The nice folks over at IBM Developerworks have started a series about Second Life. The first article of it is about how to compile your own client, the pitfalls and how to achieve the goal, since it’s not so trivial to do.
Quite worth a read, better than the wiki page over at Lindenlabs and I am looking forward to the next articles of this series!
There are some newly opened sims on the main grid.
To be exact, these are:
T-Online Island and T-Online Beach. T-Online is one of the biggest German ISPs, on their island you can find an in world presence of this company open for all, with a modern building, meeting rooms and so on, while T-Online Beach is mostly a beach, open for all.
Frankfurt am Main has opened an in world presence, too. It’s consisting of five sims at the moment, Frankfurt West, Frankfurt City, Frankfurt Nord Ost, Frankfurt Ost and Frankfurt Ostend. Not all of them are already finished, you can see most at Frankfurt West and Frankfurt City so far. The initiative to open such sims was made by some private men. It’s basically an in world rebuild of some popular sights of the city. Update: it’s the first official presence of a German city in Second Life.
[Mehr]I’ve spent today again some time on the voice beta test grid. It has been quite fun and interesting to see how voice is going to change the SL experience.
It’s also a good way to see the Lindens live; no wonder, since it’s beta and only under 10 regions are online, you can see them there. I saw Pathfinder Linden and another Linden, Monroe Linden, even used voice and talked with us a little! Great!
So, basically when you’re going online on the beta grid it’s first looking where the crowd is. There are perhaps 30-40 people online the same time, and they use to flock around, well, that’s my experience so far.
Today was also interesting since we’ve seen an avatar from the company that is providing the voice technology, Vivox, Rockin Randall, who talked with us and answered some questions to us. Nice guy and some very interesting insights, for sure this is going to scale at great lengths, if necessary!
[Mehr]I’ve attended last week a panel discussion with some politicians and around 60 attendees. A feature I’d really like to see for such kind of events in Second Life to handle such events better is available in IRC for over a decade and more already: +V, meaning giving voice.
What’s “voice” meaning in IRC? Simple. IRC is a channel based way of online text communication. Some channels tend to be rather large and for many open source projects e.g. it’s still a very important way to discuss stuff and things. The channel could be compared to open chat in Second Life.
All men are created equal, but not all are equal in IRC. Every channel has its owner. The owner can per default put all other channel members on mute. This means, they can type what they want, but it’s not going to show up in the channel at all. This does not hinder them from sending private messages to others, but the channel is muted first.
[Mehr]There was yesterday the announcement about the public availibility of the voice beta version of Second Life. Since I had spare time and a new, shiney headset, I downloaded the special beta client and gave it a try.
The first thing you’re going to notice is that you are not seeing much difference to the normal beta clients at all. Voice capability is disabled by default, so you have to enable it by yourself in the preferences. The second thing I experienced is - it’s much better to enable voice in the so called push-to-talk mode - meaning, that you’re only transmitting audio into the game world when you’re pressing down some key. Otherwise all people around you can be hearning echos if your soundcard is not configured correctly, many computers tend to transmit much noise, well, let’s just say it’s a waste of bandwidth and computing power.
I know how voice is being handled by services like Skype. Skype automatically adjusts the microfon volume while you speak, so that the microfon level is always nice mannered and not too loud. In the Second Life beta you’ve got to adjust the microfon volume on your own, so you should better now how to setup the volume mixer under Windows or Macintosh. Yup, there’s no beta for this available at the moment under Linux.
Well, if you’ve got your settings then right you can enjoy the voice capabilites of the beta - or not. First you need to get to a region, though, that is voice enabled in the beta grid. There are not many available and you can see a list of enabled regions in the release notes of the beta client. According to Lindenlabs there are these voice enabled regions at the moment on the beta grid: Abbotts, Lusk, Pulveria, Spaceport Alpha, Morris, Da Boom, Tehama and Balance. BTW, it’s not advisable under Windows to use the Shift-Key for enable the push-to-talk mode, since this is per default enabled by Windows to enable some advanced features for people with disabilities after pressing it fives times. Better use another key or turn those features of in the system settings of Windows. {{ double-space-with-newline }}
[Mehr]It’s really funny upon which things you can stumble upon into Second Life. Goreans are a big and well known community there. But, until now, I never knew that there are also gay Goreans around. I’ve stumbled upon a group called “Gay Gorean Coalition.”
The purpose of this group is:
To promote & help gay rp’ers in the Gor community.
We meet the 2nd Saturday of every month at 1pm SL time. Place to be announced.
If you need help or wish to network with others, we are here to help.
SL never ceases to amaze me…
There are now officially over 5 million residents in Second Life. So I wonder how long it takes until the next million hops on and which impact this is going to have on the platform.
Back in 2006 there’s been an interesting presentation about the underlying design principles of Second Life. It’s being hosted at the company website of MySQL.
The presentation goes about 45 pages. The most interesting page is for sure 25, because it gives a big overall picture about the underlying architecture of SL.
So, here without further fanfare, is this picture:
As you can see, there are quite many parts behind Second Life that we are normally not really aware of. The only part we can already build ourselfs is the viewer. This is now available as the real deal under the GPLv2 already.
But the rest - well… the most important part is the simulator. That’s the machine that’s computing the avatar movement and so on.
When it reboots it’s got to take it’s data from the central database. Once this is done, it should be more or less in an operational state. States and assets of the sim are being saved on an extra machine, the assets server. That’s just a big, clustered filesystem, so there’s not much intelligence on this machine at all. I guess it’s being used to save data in it which needs to become fast available, and of course there’s nothing faster then getting data of a filesystem instead of a database. A database adds for the same task many new layers the request must go through, so that’s quite a good way to speedup things for trivial tasks.
[Mehr]The German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is running an interview today with Philip Rosedale. Of course, it’s about Second Life.
Rosedale says that figures which are flowing around, saying that his company had less than 11 million US$ on sales last year, are reasonable. The first quarter ever his company made profit was 4Q 2006 accordings to Rosedale. That’s quite a long time, even for a startup like LL.
Rosedale thinks that one day SL could be bigger than Myspace.com, because of the bigger possibilites in his platform. He said that only about 10% of the accounts are in world on a regular base, that LL has about 130 employees at the moment - adding 20 each quarter at the moment - and he would like to see his company independent over the years. Rosedale is the meaning, that LL should not be sold, there is about 20 million US$ venture capital in the company at the moment, and even if Google or someone else would knock at their door and bid 1.65 billion US$ for a takeover it’s unlikely to happen.