Day: October 11, 2012

Rod Humble reveals more on LL’s upcoming new products

Posted on by Inara Pey

Talking to Giant Bomb, Rod Humble has revealed more about the Lab’s upcoming new products, all of which appear set for launch in October.

We already know about Patterns, which is already available in its Genesis Release, and which has had something of a positive response among those in the gaming community who have tried it.

Patterns: generally positive reception to initial Genesis Release

We also know that Creatorverse will also be appearing shortly, and will initially be aimed at the iPad (but is currently still awaiting Apple’s approval), although it appears it will eventually be available for the PC and Mac as well going by comments in the article. The description of a demonstration of Creatorverse given by Humble is somewhat amusing:

Humble loaded up the app, which starts with a white screen. First, he drew a box, colored it in and tried to convince me it was a car. He made a better argument when two circles were underneath it, but when he clicked “play,” everything fell apart. By tapping the left side of the screen and pulling up his toolbox, Humble added joints that merged the “wheels” with the “car,” and gave the wheels a movement ability. Finally, he added a squiggly green line beneath everything, and clicked play again. The car roared to life…and then quickly fell off, tumbling into oblivion.

Probably not the intended result, but it does raise a smile. However, the really interesting part of the news about Creatorverse is in the paragraph which follows:

Each creation can be uploaded into the cloud, and both played and edited by anybody. The goal is to bring some Second Life sensibilities to Creatorverse eventually, too, such as giving users the ability to charge for them. (That can’t happen on iOS, though.) One of the more ambitious toys created by pre-release users was a pinball machine.

So not only would shared creative spaces appear to be a concept being carried forward from SL into their new endeavours by LL, but also the opportunity for users to monetize their creations…

Creatorverse: shared creative space and monetization? (copyright Linden Lab)

Of the remaining two products up for launch, one is Dio, which has been known about in essence, if not in content for a while. It is described as a “room creator, in which players can do everything from construct a choose-your-own adventure to develop an interactive wedding album.” This had been thought to be a product arising from the acquisition of Little Text People earlier this year. However, the fruits of that collaboration would appear to be in the fourth product in the lie-up.

Dio: to appear in October as well

This fourth product is to be called Versu, and is described as a storytelling toolset, in which players assign characters a set of motivations. The characters react to the actions of the player based on these motivations, and the story is procedurally generated. The first release is aimed at murder mystery and romance stories.

The timing of the launches so close to one another is intentional, with Humble hoping that the close proximity of the launches to one another will change people’s perception of Linden Lab, and encourage those who wrote it off as “just the Second Life company” to come back and have another look.

Hopefully, if successful, this may encourage people to take a look at Second Life as well…

With thanks to Laetizia Coronet

Network Optimisation: LL seek assistance

Posted on by Inara Pey

Linden Lab are in the process of changing the manner in which network traffic is handled within Second Life, and require assistance in testing the changes made to date in order to ensure various services are functioning correctly prior to rolling-out the changes to the grid as a whole.

To this end, Oskar Linden posted the following request in the Server forum late on Wednesday 10th October:

Linden Lab has made some changes to the way regions handle network traffic. We need your help to test. This will help us insure that regions are communicating appropriately over the network. Mainly we are concerned with agents entering via direct login, teleport, and region crossing. As well as other functions such as IMs, Voice, and Group chat.

Tomorrow, October 11th, at 4PM Pacific time (right after the server beta user group) we will conduct these tests with as many people as we have. Testing will take place on ADITI and require out of world communication we will be coordinating via IRC. This will require an IRC client connected to EFNET in the channel #sltest. If you don’t know how to do that you have until tomorrow afternoon to figure it out. 🙂

The details on the tests are here:

 – https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Networking_Optimization_Pile_On_Tests

I hope you can come and help us test these new changes.

__Oskar

The tests will comprise three parts:

  • Direct log-in test to a pre-determined location on the beta grid.
  • A group chat test via the Second Life Beta in-world group.
  • A teleport test to a pre-determined location.

Note that Voice is also indicated as one of the services to be tested, but no details on what this will entail have as yet been included in the test notes – please check both the note and Oskar’s forum thread for possible updates on this ahead of testing.

Those wishing to take part in the tests will need to:

  • Be members of the Second Life Beta in-world group
  • Be able to log-in to the Aditi beta grid

The tests will be coordinated on IRC using the EFnet channel #sltest, and those involved in the tests will need to be able to access this channel either via the EFnet website or through an IRC client.

Accessing the #sltest channel on the EFnet website – note you do not require a registered account; you can access the channel using any suitable nickname

The tests are due to commence at 16:00 SLT.

Note that these changes are not related to the region lag issue sudden and massive lag spikes, as reported in the Server forum threads, but rather appear to be part of ongoing network-related work.