Month: October 2012

Patterns launched

Posted on by Inara Pey

Linden Lab has officially launched Patterns, the first of their new products. In a Press Release on October 4th, 2012, Linden Lab state that the Genesis Release of the game is now available at a “50% discount” to those who pre-ordered, putting the retail price at $19.90 for the full release, when this is made available.

The Press Release on the launch reads in full:

Linden Lab Introduces a New Digital Universe for Creativity: Patterns

2012-10-04

Discounted Genesis Release Available Now for Founding Users

SAN FRANCISCO – October 4, 2012 – LindenLab®, the makers of SecondLife® and other shared creative spaces, today announced the ‘genesis release’ of a new product called PatternsTM.

Patterns is a new 3D digital universe to explore and shape with your creativity. Beginning on an archipelago floating in space, you explore and discover the shapes and patterns that form this world. As you collect materials of varying strength and durability, you can use them to build anything from large-scale structures that reach the sky to bridges that traverse chasms and much more – all while the pull of gravity challenges your construction techniques.

Today, the earliest version of Patterns – the ‘genesis release’ – is available at a 50% discount for adventurous early adopters, who will be the game’s founding users. Updates to the product will be offered on a recurring basis leading up to the launch of Patterns 1.0 late next year. In addition to receiving early access to Patterns, genesis release users will help to shape the final product with their feedback, will be entitled to have their names in the credits, and will receive all updates up to and including version 1.0 at no additional cost.

“At Linden Lab, we believe that creativity is within all people and that it empowers them like nothing else,” said Rod Humble, CEO of Linden Lab. “We make digital spaces where people can have fun while exploring and sharing their creativity with others. Millions of people around the world have enjoyed that in Second Life, and we look forward to inspiring even more creativity with Patterns, Creatorverse™, and the other new products we’ll be releasing this year. Today is just the first step for Patterns.”

For more information, including a video trailer and product screenshots, and to purchase an access key to download the Patterns genesis release, please visit BuildPatterns.com.

About Linden Lab

Founded in 1999 and headquartered in San Francisco, LindenLab makes shared creative spaces that inspire and empower users to explore and share their creativity with others.

In 2003, the company released SecondLife, the pioneering virtual world filled by the unique creations of its users, who can build anything they can imagine, socialize with others from around the world, and share or sell their creations in a thriving real-money marketplace.

In 2012, Linden Lab is expanding its portfolio to include four new digital entertainment products, including Patterns, a new 3D universe for users to shape, and Creatorverse, an iPad game that allows users to set their creativity in motion.

For more about Linden Lab, its products, and career opportunities please visit LindenLab.com.

—-

Contact:
Peter Gray
presscontact@lindenlab.com
415-547-7367

LL updates on listing enhancements

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update 5th October: Please read here for a further update on the listing enhancements situation, and the Marketplace in general.

Following recent updates with listing enhancements, as reported on this blog earlier this week (Run silent, run deep: the SL Marketplace and eroding merchant trust), the Commerce Team have issued the following post on the Merchant’s forum:

SUBJECT: PLE Update

Merchants,

As some of you are aware, we have been giving away free listing enhancements to many of you for the past 2 months. We recently deployed a fix that was supposed to just start billing again. Unfortunately, it back-billed the free enhancements. We apologize for doing this without warning.

To show our appreciation for your patience with this mix-up, we will be doing the following:

  1. Giving everyone free listing enhancement renewals* for the period between August 7, 2012 and today. This means all listing enhancements billed during this time will be refunded before end of day today (October 4, 2012).
  2. Once the refunds have completed, we will begin billing those enhancements again.

For full details of today’s release, please see the Marketplace Release Notes on the wiki.

Thank you for your patience.
The Commerce Team

*If you created a new listing enhancement after August 7, 2012, that listing enhancement is not eligible for this refund.

While it is interesting that the post presents the suspension of listing payments as being a part of a “free  listing enhancements” offer – an offer merchants appear to have been unaware was actually being made (I also can’t remember having seen any notification, but then I could easily miss an elephant walking by unless it happened to tread on my foot in passing).

There has been some connection between my earlier post on the matter and the above announcement from LL. While I’m sincerely flattered that such connections have been made, I’m nevertheless sure the timing was little more than coincidental.

Hopefully, once the round of refunds has been completed, this matter at least can be pout to bed where the Marketplace is concerned. Hopefully, there will be more communications on the status of the remaining issues in the near future.

With thanks to Toysoldier Thor for notifying me of the LL forum post

It’s a Grimm time of month

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update: Grimm Shores has closed and the region is under new ownership.

I came across an invitation to visit Grimm Shores on the SL viewer MOTD. As it is the Halloween month, and hoping for something perhaps celebratory of the Brothers Grimm, I decided to pop over and take a look.

There are no fairy tales on offer here, but the region is decidedly slanted towards the macabre and the haunting – well in keeping with Halloween feel, and as such makes for an interesting diversion given the time of the year…

Grimm Shores – default Windlight

It’s a wet place, Grimm Shores; rain lashes you from a lurid sky, and the darkened forms of buildings loom around you, standing among scattered, forlorn trees, and between sluggish, unwholesome rivers. The notecard presented to you on arrival provides information on a ghoulish treasure hunt being held throughout the month (the prizes can be found inside waiting skulls!), and gives a hint as to what you might find:

Come walk or ride around in a boat around the entire sim … Walk through the buildings but be careful for what lurks around the corners. Don’t let the Blood scare you off, we haven’t had time to clean it up from last year…

Grimm Shores

Up on a hill, and reached by rickety-looking bridges, sits a Bates Motel-like house, which glowers across the region towards a tall church and tumbledown graveyard. Both house and church have seen better days, as has the blocky form of the asylum, which makes up the third large presence in the region.

Grimm Shores

You can rez a boat at the pier by the arrival point should you wish to cross the river and don’t like the look of the bridges. You could also swim if you want – but I wouldn’t recommend it. Across the water, a low-lying mist hovers over the stunted grass, and small bonfires appear to offer warmth for the weary – but be warned, they are really not what they appear to be…

Grimm Shores – using a foggy Windlight setting

This is definitely not a place for the squeamish, but for those who like their romance a little on the dark side, then the dance systems atop Mount Deathmore and among the gravestones by the church or just outside the decrepit asylum might offer a chance to woo one another…

Grimm Shores

The region lends itself to the photographer’s art, and works marvelously with a number of Windlight presets, although I felt a foggy look worked best for me – or perhaps that’s due to my current state of mind …

There are no active ghouls or ghosts to encounter here, although some of the residents are in something of a state of decay while others do insist on hanging around rather a lot. I also wouldn’t look to the church to give you sanctuary, either, if things get a little too much…

Grimm Shores

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Kitely offer fixed-price worlds from $40 a month

Posted on by Inara Pey

Until now, Kitely, the on-demand virtual world service, has offered worlds (regions) based on a subscription basis, with prices starting from $5 a month, inclusive of two regions and 30 hours a month in-world (additional time can be paid for / covered separately).

From today, however, Kitely are offering regions with unlimited use for a fixed monthly fee, in much the same way as other grid-based virtual worlds offer regions of their own. Kitely’s fees for worlds are :

  • $40 a month for an individual world (1 standard 256mx256m region)
  • $60 a month for 2×2 megaregion (equivalent to 4 standard regions)
  • $80 a month for a 3×3 megaregion (equivalent to 9 standard regions)
  • $100 a month for a 4×4 megaregion (equivalent to 16 standard regions).

Each world type has free unlimited access for visitors and supports up to 100 avatars and 100,000 prims (i.e. the 2×2, 3×3, 4×4 megaregions all support 100 avatars and 100,000 prims, not multiples thereof).

Commenting on the move, Oren Hurvitz, Kitely’s co-founder and VP of R&D states:

Our virtual worlds run on powerful multi-core, 7.5 GB servers, and each world can support up to 100,000 prims and 100 concurrent users. This means that our 1-Region worlds, which cost $40 / month, are both cheaper and more powerful than equivalent private islands on other grids, which cost up to $75 / month. And if you decide to host larger worlds then the price becomes ridiculously low, costing as little as $6.25 per region for a 16-region world. Remember that these are not regions running on overcrowded or underpowered servers: each of our cloud-based servers hosts between 1 and 4 worlds, depending on the amount of users in the worlds. This means that if your world has enough users inside it then it will get its own dedicated server at no extra cost!

Kitely subscribers can opt to lease a fixed-price region option, should they so wish, without it counting against their free region allowance

This move may wide broaden Kitely’s appeal  among users who wish to have large number of visitors and who don’t wish to have concerns about direct charging for in-world time, etc.

SL Viewer Support Removed

On September 27th, Kitely ceased supporting the Second Life viewer for accessing their worlds. This move is somewhat inevitable where OpenSim is concerned, following Linden Lab’s decision to enter into a Havok sub-licence arrangement, a move which subsequently saw the -loginURI capability disabled within the SL viewer.

SL projects update: week 40 / 1

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update 3rd October: The RC roll-outs were somewhat different than indicated by Simon. Magnum apparently received the back-end configuration work for new and future hardware, and BlueSteel received the maintenance update. The Group Services code & maintenance release was targeted at LeTigre, however a showstopper issue means that these regions are now in a state of flux. A comment from Oskar Linden reads: “LeTigre regions exhibited issues that necessitated a rollback. The regions were rolled forward and are on the same code that is on BlueSteel. Affected regions are getting a simstate rollback” . 

Server Deploys

There was no main channel roll-out this week, as expected, following the cancellation of last week’s RC channel deploys.

Wednesday 3rd October will see the three RC channel deploys originally planned for last week:

  • Back-end configuration work designed to help SL run better on new and future hardware – this should be deployed to BlueSteel
  • A maintenance release, which includes has Baker Linden’s Group Services project – this will be deployed to Magnum
  • The third is described by Simon Linden as being, “Very similar to what we have today, with a fix for some future compatibility coming down the pipe. It’s nothing really exciting, but required so things won’t break.” – this should be deployed to LeTigre.

The order of the releases is not clear at the time of writing, and is based on Simon Linden’s comments at the Simulator User Group.Confirmation / updates to the plan should be made available via the Server Deployment thread in the forums.

SL Viewer Releases

Things remain slow due to on-going crash / possible memory leak issues, as reported in my last mini-update.

Group Services Project

The Group Services project is an attempt to improve the management and editing of large SL groups by replacing the current UDP-based service (which has capacity issues with the size of group lists it can comfortably handle) with a new HTTP-based service. The project viewer for this is already available (for Windows, Linux and OSX.). It had been hoped that the viewer code might reach a 3.4.2 beta release during this week, however due to continuing issues with the current beta viewer code, this now seems unlikely.

The initial server code for this will be deployed to the Magnum RC channel, as mentioned above, on Wednesday 3rd October.

Materials Processing

The final feature set for the first release of materials processing is now more-or-less complete, and it should hopefully be announced nearer the time for beta testing. A number of regions on Aditi have been prepared for beta testing, and details on these will be released when the initial project viewer is ready for release.

Options to be used by Normal and Specular Maps, which will need to be provisioned in the Build floater

The initial feature set will include the ability to set parameters (rotation, offset, etc.), for normal and specular maps as well as diffuse (texture) maps. Oz originally hinted this was the aim a few weeks ago, although Geenz indicated it was only hoped these capabilities would be included, rather than it being definite at that time. This means that the build floater for the project viewer will be somewhat different from most people who build are familiar with, as it must include a number of additional options (see right). However, what is being considered is not a complete rebuild of the Build floater.

Commenting on this aspect of the work at the Content Creators’ Improvement Informal User Group, Oz Linden said, “We’ve got a strawman design in internal review… will have a version to look at soon, I think.”

The design has had input from a number of builders. Some of these are from within LL, some of them users, and will probably be left unchanged until further experience is gained in its use. Whether this means the viewer remaining unchanged between the beta programme and the release of materials processing on Agni, or whether changes are made between the beta and the release, remains to be seen. As Oz went on to comment, “It’s a very difficult problem, and we tried to meet three sometimes-conflicting goals: do what needs to be done; keep things familiar; make the things you have to change better in the process. I think we did pretty well…”

Obviously, TPVs will have access to the build UI code once it is available in LL’s accessible repositories, and they’ll doubtless look at the code in terms of how best to integrate it into the look and feel of their own viewers.

There are still no firm dates for the project in terms of beta commencement, etc., but Oz reiterated that the project will follow the familiar course, with an Aditi beta, followed by a release to one of the RC channels on Agni, prior to an eventual full roll-out.

Related Links

With thanks to JayR for the simulator UG meeting transcript.

Run silent, run deep: the SL Marketplace and eroding merchant trust

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update October 4th: Linden Lab have issued a forum post on this matter, please see LL updates on listing enhancements.

Linden Lab depend on land tier (server space, call it what you will) for  80%(ish) of their revenue. This places them in an awkward position vis-à-vis providing any form of tier easement, even if they wanted to (as I’ve commented before).

The remaining 20% comes from the likes of Premium membership, and more particularly, the SL Marketplace (SLMP). In the case of the latter, the revenue doesn’t only come from the 5% commission on goods sold through the Marketplace, a lot of it comes via the listing enhancements merchants are encouraged to pay for. These theoretically boost sales by placing items in places such as the SLMP home page, or on the Checkout pages, and are paid for on a 30, 15, or 7-day rolling subscription basis, costing merchants between approximately $5.00 and $12.00 USD a month per item, with some merchants paying over $200 USD per month for enhancements.

Listing enhancements – can amount to a pretty penny in outlay per item

Earlier this year, the system went haywire, failing to take due subscriptions for around a two-week period (JIRA WEB-4638). It was finally resolved by Linden Lab taking a single, large payment from merchants’ accounts. While people had no issue in paying for services rendered, the problems here were that a) next to no forewarning was given that accounts were about to be so debited, leaving many merchants with a sudden and unexplained drop in their account balances; and b) many were billed in excess of the two weeks subscriptions actually owed (with some reporting being billed for up to four weeks); while c) the billing information received made it hard for merchants to actually determine which of their listing enhancements had been billed, or even if the right enhancements had been billed.

This understandably led to some confusion within the merchant’s forum, and not a little upset, particularly as some merchants had also been faced with an inability to cancel some of their listing enhancements due to an ongoing issue with many items remaining stuck in a “locked” mode, preventing them from being edited – a situation itself which at the time was some 18 months old (and is now some two years old, and still awaiting resolution – see WEB-2974).

While merchants were refunded for any overcharging on their account as a result of the billing issue, the manner in which the situation was handled by LL resulted in something of a drop in trust where the Marketplace is concerned, and a number of merchants publicly indicated they would be ceasing in their use of enhanced listings.

At the end of July, the problem started again, and was raised as a topic for discussion in mid-August, as well as having a new JIRA (WEB-4927) raised against it. Neither the discussion thread nor the JIRA drew comment from the Commerce Team. Instead, a single payment was taken from all “at fault” accounts, again without any forewarning, and again with Merchants facing issues over what, precisely, they have been charged for, and whether those listings they have made payment against are actually active.

Failed subscriptions for August – courtesy Ry0ta Exonar

Again, the problem here is not so much that things Went Wrong and broke again – that’s pretty much taken to be the standard operating condition for the Marketplace nowadays – but how the Commerce Team managed the issue. Almost nothing was said on the matter (again), with the only communications forthcoming from the Commerce Team being a terse instruction not to re-open WEB-4638 after Ry0ta Exonar attempted to do so (hence WEB-4927), and a brief Marketplace dashboard message posted on September 28th, which simply said:

We are aware of some issues with Product Listing Enhancements. Keep an eye on the Grid Status page for more details.

With neither the dashboard message or Status page message actually stating what was about to be done.

So is it little wonder that merchants are again looking at listing enhancements with a jaundiced eye? Several have re-stated the fact that they will no longer participate in the process and others have stated they are terminating – either automatically or manually – their subscriptions. Given that LL are seeking to increase their non-tier related revenues, one would think that ensuring the one service which does so is run with a level of professionalism and communication that would not undermine customers’ faith in the service, or their willingness to place money into it.

Currently, and added to the rest of the ongoing litany of issues and problems with the Marketplace, this doesn’t appear to be the case.

Related Links