Matoluta Sanctuary, Sartre, July 2014 (Flickr) – blog post
It’s once again that annual time of reflection. The winter is with us, the old year is slowing dying, the new year awaits, and it is time to look back across the highs and lows of the virtual year as seen through the pages of this blog.
This year has been even busier for me than previous years, so I hope you’ll forgive that as I look back over the year as I’ve managed to report it through this blog, I’ve broken it down into three parts, this being the second, and you can catch-up with part one or jump ahead to part three, if you so wish. Not everything that happened through the year may be here; there are some aspects of SL in which I’m not active, and so may have missed some headlines. Nevertheless, I hope this review sparks a few memories and provides some interesting holiday reading. As with the first part, rather than just offer a month-by month account, I’ve tried to group things together by topic to hopefully give more of a narrative flow.
The Lab
The promised new Patterns UI is launched, and things continue to look rosy for the PC / Mac sandbox game.
In a surprising (and welcome) U-turn, the Lab agree to allow Emily Short and Richard Evans to carry the Versu product and it titles forward as an independent entity. The news is followed shortly afterwards by the launch of Versu’s first title under its own name and Emily Short is interviewed by Drax about Versu, the Lab and interactive fiction as a whole, and Blood & Laurels receives New York Times approbation.
However, the big news of the quarter is Ebbe Alltberg’s confirmation (with audio) that the Lab is working on a “next generation” platform. The news first came during a TPV meeting. This was perhaps not the best way for the news to break, as within minutes there were Tweets and feed comments flying around, most of which tended to overstate some of what he actually said, and others really did misrepresent (albeit it accidentally, rather than maliciously) what was said – something that did a lot to further the anger and outcry that followed.
While it might have been better for a more prepared statement on the new being made, particularly given the hoo-haw that followed, my personal take on the news was, and remains positive. As much as we love SL, the fact is that it is getting long in the tooth, it is gradually getting harder to make sizeable improvements without considerable effort (2+ years of the Shining Project, 10 months to tweak around the edges of group chat, etc), and it is hamstrung by its revenue model. Ergo, the Lab do need to move with the times.
Fact is, for all the hard-edged protestations from some quarters, we’re all a fickle bunch, and there’s a good chance that when something bigger, better and shinier than SL comes along, it will wean us away, whether it’s because of broader creativity options, lower fees, greater market potential, more innovative technical capabilities / challenges – or all the aforementioned; and worries about inventory “investment”, etc., be damned. And it really is a mistake to think that just because it hasn’t happened so far, it by definition, won’t happen. At last this way we know who is developing a new alternative, and it is in their own best interest to keep SL going as strongly as they can, just in case the new shiny doesn’t work out.
Anyway, following the meeting, the Lab confirms it’ll be hiring-in around 40-50 additional staff to work on the new platform. And as the news on the new platform overshadows other statement made by Ebbe, I offer a piece on his comments on user retention. Official confirmation of the new platform’s development is finally given in a late July press release.
Mid-July finally brings word that the controversial Section 2.3 of the Lab’s Terms of Service has been updated. Sort-of. I’m initially sceptical that the change really amounts to anything, due to the way the wording is arranged, and go into greater depth a little later. I’m not alone in feeling the re-wording isn’t up to the desired snuff, as Agenda Faromet offers a similar perspective, and in August hosts an SLBA presentation on both the changes and the Skill Gaming policy, for which I put together a transcript.
Second Life
The Lab launches a new range of mesh starter avatars designed to make use of fitted mesh – except the base shapes for most of them are issued No Mod. Oopsie. While an update is quickly promised, it doesn’t appear until mid-June. We also get the Interest List viewer reach release status, while the initial release of the Oculus Rift project viewer arrives and Loki Eliot offers guidance on using it with the Xbox controller, mirroring work by Strachan Ofarrel with his CtrlAltStudio viewer.
In a continuance of opening the doors on communications, Landon McDowell (Landon Linden in SL), the Lab’s VP of Operations and Platform Engineering offers up and informative blog post on recent issues with Second Life which I can’t help but praise. The Secondlife.com splash / log-in home page gets a revamp and meets with a positive response.
The Guardian newspaper in the UK carries an on-line article about virtual cities, and aspects people to contribute images of their favourite virtual places, and a fair few from SL show up. June also sees the Lab indicate that, but for a small subset of updates, the major work on Project Shining, after more than two years, is complete. This has been a large-scale undertaking to work across a lot of aspects of the SL service – HTTP delivery for textures and mesh, improvement to avatar baking, updates to object rendering and caching, all designed to improve the overall performance of the platform and to make better use of the data shared between simulators and the viewer, etc.
Baker Linden’s group bans work also gets a project viewer release, so I provide an overview of this much anticipated functionality.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 