Day: November 26, 2016

Second Life Horizons land auctions, one week on

Posted on by Inara Pey
Horizons: looking at the auctions to date
Horizons: looking at the auctions to date

On Tuesday, November 15th, the Lab launched the Premium members’ Horizon community, a “retro-futuristic” environment featuring 36 residential regions each with 24 parcels available for auction to Premium members. The auctions opened on Friday, November 18th, with parcels being auction in batches.

One week on, and a total of 87 parcels have been or are up for auction, of which, 67 have closed as of Friday, November 25th, marking the first week of auctions. Whirly Fizzle and I have been tracking things during the week, so we’d thought we’d offer an update on how things are going.

Auction Results Fri Nov 18th Through Friday Nov 25th

GENERAL INFORMATION
Total parcels Auctioned to date For re-sale For rent Commercial Residential Unknown
864 67 26 13 5 11 12

Notes

  • “Unknown” parcels are those which appear likely to be put up for sale or rent. Of these:
    • Four have been obtained by land sellers, with 2 initially put on sale, then withdrawn.
    • Five have been obtained by land renters but are not currently for rent.
    • Three could go either way.
  • Of the commercial parcels, four appear to be rentals; one is parcel holder / store operator.
  • “Residential” refers to those parcels purchased by individuals without any obvious land marketing in their profiles & who have not won auctions for other parcels. These could still be sold / rented out or used commercially.

 

RESULTS BY LOT
Lot Parcels Top bid
 Lowest bid
 Average bid
 Av sqm bid
 Total L$ paid
1 10 57,270 30,133 43,689.80 42.66 436898
2 12 65,010 30,121 39,976.75 39.04 479721
3 15 40,030 29,510 (x3) 31,306.73 28.65 469601
4 10 42,670 31,110 (x4) 35,464.50 34.53 354645
5 10 40,110 26,010 (x2) 37,751.80 30.91 317518
6 10 33,009 27,887 29,790.20 29.09 297902

 

REVENUE
 Date No of lots
 L$ raised in auction Approx US $
 Nov18th-25th 67 2,356,285 9,000

Notes

  • Taking the lowest bid price for all auctions closed to date, and applying it to all remaining parcel yields a potential total revenue of L$24,582,224 / approx US $94,500.
  • Taking a median bid price of L$36,330 based on closed auctions to date, and applying it to all remaining parcels yields a potential total revenue of L$28,955,010 / approx US $111,365.

 

PARCEL RE-SALE PRICING, FRIDAY NOV 25
Total Av sqm auction price Av sqm sale price
 Av sqm mark-up
 Highest initial price Highest current price Price spread
26 28.05 57.38 104.56% L$100,000 (x3) L$99,000 (x1) L$33,000 (x4) – L$99,000 (x1)

Notes

  • The figures above are only a snapshot – re-sale prices are fluctuating; prices set for parcels auctioned in lots 5 and 6 are likely to be reduced.
  • Initially, 28 parcels were put up for sale. Two were withdrawn on Friday 25th.
  • Of the remaining 26 parcels currently for sale:
    • Six parcels were initially priced at between 25 and 3 times their auction price; all have had their re-sale price reduced by an average of 50%.
    • Four parcels have seen a reduction in price since first being placed for sale of between 2.5% and 21.52% per parcel.
    • Eight parcels are currently for sale at a median of 2.5 times their auction price (ave L$70,000 per parcel). current tends suggest these will be reduced.

 

PARCEL RENTALS, FRIDAY NOV 25
Total Rented to Date Upper rental price
 Lowest Rental Price
 Median Rental
13 4 L$835/w (x1) L$595/w (x4) L$775/w (x4) / L$795/w (x4)

 

Radegast: recovering Voice capabilities

Posted on by beqjanus
Gentle Heron, second from the right encountered a Radegast Voice installation during the recording of a Designing Worlds special. Credit: Beq Janus
Gentle Heron, second from the right encountered a Radegast Voice installation during the recording of a Designing Worlds special. Credit: Beq Janus

Update, November 30th: Cinder Roxley has updated the Radegast installer to work with the most recent SLVoice package. See her comments here and here (following this article). There is also a separate blog post on her work, for easier future linking.

It was recently discovered that the Radegast client was no longer installing the SLVoice extensions with a new / clean installation. On hearing of the problem, Beq Janus and Whirly Fizzle decided to investigate, and thanks to their work, we now two workaround solutions. As they had put the effort into sorting things out, I asked them if either would like to write about the issue and the solution, and Beq, with Whirly’s blessing, agreed to do so.

by Beq Janus

A few days ago when I was invited to reprise my role as a videographer for a special episode of Designing Worlds on the Future of Second Life, which will air in early December. The panel for the discussion included Gentle Heron of Virtual Ability Inc, the group who work to enable access to virtual worlds for those who, through disability or illness are unable to make ready use of regular viewers.

During the show, Gentle urged Linden Lab and us all to look for ways to make Virtual Worlds more accessible, remarking, somewhat fatefully, that many of her communities are limited to a single, troubled viewer, Radegast.

A subject of reviews in this blog, Radegast is a lightweight, extensible client which has been the ideal foundation for the disabled communities to build upon. It boasts an impressive set of speech to text and text to speech integrations and can be integrated with other devices such as braille screen readers. Sadly, Latif Kalifa, Radegast’s creator, passed away earlier this year and despite the code being open source, no-one has yet stepped forward to maintain it at a time when the Lab viewer is moving ahead in leaps and bounds, with the risk that non-maintained viewers and client might lose functionality.

Radegast client is the leading lightweight client for many users with disabilities
Radegast client is the leading lightweight client for many virtual world users with disabilities

As if to underline this, Gentle fell silent towards the end of the show, as she was dealing with a number of users who were reporting they were unable to use Voice with Radegast as it was failing to install the all important SLVoice extensions. While I am unfamiliar with Radegast, I offered to try looking into it for Gentle.

SLVoice is a pre-built binary package supplied by Vivox and distributed by Linden Lab. During the summer, it had been upgraded to address some security concerns and so it seemed likely to me that Gentle’s problem might be that the older SLVoice package had been deprecated and removed from the download server. Sure enough, a quick check on the package URL resulted in  the dreaded 404 not found error. I sent an email to Oz and Patch Linden asking them to confirm whether older versions of SLVoice had been moved.

The next day Oz confirmed that all old SLVoice packages were still available and nothing had changed. Whirly Fizzle, the powerhouse behind Firestorm QA, leapt into action: she cracked open the installer and discovered the URL actually pointed to a separately hosted Voice package which was no longer available, causing the Voice installation to silently fail during a new or clean Radegast installation as a result. However, Whirly also found a working back-up archive we could perhaps use. Unfortunately, neither Whirly or I are C# coders and cannot update the installation package directly; so how could we get a Radegast installation to work with the back-up Voice package?

I hit on the idea of first installing the backup package that Whirly had discovered, and then running the standard Radegast installer. Success! So, for anyone who is performing a clean / new install of Radegast and needs Voice, I’ve produced a set of instructions – see the link below. There is, however, more.

I mentioned above that Linden Lab had updated the SLVoice packages over the summer to deal with security concerns. Because of this, older versions of SLVoice are to be blocked from connecting to the service, and Radegast would once again be without a Voice option. Knowing this, and never one to leave a job half done, Whirly successfully tested my approach using the most recent SLVoice package available from the Lab, and confirmed it will also work.

This means that providing that there is no internal dependency within Radegast on the legacy Voice package, we now have an upgrade path for Radegast users that will ensure continued voice support after the block on older SLVoice packages comes into force. To help ensure people know what they need to do, Whirly’s instructions can also be found in the link below.

Radegast Voice Installation Instructions.

A Plea to Developers

These instructions are only a workaround. We still need to find a way to have Radegast install the correct Voice extensions automatically, as a part of the client install process. So, if you are a C# (C-Sharp) developer and are willing to spare a few hours looking at this, please take a look at the Radegast codebase and see if there is a way to incorporate the correct binaries into an installer package. Thank you.

With grateful thanks to Whirly Fizzle.