Category: News

Curio and Hush reach a settlement

Posted on by Inara Pey

The long-running dispute between Gala Phoenix, proprietor of Curio Skins and Hush Darkrose / Verikai Vargas, proprietor of Hush Skins, has reached an out-of-court settlement, it has been announced.

The dispute, in which each party accuses the other of IP infringements, first hit the headlines early in 2012, and was, through part of the year a major topic of conversation and heated debate.

The joint statement relating to the settlement reads in full:

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013

Hush Darkrose /Verikai Vargas, owner and operator of Hush Skins, and Gala Phoenix,
owner and operator of Curio Skins, announce a mutually amicable settlement to the
dispute between them regarding the ownership of their skins.

In March 2012, Gala Phoenix filed a DMCA takedown notice against Hush Darkrose for
alleged infringement of her Curio skins. In May 2012, Hush Darkrose responded by filing
a DMCA takedown notice with Linden Research, Inc. and filed a Notice of Civil Claim
against Gala Phoenix for alleged infringement of her Hush skins.

Hush Darkrose would like to clarify that she did not “obtain” an injunction against Gala
Phoenix, but rather only sought an injunction against Gala Phoenix in a Notice of Civil
Claim, which was then filed with Linden Research, Inc. and resulted in the takedown of
certain Curio skins.

Since that time, Hush Darkrose and Gala Phoenix have been in legal discussions regarding the skins in question. The parties have agreed that each store was created separately and individually.

Wishing to avoid the expense of litigation, Hush Darkrose and Gala Phoenix have
reached a private and amicable agreement, and are content with the results. Neither Hush Darkrose nor Gala Phoenix admits liability, and both parties wish to put the dispute behind them and move forward.

Both Hush Darkrose and Gala Phoenix would like to thank the public for their support
and patience during this time, and hope that the public will continue to offer their support
to both designers and the incredible and unique skins that they each offer.

Thank you,
Hush Darkrose, Hush Skins
and
Gala Phoenix, Curio Skins.

—-

With thanks to Venus Petrov.

So, what about SL in 2013?

Posted on by Inara Pey

So, 2012 is done, reviews are written and the New Year has arrived. Now it must be time to stop looking back, and look a little ahead.

The Platform

The Lab has given some indication of what to expect for 2013. Some items of note, together with some of the things not mentioned, are:

  • We have the upcoming deployment of server-side avatar baking – which the Lab calls Project Sunshine – bringing with it the promise of no more avatar bake fail issues
  • We should see the roll-out of initial improvements to interest lists and object caching
  • Further work on platform performance and stability
  • We’ll also see the deployment of what is hoped will be the “first phase” of normal and specular maps which, over time, could revolutionise the physical look of in-world objects be they made from prims, sculpts or mesh – but not for avatar skins or system layer clothing

Doubtless more will be announced during the course of the year.

For the Company

  • LL’s new products, Dio and Versu will arrive
  • The company will continue to develop their ideas for “new virtual worlds”  – and will hopefully share more information with users
  • Patterns will progress towards a full release, currently scheduled for the end of the year, and will introduce several features requested by users
One of the options ("albums"?) within the Dio website
One of the options (“albums”?) within the Dio website
  • It would appear likely the Lab will announce further new products.

For the Community

  • 2013 marks SL’s “official” tenth anniversary, a such, and building on the success of SL9B, the community is doubtless going to come together with it own celebrations to mark SL10B whether or not LL try to involve themselves
  • Bay City also marks its 5th birthday and will be hosting a wide range of events and activities
  • RFL SL 2013 promises to continue a long and stunning tradition in which the community comes together to raise funds to help in the fight to eradicate cancer. The focal weekend for events will be the 13th / 14th July 2013
  • BURN2 will again return.

What Would be Nice to See

I’m not that into making predictions for a New Year (as the old joke goes, I’m a peripheral visionary – I see into the future, but only way off to one side…). Instead, there are some of the things I’d like to see in 2013:

  • The Lab finally make a concerted and persistent effort to use all the channels at their disposal to communicate with and inform their users
  • The public JIRA closure amended so that everyone can at least see JIRA items (comments don’t have to be re-opened)
  • Someone finally takes the Commerce Team firmly in hand and takes responsibility for:
      • Ensuring Marketplace issues are dealt with
      • Merchants are actually kept informed more fully on matters
      • Direct dialogue between the commerce team and merchants is resumed – such as through in-world user group meetings
  • my.secondlife.com is better leveraged, both as a communications platform by the Lab and, more particularly, to enable better and more in-depth communications and interaction between users, such as suggested by Estelle Pienaar
  • Rather than gearing the attractiveness of Premium accounts purely towards new users, LL seek to increase their appear for existing users. For example by:
      • Offering more flexible options (e.g. offer a larger stipend or a Linden Home stipend / free land tier; or offer a Linden Home or 1024 sq m land tier)
      • Allowing the tier allowance to be donated towards private estate holdings
  •  Linden Lab re-engaging with the community as a who in a concerted and constructive attempt to address the core issue of new user retention- which still remains a major issue where growth within the platform is concerned.

What Is Likely to Remain a Concern

This can most probably be summarised in for words: tier and declining revenue. While it is not the sole issue facing SL (see matters such as user retention, for example), this has dominated conversations about SL’s future, fuelled most recently by the news that around 12% percent of private estates have been lost to the grid in 2012. However, calls for tier cuts need to be tempered by the fact that, like it or not, they are not so easy for the Lab to make.

Certainly, given that the current decline is unlikely to reverse itself in the medium term, this is liable to be a subject we’ll be returning to during 2013, and it would be nice to see the Lab give some comment / assurances on the matter.

Marketplace: new listing categories start rolling-out

Posted on by Inara Pey

I’ve covered the recent focus by the Commerce Team on enhancing Marketplace listing categories, particularly with reference to the contest held in November to encourage feedback on the subject (and which had the winners recently announced).

As of December 20th, the Commerce Team has updated the proposed listing categories to reflect feedback received to date started rolling-out some of the new categories, although it is still not to late for people to have input.

The new Christmas sub-categories
The new Christmas sub-categories

The first two categories to receive updates are:

  • Celebrations / Holidays / Christmas, which gets the following sub-categories:
    • Crhistmas Lights
    • Christmas Trees & Ornaments
    • Men’s Seasonal Apparel
    • Women’s Seasonal Apparel
  • Celebrations / Wedding, which gets the following sub-categories
    • Wedding Decorations
    • Wedding Dresses
    • Wedding Rings
    • Wedding Tuxedos

(Bridesmaid’s dresses is also supposed to be in the Celebrations / Wedding category, but at the time of writing is AWOL from the Marketplace).

In announcing the new sub-categories, the Commerce Team have requested that any further inpute to the new listings should be made no later than January 10, 2013 – so if you do have specific ideas or comments on what is being proposed and haven’t passed them to the Lab, now is the time to do so!

Sadly, no update on the status of ongoing Marketplace issues prior to the Christmas break.

Marketplace listing categories contest winners announced

Posted on by Inara Pey

almost a month ago, I reported on LL launching a contest to define new female skin categories for the Marketplace.

As I explained at the time – for those who don’t / rarely use the Marketplace / notice their existence, listing categories are the selections under which merchants can have their products listed in the Marketplace. The idea is to help quantify / filter products on the Marketplace (together with keywords) so that they can be more easily found (by a user using the Category option on the left of Marketplace pages and clicking down through the options to refine a list of displayed results in the main part of the page).

Marketplace listing categories: LL seeling to improve
Marketplace listing categories: LL seeking to improve

Merchants have long felt that many of the categories used within the Marketplace are too broad; however, defining where and how the categories should be expanded is a problem in itself. In November, LL therefore issued a survey to merchants asking them for feedback on a proposed new structure – and as an incentive for people to participate, offered-up the aforementioned contest: to define a new set of categories for female skins.

Today, in a quiet update to their original announcement, the Lab have issued details on the new categories and the five winners. The new categories will also now be applied to male skins as well, and comprise:

  • Fantasy, in turn comprising: animal, vampire, fairy, alien, zombie and “other”
  • Human Light Toned, Human Medium Toned, Human Dark Toned – each of these in turn comprising: young, adult, aged
  • Human Fatpacks

The five winners of the contest are: SayaNicole Cuttita, Kilene Kondor, Emma Krokus, Yuukie Onmura and Voshie Paine. Each has apparently been informed and received their cash prize of L$2899 which, as LL keep reminding us, is equivalent to the cost of a month long [sic], frontpage Marketplace Product Listing Enhancement”. Indeed, according to the survey itself, a month-long listing enhancement was the actual prize!

So, congratulations to the winners!

WOOT! Snapshot tiling fix is here!

Posted on by Inara Pey

Back in July 2012, I indicated that Runitai Linden had a long-awaited fix for the “tiling” issues affecting high-resolution snapshots for some people.

The issue was initially reported in JIRA MAINT-628 at the end of 2010, and has impacted viewer releases since then, becoming the subject to intense investigation by users and LL alike. The problem has tended to make itself known when taking images at a higher resolution than that of your monitor, resulting in lines breaking-up the captured image in a tiling effect.

In July Runitai commented on the JIRA thus:

Runitai Linden added a comment – 18/Jul/12 1:57 PM

Fixed in viewer-cat

Fix was to use a large render target for snapshots that are larger than the window, but only when lighting and shadows is enabled. Screen space effects will still show seams when lighting and shadows is disabled.

If the graphics card is unable to allocate a single render target large enough for the high res snapshot, the old method of tiling is still used. On my GTX 580, I could take artifact-free snapshots up to 3500 pixels wide, but could not allocate a full set of render targets at 4000 pixels wide, so the old method is used.

Changes involve an invasive set of changes to LLRenderTarget, so QA should be careful to check various shadow modes, ambient occlusion, depth of field, and anti-aliasing with lighting and shadows enabled. Running with Debug GL enabled will likely cause a crash now when taking high-res snapshots (expected and acceptable behaviour), since the driver reports “out of memory” when trying to allocate a large render target. When Debug GL is not enabled, the viewer handles this error condition gracefully and continues to function.

Sadly, in the interim, things went slightly pear-shaped with LL’s viewer code, with major bugs appearing in the beta code branch which brought updates to a juddering halt which they were sorted out. Those reading my weekly project news updates will be aware of the issues, which were finally sorted out last month. However, in the interim, a LOT of high-priority work has backed-up, with the result that MAINT-628 appeared to be in a holding pattern with a lot of other work, waiting for the high-priority stuff to clear. When I asked Oz Linden about the situation, he could only say that the JIRA looked likely to be out “pretty soon” – which suggested a potential wait of a few more weeks.

However, for those using the SL viewer – the wait is over!

Beta viewer 3.4.3.267755 was released on December 5th, 2012, and the release notes contain a small but significant entry:

MAINT-628[c] Highres snapshot – Rendering artefact (Window sized frame buffer regardless of snapshot size)

I’ve just been playing with the release, having long suffered from the tiling issue when trying to capture images at almost anything over my screen resolution of 1440×900 and the results are superb. The following two images were captured at the same image resolution (3500×2154). The top was captured using the current SL release viewer, and the lower image with the new beta viewer. The results are clear – but click to enlarge each, if required. Note the tiling line across the sky in the first image and the lack of any such line in the second.

The problem again: an image captured on my PC at twice my screen resoltuion (1440x900), using the release SL viewer, 7th December. Note the tile line in the sky (click to enlarge)
The problem again: an image captured on my PC at 3500×2154 resolution, using the release SL viewer, 7th December. Note the tile line in the sky (click to enlarge)
Rough the same image shot using the new beta viewer at the same resolution - no tiling line (click to enlarge)
Roughly the same image shot using the new beta viewer at the same resolution – no tiling line (click to enlarge)

So, for those who have been afflicted by the tiling bug, the wait is almost over. You can either grab the beta viewer and start snapping in high res, or wait for the fix to arrive in your favourite viewer – the wait shouldn’t be that long now, hopefully!

“You proceed from a false assumption”: the myth of SL’s failure

Posted on by Inara Pey

Ciaran Laval (once again!) lead me to an article on The Register concerning “Ten technology … FAILS” by one Tony Smith. Some of the entries will doubtless raise a smile or two or have some pundits nodding sagely and muttering, “Yep, said it would never work at the time…”

However, on page four of the item comes … Second Life, which is given a dismissive paragraph concluding, “And then, of course, they all realised that living one, real life was busy enough. And social networking was born…”.

Thus, Mr. Smith joins a growing clique of journalists all eager to proclaim that SL has not only failed, it is in fact like the proverbial parrot famed of Monty Python, “No more”. Not only is his view demonstrably wrong (to sum up what follows, “We’re still here, aren’t we?”), in pointing to Second Life, he again, like many who cite its “failure”, reveal a complete lack of awareness of the platform.

Ciaran asks why attitudes such as this prevail in journalistic circles. He points to an article on The Ancient Game Noob, which also attempts to address the question. Both raise fair points. However, there is really only one answer that matters where views such as those expressed in The Register are concerned, and it can be summed up in two words.

Lazy journalism.

Birth of the Myth

Anshe Chung and Business Week – success and hype

For a time, SL was undoubtedly the darling of the media – whether it be bold predictions of a new kind of “virtual entrepreneur” being the wave of the future. The hype, as I’ve covered elsewhere, began in late 2005, in an article which appeared on CNNMoney and which essentially catapulted Anshe Chung onto the cover of Business Week.

This saw the birth of a story which ran and ran, across more than a year through 2006 and 2007, when the media couldn’t get enough of SL – and nor, for a time, could big business – for reasons neither could fully understand (and nor, in fairness, could LL). All that was apparent, was that the bandwagon was passing by, and it was time to jump on or risk missing out – even though “jumping on” and “missing out” were never actually quantified.

And when it comes to media we’re not just talking the “traditional” forms of media, real or digital print; leave us not forget that CBS jumped aboard in 2007, working with Electronic Sheep to bring us a CSI immersive environment, and the appearance of Second Life (albeit rather badly) on a two-parter of CSI:NY. Other shows also jumped in as well, and even pop stars around the world got in on the act, with Duran Duran (2006) perhaps being the most notable (and still very present), while Italian singer Irene Grandi released her 2007 hit Bruci la città (“Burn the City”) with a video produced in part in Second Life, featuring an avatar based upon her.

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