Category: News-Opinion

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.

LL look back at 2012. Will they learn to communicate in 2013?

Posted on by Inara Pey

Linden Lab  published a blog post on December 20th looking back over the last twelve months and looking ahead to 2013.

This year hasn’t been a particularly sexy year for Second Life in terms of Big News. The Lab has been more focused on working “under the bonnet (hood)” to sort out a lot of the mechanical aspects, as it were, of Second Life. It matters not as to whether some of what they’ve been working on are things people feel should have been “sorted out years ago”. The fact is that the Lab are working on long-standing issues and is also trying to bring new capabilities to SL which do serve to improve out in-world experience, and that is deserving recognition.

However, it is when there have been “major” deployments through the year that the Lab’s inherent weakness and seeming inability to learn from its mistakes comes to the fore. In particular, the blog post points to three major roll-outs in 2012: advanced creation tools, pathfinding, and Direct Delivery. While one of these, the advanced creation tools, did initially hit problems when first deployed to a Release Channel, the matter was quickly dealt with such that they could be safely deployed and properly announced by the Lab. True, we’re still waiting on the updates to the permissions system, but at least we did receive decent and widespread notification of their deployment.

Pathfinding: let down by poor Lab communications
Pathfinding: let down by poor Lab communications

Alongside the advanced tools, pathfinding was one of the “big things” for SL in 2012, trumpeted by Rod Humble himself. In many respects, pathfinding was potentially a “bigger” release than the advanced creation tools, so one would have thought it would be more prominent in the Lab’s communications with users.

Not so. While we did get a sneak peek in September, the Lab relinquished all attempts to communicate the project to their wider user community, leaving it almost entirely up to bloggers to carry the message. And while no-one set out to deliberately misinform people, the fact remains that pathfinding was so complicated that the lack of clear-cut information from the Lab did lead to misunderstandings which in turn led to reports that it would result in a “Tsunami” of problems or would have a huge adverse impact on SL as a whole once deployed.

In both instances, people at the Lab did move to try to clarify matters and redress the misunderstandings. However, by the time they had, the damage had been done. In abdicating all major responsibility for communicating with their users, the Lab had opened the door to misunderstanding, misconceptions and mistrust, with the result that the negative perceptions of pathfinding continue today, with the functionality remaining disabled across many private estates.

With Direct Delivery, the situation is somewhat worse, with everything from the initial deployment through to mounting issues across the Marketplace as a whole becoming something of a catalogue of errors in which a complete unwillingness on the part of the Commerce Team / Linden Lab to engage in a decent level of communication with merchants has played a major role. Even Rod Humble’s own intervention in matters on two separate occasions, the first via Twitter,  the second time on the Commerce forum itself, have proven hollow. Despite all assurances to the contrary, communications on the ongoing issues with the Marketplace remain minimal, with little indication that matters are approaching any form of resolution.

Failed subscriptions for August - courtesy
Listing enhancement issues have been a repeated cause of upset for merchants through 2012, one of a litany of errors and problems occurring within the Marketplace during the year; some of them apparently as a result of the introduction of Direct Delivery  (image courtesy of Ry0ta Exonar)

Both of these situations point to a need for Linden Lab to be more openly proactive in communicating with users – and there really is no excuse for them not to do so. A recent response from the Lab to the question of why they don’t routinely blog any more was that “no-one reads the blogs”. However, this is hardly an explanation – it is an excuse. Keep the blog reasonably up-to-date with information, be it news or periodic updates, give people a reason to read it – and they will.

In 2013, we’re promised some more new capabilities and options which can and should significantly improve th look and feel of Second Life and do much to improve the overall user experience. Things like materials processing and server-side avatar baking. These are all to the good and will hopefully be “nice to haves” when they arrive.

What would also be nice to have in 2013 is more proactive and widespread, informative communication flowing out of the Lab. Sadly, the cynic / realist in me is not holding her breath in anticipation.

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.

Phoenix: hard truths

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update 17th December: The video of the meeting is available on You Tube (and embedded below). Links have also been added to the official announcement and a transscript of Jessica’s presentation given at the start of the meeting.

PhoenixJessica Lyon and members of the Phoenix Firestorm Team hosted an in-world / streamed meeting on Saturday 15th December, 2012 to discuss the future of Phoenix.

As expected, the core of the news was the Phoenix has essentially come to its end of line. As from December 31st, all official support provided by the Phoenix / Firestorm team will cease.

There are many reasons as to why this step is finally being taken, but they all have their roots in the fact that in late 2010, the decision was taken that to ensure future ease-of-development and enhancement of the viewer, it would be more in the Phoenix Team’s interest to develop a viewer which could more easily keep pace with LL’s development curve, rather than attempting to continually backport new code and features into a viewer that would be based on what would become an increasingly outdated code base. Thus, Firestorm was born. Whether one agrees with this decision or not is actually moot. It was a decision the Phoenix Team were entitled to make.

Jessica Lyon (stock image)
Jessica Lyon (stock image)

The major reason as to why the team has opted to formally announce the end of line for Phoenix now is because Linden Lab have notified TPVs of the forthcoming roll-out of server-side avatar baking in 2013.

As I’ve explained in a recent blog post, server-side avatar baking is a significant change in the way Second Life operates and which should see an end to the major issue of avatar bake fail. However, it brings with it not only changes to the server-side of Second Life, but very major changes to the viewer itself.

Such is the complexity of these viewer changes that Linden Lab has sought to provide TPVs with an eight week window in which to implement and test them. Given the overall status of Phoenix, it simply is not possible for the Phoenix Firestorm team to implement the changes in Firestorm and backport and integrate them into Phoenix (together with all the other changes required to get Phoenix back on a par with LL’s viewer development) in that time frame. The reason why it is vital for all TPVs incorporate the new code is because without it, avatars will fail to render correctly – so if Phoenix does not have the code, it simply “won’t work” when the new service is deployed.

Avatar baking 2013 and Phoenix in brief: These images show the impact of the new avatar baking service on viewer which are not updated to the new code. (l) as I appear on a viewer without the code, and someone on another viewer (regardless of the code it is using) looks to me. On the right, someone running the new code, and how I look to them - a never-rezzing cloud.
Avatar baking 2013 and Phoenix in brief: These images show the impact of the new avatar baking service on a viewer which is not updated to the new code. (l) as I appear on a viewer without the code, and someone on another viewer (regardless of the code it is using) looks to me – a “grey ghost”. On the right, someone running the new code, and how I look to them – a never-rezzing cloud.

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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!