Tag: Second Life

Following-on from yesterday’s posting, Jack is out in blogland again, with an announcement which seems to have a lot of people going, “tilt?!”

Certainly, the announcement has lead to a lot of speculation – and even near-hysteria (“favouritism!” “bailout!”).

On the surface, it seems something of a reasonable deal: USS stood to be very badly mauled with the OpenSpace sim debacle, and thus Linden Lab have stepped in to help out and at the same time found a means of bolstering interest in their mainland Nautilus project, while allegedly giving the community as a whole something to enjoy (a new sailing sea – although contrary to the cries of the likes of LL and USS, I’d question just how popular sailing is overall & when compared to other sim-intensive activities like flying…).

But since when has Linden Lab been reasonable? What’s more – what is with the sudden willingness to hand over mainland controls to other groups, as Jack Linden has stated to Prokofy Neva will be the case here? Granted, he hints that the handover may be temporary (thus bringing it loosely in line with the festivals Prok mentions in her post) – but USS tend to have an active events calendar, which could call into question the “temporary” nature of the handover of powers.

Could it be that Linden Lab are themselves loking for ways to hand-off broad management of the mainland to users – thus relieving themselves of the mundane grunt work while charging users for the privilege?

Or could the reason run deeper? Again, while people quickly shout “favouritism” on reading Jack’s post, I tend to side with Prok and some others in the forum thread itself who pick up on Jack’s own reply to this cry, vis:

“First of all, this isn’t something exclusive and it will not be the only such project of its type. In deciding that we wanted to look for ways to involve estates to the benefit of both themselves and the Mainland, someone has to go first…..

“The USS are a particularly good fit because they are large, well established and have a strong theme that is PG in nature and appeals to a wide range of residents. They also happen to be extremely well organised.”

OK… the first part of this comment is reasonable enough inasmuch as someone has to go first in a project such as this….but the second part of this comment certainly hikes my eyebrows, as it implies that LL will only engage with groups that meet some pre-ordained criteria (hidden under the banner names “PG”, strong”, and “well established”).

However you look at it, this does smack of favouritism in-the-making: if your group doesn’t measure-up the the criteria, Linden Lab won’t engage with you, and thus you’ll be left wanting while others get leverage.

And this borders on this being another potential way of LL censoring SL content it would rather not have…since by Jack’s own admission, if you have any group or activity that is Mature rated (and remember, “Mature” doesn’t always mean sexual in nature – or even adult in extent) – then you are immediately precluded from the potential of a partnership.

The flipside to this is, quite simply that perhaps Linden Lab, in striking this deal, really is trying to make amends for earlier upsets. However, if this is the case, then Jack has once again taken the hand gun, cocked the hammer – and royally shot himself in the foot. If LL are indeed looking to leverage partnerships that will both benefit private estate owners and help develop / utilise the mainland – then why not be up-front on things from the start: state the intention, explain the process and aims, and invite submissions? All this announcement has (again) done is stir up a lot of resentment which no amount of spin from Jack is going to undo.

Certainly, given the controversy he has now successfully created, Jack would do well to take heed of Bryon Ruxton’s comment / warning. Although it has to be said, there is a certain genius at work here – at a stroke, Jack and his cohorts and split those protesting over the recent OpenSpace sim tier hikes right down the middle. Leave us not forget, USS were leading the charge on the matter….now they’ve been given a one-sided deal from LL that has left many of their erstwhile supporters deeply upset.

For my part, I’m curious to see what transpires in the future as a result of this apparent paradigm shift on the part of LL. If it benefits SL as a whole – and by that I mean all of us, whether or not we are “strong” or “well established” or “PG” – then it is all to the good.

However, the cynic in me is now waiting for not one, but two shoes to drop as a result of Jack’s announcements….

On Monday, Katt Linden issued the latest in what I refer to as KLiPPs (Katt Linden’s Pointless Posts). This one was about the much-vaunted “new” front end to the Second Life website that is being developed with Big Spaceship in order to “draw-in” potential new users.

However, rather than simply announce the fact that a demonstration version of the new site design is available for people to comment on, Katt made an announcement about the fact that some time next week, Linden Lab will be “testing” the new design, and that as such some of us might get to see it.

Thus, the tagged-on request for comments and feedback (coupled with a basic snapshot of the proposed layout), made at this point in time, is utterly pointless – how can one fairly judge what is (apparently) something of an interactive front end (Flash-driven) on the basis of a static snapshot or without actually seeing it in action for oneself?

One can’t.

So why not wait until the new site is ready for a proper look, and then make it available, together with a suitable announcement and request for comments on something that is tangible, rather than wasting our time with more hype?

Because let’s face it showing a static photo of what is supposedly a dynamic web front-end gives about as much idea of the appeal & actual usability of that front end as does sticking a penguin on a pair of rollerskates and using it as a demonstration of flying (it’s got wings, it moves – but it ain’t airbourne).

…Although in making the above comment, I do acknowledge the fact that I’m assuming the pictures within the new web front end are dynamic, rather than themselves being basic snapshots….

That said, there is one aspect of the new design that does deserve comment. That aspect is the use of Flash as the presentation medium. And the comment is, “Oh dear…”

Ostensibly, the idea behind the new design is to encourage potential new users into Second Life, and remove barriers to them getting in-world ASAP. This being the case, one cannot help but ask, “So what on Earth went wrong between coming up with this Big Idea and handing the assignment to Big Spaceship?”

Lets face it. Flash is not exactly the most popular browser plugin in the world. For a start, the fact that it is a plugin presupposes people have Flash installed on their computers (many don’t) or that they will be suddenly willing to install it in order to see the “exciting new medium” LL claims Second Life to be (they won’t).

And even where people do have it installed, coming across a website front-ended by Flash tends to provoke one of two reactions:

1. Either people get hacked off waiting for everything to load and initiate and go off elsewhere before the “exciting stuff” begins, or
2. People immediately hit the “Skip intro” link in the hope of getting to something more meaningful.

Thus, however you look at it – it is really hard to see how this new design is going to win over new users any more than the current (admittedly hideous) website – or even be seen, given point (2.) above…

Even Jamie Linden’s attempts to reassure people over the use of Flash stand as a damning indictment of the whole approach. “During the test,” he announces in the forum discussion on the subject, “for those that do not have Flash, we have a detection script which then serves those people a non-Flash homepage, similar to the homepage we have now.”

In other words Linden Lab is aware the Flash isn’t exactly highly regarded from a user perspective….

….so why even bother investing the time and effort into such a lame duck approach? Flash is not the sole media management technology that is out there. There are better ways of attracting new users without trying to be so – and pardon the unintentional pun – flashy; ways and technologies that are far less alienating than Flash. So why not cut to the quick and simply use those technologies instead, and avoid all the rigmrole of providing “alternative” sites and links and all the maintenance headaches that involves?

Could it be that at the end of the day the choice of Flash was not driven so much by the need for accessibility than it was by the fact that it appears to be the only medium Big Spaceship understands? If so, then a) Linden Lab has again managed to suck on alemon while trying for an orange, and b) the alternative meaning often applied when Big Spaceship’s initials are paired together may well be richly deserved….

First, I’ll (like others) pre-empt this by saying I’m not against vampiric role-play in SL per se. It’s not my cup of tea – but then, there are probably a lot of vampire players out there who don’t find my D/s preferences to their liking. However, SL is a big place to rattle around in, so as long as we all acknowledge one another’s right to hold individual views and interests, and not impinge our own on those around us – then we can all enjoy this metaverse to our hearts’ content.

That said…there is one aspect of vampire “gaming” that has, over the last several months, increasingly climbed up my left nostril, where it has smelt increasingly bad. That aspect is Bloodlines.

Why?

Well, first and foremost because it is intrusive – thus breaking the second half of my “live and let live” statement above. I’m frankly sick to death (no pun intended) of Tp’ing somewhere and getting hit with 1, 2, 3 – sometimes even 4 – pop-ups from people wanting to “bite” me. OK. So it is easy enough to click these requests away by hitting IGNORE – but this doesn’t prevent the whole thing becoming an annoyance very quickly. And the whole thing is far, far more insidious than this.

But rather than rattle on about it myself, I’ll direct you over to Boy Lane’s blog, where she has given a very eloquent post on why we should all treat Bloodlines in a very circumspect manner.

Again, to make this clear – I’m not having a bash at vampire players in SL; nor am I hitting out at those who enter Bloodlines with a sincere desire to extend their roleplay enjoyment. What I am doing is – like Boy – highlighting the more insidious aspects of this particular “game” and the manner in which the organisers target the unwary for their own gain.

Certainly, given the sheer nuisance aspect of bite requests landing on people Tp’ing to a new location, rest assured that anyone spamming visitors to i-Squared stores and properties in this manner will be summarily ejected and banned.

During an Office Hours discussion, Babbage Linden laid out what appears to be the future for managing scripts in SL. From this and other discussions, it is evident that the issue has been causing concern within Linden Lab for some time now, and was likely to have been the kick-off point for the recent OpenSpace sim debacle – even if they opted to “leverage” that situation for different purposes…

In a nutshell, and bearing in mind I’m not a techie – the problem is that there is obviously finite memory available on each server that runs SL sims (4 sims per server in the case of “full” island sims; 16 in the case of the current OpenSpace sims). This means that each sim gets around 800Mb of memory in which to run residents’ scripts. Up until now, if there are more scripts on a sim than available memory, the sim has “swapped” memory with the other sims on the server in order to meet the needs of all the scripts it has running.

While this hasn’t been a “major” problem in the past, it has impacted performance (lag). However, because we are all natural script hogs (in the same way we are all prim hogs), the memory swapping situation is approaching epidemic proportions and seriously impacting overall grid performance. Thus, it is fairly evident something must be done.

Linden Lab’s preferred approach to solving this problem is to allocate memory space to sims in much the same way as prims are currently allocated: a finite amount of memory is “given” with the sim, and (like prims) this is divided across the sim in accordance with how the sim is parcelled. Therefore, if you own a sim and divide it into two parcels, each parcel gets roughly 50% of the memory space available to the sim. Divide the sim into 4 parcels, and each parcel gets roughly 1/4 of the memory allocation…and so on.

I say roughly, because at the same time, a “resource pool” on each sim is set aside for Avatars that will enable all the myraid of in-world attachments we all tend to carry around to work.

On the surface, both of these apporaches do actually seem reasonable, although it has to be said – as in the comments given by those quoted in the extracts published by Dari – that there are potentially better solutions. Further, this whole idea raises a plethora of questions, many of which LL have yet to answer – of which by far the most important is how will user awareness be handled?

Right now, we all expect that, no matter what we purchase, when we get it home, it will work. OK, so sometimes it may run a little slowly, but it will work. With the new limitations, this will no longer be the case…if you’re on a 1024 sq m parcel and your new left-hand widget wongler takes you over your resource allocation it won’t work until you sort out which items you currently have rezzed must be returned to your Inventory in order to “make room” for the widget wongler….

It gets worse. Prims are relatively easy to understand. They are finite units, irrespective of their relative size. Thus a prim is a prim whether it is 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 or 10 x10 10. Scripts (in terms of memory use are not. Some scripts run in a few Kb of memory space, other require the (current) maximum of 64Kb (thus gobbling more memory). Therefore, thus judging whether the next purchase will work at home or require other things get “put away” to “make room” for it is not simply a matter of counting the number of scripts it contains…

And what about those already exceeding the (currently unspecified) limits on resources? The day before the caps are implemented, they’ll see everything running fine. The day after, there is a good chance they’ll find things are not working at all, leading to a potential outcry as beloved household items suddenly have to returned to Inventory or swapped back and forth with other items, thus making a mockery of having a “home” (when was the last time you had to put the sofa into storage to make way for the television set in rl?).

Unless communications prior to the event are handled clearly and passed to ALL members of the SL community, there is a danger that those getting lambasted for perceived failures with objects will not be Linden Lab….but the creators of the objects themselves. This would be grossly unfair on content creators.

There are many other questions that need to be addressed on the issue – how will protected land work for example (particularly where it is protected to provide prim bonuses to other parcels – will the memory allocation be available to provide a similar “memory bonus”); how will malls work, if memory is not only tied to land size, but land ownership?

Then there is the potential impact of the “resource pool” for Avatars. Again, at the moment it makes no difference memory-wise as to how many agents (Avatars) are on a sim – the CPU will simply start memory-swapping to accommodate until the nominal Agent Limit is reached. Practically this does mean that where the limit is being approached, things get bad on the sim in terms of lag (and on the other 4 sims sharing the server for than matter).

While a resource pool may prevent the latter problem of the other 3 sims on a server being impacted, the fact that resources available to Avatars will be capped means that the numbers of Avatars able to enter popular venues in future could be seriously impacted: get a dozen Avatars on-sim blinged up to their eyeballs, all wearing (God-awful) “clickety” shoes and scripted hair with Chimeras attached to heads / shoulders / butts, as well as two or three other “heavy” attachments – and one can see a sim’s “pool” of Avatar resources quickly drying up, with the result that while others may be able to Tp into a sim, they’ll find that “nothing works” when they get there.

No-one can doubt that when we have finite resources available to all of us, then something must be done to ensure those resources are fairly managed and distributed – and that the reasons for such controls, how they will work and what it will mean to SL users is clearly communicated. Further, it is also necessary to ensure that reasonable tools / facilities are put in place to enable people to husband their available resources wisely.

But given LL’s inability to keep its left hand informed about what its right hand is doing, let alone actually communcate with its user base clearly, concisely and openly, can we really believe they’ll shoulder the responsibilities inherent in introducing such fundamental changes to SL wisely or constructively?

If things do go in this direction, then I, for one, will not be holding my breath.