Tag: SL News

BSG returns to SL

Posted on by Inara Pey

In November I blogged about Battlestar Galactica within Second Life being on the receiving end of a DMCA from Universal Studios. Now it appears, by way of a cheese-loving investigative resident and a delightfully easily to tease medieval lord that an agreement has been reached with regards to Battlestar Galactica in Second Life.

Some had said that the NBC/Univseral move was to quash opposition to their own upcoming BSG MMOG, now about to enter beta. Well, not so.

The actual news was broken by the Harrisburg Second Life Examiner (as was the original information relating to the issuance of the DMCA) that following intense negotiations between a number of parties, including NBC/Universal’s IP licensing office and the International Federation of Trekkers representing BSG interests in SL, an agreement has been reached whereby BSG roleplay can now continue within Second Life.

This is an encouraging move, and shows that major corporations are prepared to act in a reasonable manner towards activities in Second Life. While it is true that several BSG sims have folded in response to the original DMCA and the statement from NBC/Universal contains a very specific caveat, this outcome should nevertheless not be taken with any sour grapes on the part of SL residents.

The caveat itself  relates to BSG goods within Second Life; specifically, NBC/Universal state:

users may continue to create and interact with each other as BSG fans, so long as such interaction does not include the creation and sales of unlicensed of real-life or virtual items featuring our intellectual property

Note my emphasis. “And”. It implies that NBC/Universal might be willing to allow the creation of BSG material (uniforms, vehicles, etc.) providing the evidence can be provided that the creator is not profiting from such items. That this seems to be the case has been confirmed in a follow-up telephone call from NBC/Universal to those representing BSG activities within SL, wherein it was confirmed that the company will tolerate goods made under the fair use act (i.e. not sold or re-sold), but that lawyers for the company will follow-up on individual cases involving the creations and sale / re-sale of BSG-related material.

The cynical might say that nevertheless the caveat still “kills” BSG as no-one will “want” to create BSG items that they cannot sell and thus receive some benefit for their hard work. Frankly, I say “not so”.

Fans of series like BSG are extremely loyal both to the franchise and to the idea of keeping the concepts, philosophies and appeal of such shows alive – and in having fun doing so. As such, I have little doubt there are BSG content creators out there who will be willing to forego profit and see some of their wares available for use in such sims under the fair use act.

As it stands, those running RP sims have a green light, providing they clearly demonstrate they are neither creating BSG goods for sale and that they are not in receipt of any proceeds from the sale of such goods. Indeed, those directly involved in the major remaining sims have indicated their full support for the agreement, and one group is already working on a comprehensive roleplay scenario that takes the BSG concept in something of a new direction.

Kudos should be extended to those that kept the faith and put in such positive effort to keeping BSG alive in Second Life. Such kudos, should especially go to Anthony Haslage (“Ntaniel Swordthain” in SL) for acting as mediator in this matter and to NBC/Universal themselves for being willing to engage so positively and work towards a satisfactory conclusion.

So say we all!

Rodvik Revealed

Posted on by Inara Pey

Rod Humble (Rodvik Linden), the new CEO at Linden Lab attended a short “meet and greet” event with members of the “Second Life Press Corps” on Friday.

The meeting itself appears to have been a bit of a curate’s egg: on the one hand, it *is* good that Rodvik is taking the time to meet and greet. On the other…but the time the greetings were all done, there wasn’t really much time for the actual meeting this time around – although a fair few of those attending did get some points across to Rodvik – which I’m sure he’s taken note of and some of what he said vis-a-vis in-world creativity within SL was encouraging.

The really sad thing here is that once again, this smacks of LL operating by stealth. The meeting was very small, with a selected audience who (one cynically suspects) were selected as much for their positive attitude towards LL as for any “journalistic credentials”. Certainly, Rodvik cannot hope to meet with everyone, and really large audiences can make for difficult meetings – but one cannot help but be disappointed that no-one at LL has made mention of the fact that these meetings are happening (assuming this was not a one-off), or indicated that larger audiences may be possible in the future. To be sure, LL are in a rock and a hard place: Town Halls, etc., are hard to organise and small meetings smack of talking to the anointed: but at the moment excitement around Rodvik’s appointment is running high and favourable – and as such, it would be good to see LL engender more goodwill among residents by holding somewhat larger, more open meetings that allow for a wider opportunity for people to see / hear / chat with Rodvik Linden.

Again, these needn’t take up great swathes of his time – but putting aside a couple of hours each week for a two or three-week period and scheduling meetings at times that suit international meetings (as was done with this first one)  isn’t really beyond the realm of the doable.

Anyway, here’s the transcript of the meeting, and my thanks to Chestnut Rea for posting it.

On a side note…Rod’s avatar is a fabulous (photo?) rendering of himself, and one of the freshest approaches to a Linden Avatar I’ve yet seen.

Rodvik Linden (right)

Getting Kinect-ed

Posted on by Inara Pey

Hamlet over an New World Notes carries an interesting article on using Kinect to connect to Second Life (and potentially other virtual worlds in the future).

The system is far from perfect, as it’s creator admits, but it would seem to offer a new means of interacting with SL for those so-minded. I have to admit to being somewhere between sceptical and amused.

At the moment, one cannot enter any electronics  / computer store in the UK without coming across someone standing in front of a 53-inch TV screen frantically gesticulating, waving, hopping, crouching, jumping and shuffling like they’re either having some form of fit, have inadvertently sat on a termite hill or have the most bizarre case of cramp on record – and sometimes a mix of all three. As such, quite how the rest of an otherwise sane household will react to mother or father doing a Superman/girl impersonation in front of their computer screen (and yes, it would seem that a lot of people engage in SL in the same room where other family members are doing other things) or suddenly hugging empty air and puckering their lips seemingly an nothing, could lead to some “interesting” times / explanations.

More interestingly, Leigh Alexander over at Gamasutra, questions the validity of gesture-based “ease of use” (among other things in a far broader article):

Getting your average person — one not particularly versed in gaming, for example — to understand that a hand wave translates to an in-game behavior might be easier than asking them to learn a controller button combination that has the same effect. But while literal simulation may be more immediately comprehensible, the idea that it’s more efficient in terms of interface is largely fallacious.

On the other hand, for those that like to RP in SL – sword fighting and other combat – and providing the gestures can be learned by the system, this might offer a new layer to SL interaction. Although, as one commentator on Hamlet’s NWNs observes – if the system gets to full body movement replication, things could start getting embarrassing at clubs and dances. “Dad dancing at my wedding” could become as much a SL nightmare for brides as it can be in RL….

Mocking aside, if this actually turns out to be going somewhere – the work continues to enhance the system and people actually take it up and encourage more work to be done – where it might lead may remain limited in outcome, but could also be quite fascinating. I’d be interested to see how this is picked up by other sectors of the technology industry for more bespoke virtual environments.

Properly prim(med)

Posted on by Inara Pey

Tateru Nino speculates on the future of the megaprim on her blog, in an entry that is ironically amusing in its timing.

The megaprim has been around in various forms for years. Early megas (prims bigger than the 10x10x10 SL limit) were highly questionable, having come about through an exploit that meant their dimensions were so tortured as to be highly suspect and / or that actually played games with the physics engine. A 50×50 (x,y) mega, for example, may have looked like it was 50×50 in size, but it actually registered with the sim as either a 50x50x? or 100x100x? mega, depending on how the original had been tortured and where the “centre point” lay (either along one edge of the prim or in one corner). Push such a prim up against a sim boundary, and you risked destabilising the sim as you had a physical object effectively crossing the sim boundary. Such megas also massively increased the number of collisions on a sim as avatars walked on them (or more usually – again due to the nature of the beasts – through them as far as the physics engine was concerned.

LL, as Tateru reports, itself was split into two groups: those that wanted to ban megas period, and those that wanted to let them in to a greater or lesser degree. With the coming of Bay City and Nautilus, the latter group partially got their way: a “legal” exploit was used to create megas that could be tortured without the issues surrounding earlier attempts. Thus was born the plethora of “legal” megas we all know and use today. They are not perfect: you cannot resize them without them “snapping back” to 10×10(x10); but they can be cut, sliced, tapered, etc., like any other prim.

Now, Tateru speculates, the era of these megas might even be coming to an end. AS I’ve noted myself, the “legal” prim size is due to be increased to 64x64x64 with the introduction of Mesh (although I thought it was 60x60x60 when I blogged on the matter). Further, LL are implementing a new toolset that will enable people to return prims that encroach upon their land.

Had I read Tateru’s blog in isolation, I’d have dismissed it; it is hard to image LL wiping all mega prims from the grid, given the chaos it would cause. And yet…

Last night (my time), mega prims – and anything they were linked to – started vanishing from the grid (I was actually one of those affected when the main section of my house vanished out from under myself and a friend). While the situation was apparently stopped by Maggie Linden, it was nevertheless perplexing, and afterwards, theories started appearing on various blogs as to what happened. These seem to have comprised the following:

  • It was because LL had banned the prims belonging to one “Crowley Avro” (or “Auro”), and that these were being systematically wiped from the grid, OR
  • That “Crowley Avro/Auro” had been banned with the result that all megas made by them were being blacklisted, OR
  • That LL were wiping out all 50x50x?? prims our larger, OR
  • That is was restricted to a specific size of prims around the 50x??x?? size.

LL are, unsurprisingly, remaining quiet on the subject. Personally, I have issues with these theories, because:

  1. All of the megas I used in the section of my house that poofed (which I later recovered via a re-rez from my backup rezzer) were created by Research Project not Crowley Whoever
  2. The section of the house that vanished didn’t contain any 50xanything megaprims in it: indeed, the single 50x50x1 prim I’ve used in the build was untouched

Thus, it would seem all these theories floating around as little more than guesswork; as are these two alternatives:

  • Someone at LL simply boobed (although why they should be focusing on megaprims is itself an interesting question) OR
  • Someone boobed inasmuch as they pushed the button to early – that is, there are plans to remove megas at some point down the road – someone at LL just accidentally jumped the gun – and as such, Tateru is correct.

On the one hand, it is hard to conceive of LL “banning” all current megas. Not only would it piss off a lot of people, it would create a heck of a lot of work for them – or rather their moles – given both Bay City and Nautilus use rather a lot of megas. But this doesn’t necessarily rule out such a move – there might even be valid performance reasons for doing so; and even if not, LL seem to have a habit of upsetting users, even when they don’t intend to.

Addendum 3rd Feb

While the exact cause of the issue remain unclear, LL posted the following on the Grid status page, which actually hadn’t shown up on my Dashboard when I posted the above:

We are aware that some megaprims were removed from the grid which have affected builds that contained the megaprims. While mega prims are not supported, we understand their value in builds.  The issue has been resolved and the object can be re-rezzed from your inventories at this time.

It’s interesting to note LL understand their value in builds but also reinforce the fact that mega prims are not supported. So I’d say the jury is out on the subject of eventual removal, but possibly swaying towards not banning them. Even so, I’ll still be reworking my builds when the time comes…

A remarkable use of a virtual world

Posted on by Inara Pey

Doctors in the United States have put a virtual environment to a remarkable use. The double-handle of physically “cancelling” the visual / audible stimulus that can trigger fear and heighten the sensations of pain together with the more subtle psychological factor of placing the user into a “cool” environment far removed from any association with the trauma he faced is extremely clever.

The medical potential of virtual worlds, at least for those who can afford / have access to such treatment, really is staggering, and move something like World Builder – which some find “creepy” or manipulative – into a more practical and achievable use, the benefits of which cannot be denied.

Viewer 1.23: coming to the end of the line

Posted on by Inara Pey

In May of last year, I reported on the initial steps that would see the eventual loss of Viewer 1.23.x as we know it.

That the depreciation had started – and would take a goodly while to complete, admittedly – caused one Third Party Viewer creator to get a little out of his tree, threatening to AR me to Linden Lab for “spreading lies”, and also to submit a “defamation” report against me with WordPress!

Anyway…it now appears that the first major step to ending Viewer 1.23 from effectively working on the Main Grid will be taken some time in Quarter 2 of 2011 (although this has yet to be precisely confirmed by Linden Lab).

The news came to light in a Phoenix Viewer office hour on the 11th January (the transcript from which I missed at the time). To whit:

Linden Labs has announced that they will be blocking search, server-side, for the Viewer 1.x viewer, effectively making all Viewer 1.x useless for search, and effectively forcing users to move over to the Viewer 2x viewer (allowing Linden Labs to move forward with features that are not compatible with the 1.x viewers). That gives the Phoenix team 3 or 4 months to get Firestorm ready for delivery…
[Addendum: To be clear… We were notified of the intention to turn off viewer 1.x search capability during a meeting between LL and approved Third Party Viewers. This information was provided to us as a means to help us prepare for what the future holds for existing 1.x viewers. Linden Lab has not officially announced this yet, and you can be sure that they WILL announce it well ahead of time and give everyone ample notice. We are told that the Lab will stop support for their 1.23 viewer before search in 1.x viewers is turned off….]

This announcement has been reported on at SLU, where it has been met with a mixed response. Elsewhere, the news has also meet with opposition – and one has to say that the concerns and critiques are somewhat justified.

However, is this really a bad thing? While it is true that Search in Viewer 2 is far from perfect, and still needs considerable work (not least shown by the fact that each new release of Viewer 2 seems to operate slightly differently with regards to search, and people have been commenting on this and getting frustrated about it in the official forums for a while) – the fact remains that Linden Lab cannot maintain two code bases indefinitely, and Viewer 2 already embeds a lot of functionality that Viewer 1.23 cannot support without more work than Linden Lab can afford to give, even were they so minded.

Ergo, things have to change, and as such, the end of Viewer 1.23 and its derivatives was and is only a matter of time. And let’s be fair: Viewer 2, while it still has warts, has come a considerable way in the last 12 months. While one could argue that in doing so, it could have benefited if, for part of that time it had remained in a more rigorous closed Beta testing environment in which perhaps more user feedback which was then acted upon, the Viewer would be now be enjoying a far greater degree of popularity among users than is currently the case; the point is now moot. Viewer 2.5 and the 2.5 Beta are a long way removed from the original, and time and effort has been invested by a lot of people both within and without Linden Lab – and they deserve thanks.

Again, the demise of 1.23 later this year shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. The likes of the Phoenix and Imprudence teams have been beavering away with their own Viewer 2 based products, Firestorm and Kokua since around November of last year because of this very fact.

Of course, one could argue that “breaking” search in 1.23 is a lot different to “depreciating” the Viewer – but is it? The end result is the same.

While “breaking” – or more correctly – blocking search for 1.23 is perhaps a little unsubtle in some respects (rightly or wrongly, the perception (note the emphasis!) is that search is “working” in 1.23, and “not working in Viewer 2.x), it shouldn’t be seen as a negative. As some on the SLU thread point out, it clears the way for LL to focus down more thoroughly on Viewer 2 and its good and bad points.

Yes, Search in Viewer 2 still need work – but again, as many have pointed out to those raising a hoo-haw over this move: Search in Viewer 2 does work; just not in all cases. LL is fighting hard against people gaming the system – and in the areas where people complaining about it “not working”, it tends to be the most gaming goes on (such as with land and the like). In other areas, things are a lot better, and merchants and users alike are encountering fewer problems.

However, given that Search on Viewer 2 is still being worked upon, and may people do rely on Search in many ways, one hopes that the “turn off” date for Viewer 1.23’s access to search is not something that will be viewed as “stopping the train” if it is delayed. If we reach the date and it is widely acknowledged by the users who have to make use of it that Search in Viewer 2 still needs important work – LL will delay the switch-off.

Unless, of course, Firestorm and Kokua (and whoever else is going down this route) have rolled out and wooed all those still “anti” Viewer 2 on the grounds of its awkward UI – which is likely to be the case. Providing they do, I have a sneaking suspicion that many won’t even notice any Search issues. They’ll have a Viewer with a UI they like (aka one without a sidebar and with a better approach to chat windows  / chicklets / toasties – whatever cute name you give them) – and so on, and won’t be worried about Search.