Tag: SL News

There are probably very few people in SL who have not heard of MadPea; they’ve been responsible for some of the most engaging and interactive games, hunts and gachas in Second Life. I’ve covered some of their work in these pages, notably their magnificent Room 326, (which continued through their Mad City installation on Da Vinci Isle), and their fiendishly fun Carneval. The team have also been featured in an edition of The Drax Files.

For most of the past year, the team has been focused on their next major undertaking, an immersive, interactive HUD-based game called UNIA, which is spread across two regions and is – I can say with some authority, having been taken on a guided tour of the installation by MadPea’s leader, Kiana “Queen Pea” Writer and development team member (and good friend) RAG Randt – utterly stunning and completely involving.

I don’t want to give too much away as to the plot, but suffice it to say, it is part horror story (or nightmare story, given its origins), part puzzle solving, part mystery, and more. Players will be able to engage in the game either individual or work in co-operation with others (or even both, depending upon how events unfold), and will interact with creatures, NPCs and things not normally of this world as they attempt to resolve what is going on and discover the truth.

From the moment someone arrives in the little town of Molimo, they are in for one hell of a time (literally and figuratively!), in a game which features settings designed by the likes of Bryn Oh, Rebeca Bashly, BlueSean Yiyuan and Silex Zapedzki, and Jaimy Hancroft, as well as the MadPea team themselves, with huge amounts of dedicated scripting by the team and purpose-built animations from Abranimations.

The reason the game has taken so long to develop is that it really pushing the envelope within Second Life in terms of capabilities and gaming mechanism, and even now, Kiana and the team estimate there is still around two or three months work required in order to bring UNIA to life. However, a major spanner was thrown into the works fairly early on in the scheme of things.

As the game was being developed, so MadPea lost their sponsor. Developing something as immersive and involving as UNIA doesn’t come cheap: the cost of the two regions on which it is set runs to $731.60 a month (incl. VAT at 24%, levied as a result of Kiana’s real-life location in Finland). The team have been able to offset some of the costs through other ventures and activities – including running additional hunts and gacha fairs, and well as via donations through Mad City. The problem here is, of course that time spent on developing hunts, etc., is time taken away from UNIA, slowing down its completion. Also, Mad City is set to close at the end of May 2014.

In order to try to keep things going, MadPea launched a fundraiser at the start of May, hoping to encourage SL users and their patrons to help contribute to bringing UNIA to life.

“I have been struggling with this for a while in my mind.. Should I do a fundraiser for UNIA or not?” Kiana says. “After several players contacted me asking where they could donate, I thought that ok, let’s go ahead with this, there’s nothing I have to lose.”

The funding effort is being run via GoFundMe, and aims to raise $4,389.00 for the development and upkeep of the game, with some $1,500 of that target having been achieved at the time of writing. People are free to donate whatever they are comfortable with giving, but pay $50.00 and you’ll receive an exclusive UNIA outfit for your avatar; pay $500, and you’ll receive an exclusive tour of UNIA by Kiana, early access to the game, a free HUD, weapons and outfits.

If the fundraiser is successful, and UNIA does open to the public, then there is the potential for even more, “This is only part ONE,” Kiana said during my tour, “Part two is [going to be] taking place all over the grid.”

Having spent two hours in UNIA with Kiana and RAG, I can say that this is something that could be very unique in SL, and offer an astonishing level of immersion and engagement. If you’ve experienced past MadPea activities and events, you’ll know just how inventive and imaginative they can be. So why not hop over to the funding page and offer a payment? In doing so, you’ll be helping to open the door to even more fun you can enjoy.

On Wednesday April 9th, I reported (under “Transaction History Oopsie”) on an error with the Transaction History page on people’s SL dashboards which lead to some upset and confusion after the familiar page was replaced with one that failed to show totals, and which had the familiar .XLS and .XML download options replaced by a single .CSV option.

The change lead to understandably negative  forum comments and a JIRA report (BUG-5664).

As a result of the upset, the page was rapidly withdrawn, and as I reported on April 12th, the Lab blogged on the matter, indicating they would be seeking users’ input to the matter going forward.

In line with this, the Lab issued a further blog post on Wednesday April 16th, entitled Try Out the New Transaction History Page, which reads in full:

Last week, we made a new page available as a replacement for the old Transaction History page. Due to your feedback, we rolled back the changes to this page to allow us to gather more feedback, and we are now providing this new page for review, without removing the old Transaction History page.

We have not yet made any changes to the new page, because we would like time to collect your feedback and review it. We have created a wiki page giving background on why changes were made to this page, where the new page is, and how to provide feedback. We will be closing feedback on April 30, 2014, so please take a look before then.

The wiki page repeats the blog post information, and confirms the primary reason behind the change:

The new Transaction History page was created to allow more than 500 transactions to be displayed for Residents with very active businesses.

It also invites people to provide feedback via the original BUG-5664 JIRA report raised by Sera Lok, which is open to comment for feedback.

Please bear in mind when examining the “new” Transaction History page, that no changes have been made to it since it was first revealed on April 9th – it is given purely as an example so that people can better identify and report issues they may have with it when comparing it to the existing Transaction History page.

People have been asked to provide feedback by Wednesday April 30th.

Reading through the comments, some constructive points have been put forward, although the range of comments doindicate the complexity of implementing changes like this, with people falling almost equally either side of individual changes. For example, many feel that providing only a .CSV download isn’t a problem, but an equal number feel that .XLS (and .XML) should be retained, as .CSV can create problems when it comes to processing the data contained n the downloaded file. Were I to be asked, I’d suggest that retaining .XLS (/ .XML) alongside .CSV would offer the most flexible approach. Backwards compatibility and not breaking legacy content (including scripted processes) has long been a watchword for the Lab when making changes to the SL platform – and this attitude should be carried forward with supporting services as well, such as the Transaction History page, to accommodate all those who have processes reliant on receiving their transaction data in .XLS.

What is healthy is that the Commerce Team appear to be listening and making a genuine effort to understand issues and concerns. Coming so long after what seems to have been a deliberate policy of disengagement by the team from merchants in many areas, this is undoubtedly welcome.

One can only hope this willingness is further reflected in how the new page is refined and updated going forward.

This is a little long in the tooth, but I’m caught playing catch-up on a number of things, so apologies on my part.

As most will be aware, there has been a lot of coverage about the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability in the course of the last week, and the impact it may have had over the last two years in exposing what should have been secure information.

The vulnerability is so-called because it affects an extension to SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) which engineers dubbed Heartbeat. It is a server-side exploit which could affect almost any system running any version of OpenSSL from the past 2 years, and allows an attacker to gain control of up to 64kB of the server’s working memory at a time, enabling them to eavesdrop communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.

Because of the widespread nature of the issue and the concerns it raised, the Lab issued a blog post on the matter on Thursday April 10th, which reads in full: