May be Linden Lab is not recession proof. New World Notes has an article, now confirmed, about Linden Lab laying off 30% of staff.
Game Development
Things Around Second Life and OSGrid
Both Second Life (SL) and OpenSim (OS) are advancing; changes, updates, events, people. Several are small things that I doubt deserve their own post but are worth noting. Also, I’m part of a Myst-Uru fan community. So, some things come from far outside the normal SL/OS circles.
Why Games Succeed – THERE.com
A researcher working in the game THERE has written a thoughtful article about her findings. For those of us interested in what makes a game tick and succeed or fail it is a great read. In-Depth: Requiem For A World For those of from the Myst-Uru community it has special interest as Celia studied the … Read more
Blender 2.5/2.49b – Second Life & Blue Mars
Many of us have heard that Blender 2.5 is on the way. Blender 2.5 Alpha 0 is out and can be downloaded. It is Alpha software. Some features from the 2.4 series are not all working in 2.5. How the missing features are implemented is changing, so there is some delay. There seems to be lots of changes coming. One thing that has not changed is installation information which is still limited and what is out there pretty much assumes one is a geek. So, I’ll provide some help I think is less geeky.
Getting OSGrid Running
Running a standalone grid on your home computer is not big thing to do. Finding all the information you need to get it working as you want is a bit of a pain. All the people that are working on OSGrid know where everything is. So, they don’t write it down.
When I reinstalled my OpenSim server (I broke mine upgrading) it did not let me walk on prims. Everything was phantom. Setting things to physical did not help, they were still behaving as if phantom. So, I started looking for how to fix that.
Busy
I’ve been busy with RL, moving, unpacking, getting what little work there is done, getting cable to my new home for a good Internet connection, writing proposals for the company I freelance for… I have new articles planned for here. One that is most in my mind is about Devokan (SL Map). It recently made … Read more
Blue Mars Review & Tips
I tend to agree with Kanomi of Tiny Dancing in her funny post about Playing Blue Mars. It’s for boys. I registered weeks ago and watched my email and the spam folder too. Still no invitation. I opened a yahoo email account using a boyish name and four days later I have my invite. That could be coincidence. …right.
Updated 10/13/2009 – New Blue Mars Review Stuff Here
Updated 12/17/2009 – Blue Mars Goes Open Beta
Land of NoR (LoN) Goes DCS2
This post is about the insides of the RPG’s within Second Life. The largest and, what until now, most exciting game in SL has changed its combat/RP system. What does a meter change mean to a game?
Land of NoR (Nation of Remembrance) is self described as a Dark RPG with combat. Previously it used the WARPS (now XRPS – NextRPS) combat system. For two years this 29 sim RPG used WARPS. Now for various reasons Land of NoR (LoN – do we have enough acronyms yet?) begin upgrading the WARPS to XRPS and is now changing to DCS2, another combat system. Why?