Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Oculus Rift Project Viewer has been upgraded 3.7.18-295296. Along with the upgrade comes a post in the blog: Oculus Rift DK2 Project Viewer Now Available.
They are still careful to point out that this is a somewhat incomplete viewer, but then Oculus Rift is incomplete. However, those with DK2 units can play with this viewer.
Last Friday was the Third Party Developers User Group meeting. We often have a wealth of news coming from this UG meeting. This week we learn of a Market Place (MP) project that has been in progress via closed alpha/beta since January 2014. We don’t get much news about the Market Place and commerce.
Brooke Linden spoke at this meeting about how the market place will be changing. The Lab is going to move us from the current Direct Delivery system to Viewer Managed Market Place. I expect for customers little if anything will change. But, for merchants this will be a big change and involve migrating the current Market Place to a new backend system.
I did not hear anything about changes in how the Market Place will look to customers or how it will operate from the customers’ side of things.
The problems the Lab is seeing with Direct Delivery, a feature that starts in the SL Market Place and ends in the viewer in-world, is merchants are having problems managing their Market Place (MP) inventory. Also, the Market Place engineers have not been able to fully complete Direct Delivery. Magic Boxes are still used for selling items the merchant does not have COPY rights to.
Designing Worlds has a show up in which they interview people running Japanese new user help regions. I watched the show on SLArtists, the Treat.tv site seemed to be down this morning, at least I could not access it. The video is here: Designing Worlds DW 245 – Japan’s New Residents. The Designing Worlds page that should have the video is here: Designing Worlds visits the Japanese regions to learn how they support new users – now on the web!
About 3:30 minutes in, they talk about the problem the new user avatars are causing. They feel this is a MAJOR obstacle to improving player retention.
The new mesh avatars for new users was thought by some to be a definite problem for new users. The thinking was they would create more problems than they solve and harm player retention more than help. The people doing support in beginner areas are confirming the problems are manifesting. The question they are hearing often is, the promos say we can customize our avatars, so why can’t I change my avatar?
Ciaran has an article up on the changes coming to gaming (gambling) in Second Life™. These changes will affect ‘SKILL’ games.
There will now be Skill Gaming Regions… oh, and tier for those is US$345, up from the standard $295. PLUS… a $100 fee for asking to have a ‘Skill Gaming License’ … non-refundable if your app is rejected. And your RL self has to be in a country where the Lab can exercise legal control… where you can be easily sued, I suppose.
Read the details on Ciaran’s post: Coming Soon To Second Life – A Licence To Skill.
Wednesday morning at 7AM PDT at the Firestorm Auditorium a Q&A meeting was held. Oz Linden and Peter Gray were answering questions. For most of the meeting Jessica was asking questions I think she took from previously submitted ones and that she or she thought the community was interested in.
And I’ll be proofing this after it is posted… so…
[youtube uO2Ean6Vzxk]
Toward the end they opened it up to audience questions.
The meeting was recorded so you can see it at several places; SLArtists, YouTube, and other places… sound is better on the SLArtists video, but it is hard to jump around in that player.
As always I am paraphrasing and not quoting.
In the Firestorm Q&A Oz has announced that Experience Keys stuff will be coming out today.
The Torley Video will be released today too. Plus documentation, plus blog post, plus Project Viewer.