General News – Page 69 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Second Life Drama About Pictures

2014/08/23 by Nalates Urriah

Seems I missed most of it… I’m not disappointed. Seems Iris Ophelia (RL: Janine Hawkins) wrote an article for Paste Magazine titled 10 Best MMO’s. Second Life was listed as 6^th, not bad. My Myst-Uru MMO didn’t make it at all, but it never went massive… But, it wasn’t the writing or 6^th place that bothered people. It was a bad picture of what SL looks like.

Lost Eden Love Shack - 2014 — Lost Eden Love Shack – 2014

People took it to Twitter and soon the Lab had posted 30± new images to their Flickr account, bringing it to a collection of 99 images of SL, Blocksworld, Patterns, and other Linden Lab products. You can see them here: Linden Lab @ Flickr. Iris/Janine sent a nice image to Paste Mag and got the bad one removed. By the time I saw the article it had been replaced. So, my first thought was, “Huh! Nice image for a change.”

Second Life’s Shipwreck Island

2014/08/23 by Nalates Urriah

This looks Interesting… I’ll be checking it out. Oceania is proud to present Shipwreck Island, August 18th – 24th! Join the adventure for one week of a Special Edition Preview of Oceania Fishing, Custom Prizes, and so much more! Explore the incredible sim-wide build, hunt for hidden treasure, and stumble upon a Pirate secret or two! All … Read more

Second Life Bits 2014-34

2014/08/19 by Nalates Urriah

India on Second Life

There is an article in India Times’ Economic Times on a company making US$16k/month from virtual animals, Fennux. It seems there are 1.2 million of the little guys in SL.

We find they think there are about 4,000 users logging into SL from India. I am not sure how they know that. Also, that they spend 67,000 hours in SL. I wonder if the Indian government is logging their Internet activity?

See: A Tumkur start-up VentureNext earns Rs 10 lakh a month by creating virtual creatures.

Second Life’s New User Avatars

2014/08/14 by Nalates Urriah

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!

Taciturnly – April 2014

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?

Second Life’s Necronom VI in Video

2014/08/112014/08/11 by Nalates Urriah

I tried taking pictures of Necronom VI (NVI). But, the lighting is often animated, which doesn’t show up in the still images. So, Saturday I took some time to make what I think was a last visit to NVI and take some video. I’m not a machinamist… or even that experienced with FRAPS. So, I forgot to turn off the cursor for most of the video. But, I think I caught enough to show what NVI was/is like.

[youtube -rgHQjkd6-c]

This video is uploaded in 720p format. That means it looks best in the default YouTube viewer or smaller, not full screen… over 1024.

Second Life News Bits 2014-32 #3

2014/08/08 by Nalates Urriah

Servers

At Thursdays Server Beta UG meeting we learned that a prior JSON fix (BUG-6466) is unwound by this fix. It is a case of one fix breaking something else and aggravating other problems. JSON is JavaScript Object Notation and was added to the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) as a better way to deal with list/array information, a task that LSL is weak handling. Whatever, a fix is in-the-works.

Hunk - Found in Lost Eden 2014 — Hunk – Found in Lost Eden 2014

The server engineers are working on ‘infrastructure’ changes… a somewhat fuzzy statement. Maestro Linden says a major operating system (OS) is planned and this work is assuring that various system services work as intended with the new OS. I suppose when they are sure things work, they’ll start updating the OS on backend servers.

SL runs on Linux. As best we know some flavor of Linux. Recent changes to the Linux core are performance and security related. The improvements touch file handling, memory, power management, and more. I guess that the Lindens have found some of the changes interesting enough to plan an upgrade.