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.
Fantasy Fair 2014
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
While Karyne distorts what SL is and misses much of what is going on, the article is not that bad. It is just the typical ignorant writer writing without bothering to do more than a minimal amount of research on their article. A basic noobie thinking they know what SL is.
You can join BI and leave comments several have. Jo Yardley comments at length. She and others referred Karyne to Flickr’s SL Looking Good, which has some awesome pictures from within SL. Jo and a couple of others refer Karyne to Drax’s World Makers on YouTube. The play list there is getting impressive.
