General News

Linden’s Second Life Affiliates

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Ciaran Laval has an article up about Linden Lab’s affiliate program. So what is that and how does one find out more? Ciaran tells in his article: Linden Lab Launch New Second Life Affiliate Program [sic]. I get the impression Ciaran thinks this is a new program. It sort of is and isn’t.

Second Life Affiliate Program
Second Life Affiliate Program

The official Linden page that explains the program is here: Second Life Affiliate Program.

They describe the program as: “The Second Life Affiliate Program is an easy and simple way to be rewarded by associating your Web site with ours. When you place a Second Life banner with a link on your Web site, you have the opportunity to make money. When a visitor clicks a Second Life link on your Web site and registers as a new Second Life Resident, you earn a flat commission for each new valid registration that you refer to Second Life made within 45 days of click through.”

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State of Game Engines

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I think any one that has been around Second Life™ for any time and taken a look at the engine driving SL realizes the current batch of game engines in the gaming world far exceed the capabilities of Second Life. To get an idea of where the art of games engine design is take a look at Game Thirst’s Count Down of the top 5 game engines.

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If you are not that into the tech of game engines you may be wondering if Second Life will ever catch up. Well, probably not, which begets the question: why not? 

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Second Life News 2013-31

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I got most of the interesting news out Sunday. Today we have confirmation of which server updates they plan to roll out this week.

Main Channel

The main channel will get the maintenance pack with some bug fixes and the faster materials processing that ran in Blue Steel last week (30). So, objects failing to detect collisions after teleporting, run time permissions messing up in attachments, and pathfinding characters wondering out of their parcels should all be fixed. The Materials system will now be able to request 4 textures per second in place of the 1/sec previously.

Blue Steel

This channel gets a new maintenance package. llListen (BUG-3291) and llApplyImpulse (BUG-3307) have fixes. Plus there is another… or some more crash fixes… which I read to mean more exploits cured. 

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Second Life News 2013-30 #2

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Some of the most interesting news comes from the Third Party Developers meetings. This is not a meeting that is well publicized. I suspect many think that having just the well informed attend is more productive. I tend to agree.

This article is 2,600+ words. It has some work-around methods for some current problems that people are experiencing. It covers some of the most informative news about SL that is available.

TPV Dev Meetin 2013-30
TPV Dev Meetin 2013-30

Server Side Appearance

SSA is going extraordinary well. The stats coming in are as expected, which means the backend is performing as expected. This means the Lab’s estimates for the amount of hardware needed are going to be correct.

View adoption is going pretty well. About 75% of users have adopted an SSA capable viewer. (84% of Firestorm users – see chart) Looking at that the other way, something like a quarter million people login each day with an old viewer. Also, the numbers vary quite a bit from day to day. 

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Second Life’s Annoyances

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I generally think Linden Lab is doing a good job with Second Life. I see the quality of the simulation improve and degrade over time. But, there is a definite trend of improvement. Sort of a two steps forward one back.

Hair Fair 2013 - Waiting to Rez
Hair Fair 2013 – Waiting to Rez

At the moment performance seems to have degraded, at least in regard to texture download and rendering. I saw this problem with the Linden SL Viewer 3.6.1 (278007) Jun 27 2013 12:41:07 when I visited Hair Fair 2013 (HF). And I do keep HTTP Get and Inventory enabled. I’ve given up on the older UDP protocol. It has little future in SL. HF regions were running the main server release version 13#13.07.08.278357 not an RC . 

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Bits and Pieces 2013-30

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Ciaran Laval has a post about the 50% discount for educational groups coming back. See: Educational And Non-Profit Ventures See The Return Of The 50% Discount. The original Linden announcement is here: Updated Pricing for Educational and Nonprofit Institutions.

This is probably a good thing. But it is also probably a bit late.

A number of people think the cost of a region is too high. But, that is in the eye of the buyer. I was over on Lost Paradise today looking at Ae’gura. There were 6 users on in the last 24 hours and 17 over the last 7 days. At the same there were 50,000+ concurrent users logged into Second Life™.

Lost Paradise rents regions for US$40/month, the Lab $300±. For daily possible visitors in a day that is $6.67 per user in LP and $0.006 per user in SL. If you are doing business, SL is way cheaper. I know that is not a accurate cost per visitor comparison, but the cost ratio per visitor is accurate.

For educational groups that tend to bring their own students, a discount seems to be reasonable thing that should help everyone.

Hypergrid Business has articles this week on AviWorlds going offline and a how to tell when your grid is about to fold. Hmmmmm… 

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