Second Life and Virtual Worlds
In my reading I came across: Second Life Maker Linden Lab Buys Desura for Games Distribution, Plans to Keep It Open.
Desura is not a games maker itself but provides all other services around them. Specifically, users can buy and play games, get free access to mods and add-ons, use the platform to distribute their own games if they’re developers, and use the platform to create a social layer around games for communicating with other players.
Interesting…
On Plurk I noticed Hamlet’s article: New SL User Retention is 20% (Wha?) I mentioned that stat in one of my ‘Rod Interview’ articles. Rod had said of the 400,000 new sign ups to SL each month 20% stay longer than 30 days.
Hamlet was thinking about that and wondering about the numbers. Hamlet had thought about past numbers and remembered that previous monthly sign ins was in the range of 500,000+. If there are 1,000,000 sign ins per month now and 400,000 of them are new sign ups each month, Then that means SL has only grown to 600,000 over a number of years. How can 20% stay and not drive up the sign in count? That should add 80,000 users per month.
These just keep popping up. Ciaran Level in Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble on Second Life’s Tween Years links to the article on AllThingsD: Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble on Second Life’s Tween Years (Q&A).
Also Jo Yardley has an article, up about the same interview: Oculus Rift in Second Life goes public late summer!
Again Rod comments on Second Life’s performance and how it has been a prime concern. Rod says that this year he believes he will be able to say, “Hey, performance is good.” I definitely will go with ‘better.’ But, I’m going to have see more before I’ll say ‘good.’ I also suspect it is going to be ‘good’ for SL.
The site Co.Create has an article about Second Life™ by Susan Karlin. She interviews Rod Humble, Linden Lab CEO. The title is: A Look At Second Life’s Second Decade. Jo Yardley posted about it on Facebook.
Susan gets into the creative nature of people in Second Life. She mentions Jo and Drax.
Surely by now you know SSA is Server Side Appearance, which is about baking your avatar appearance. The Lindens have posted a second notice that SSA will be here next week. See: It’s Time to Update Your Viewer!
And they reuse their previous video:
[youtube jwglL3VXI80]
Please make sure all your friends know about the coming update and the need for them to be using a recent version of whatever viewer they use.
As you know the Materials System has been released by the Lab. The third party viewers are picking up the project and adding it to their viewers. Cool VL Viewer and Niran’s Black Dragon have Materials. Firestorm 4.4.1 does not have Materials yet but, 4.4.2 is nearing release and will have materials.
There are fixes for problems in Materials System that are in the pipeline. One of those has to do with Ambient Occlusion on large objects. That is unlikely to be in Firestorm’s 4.4.2 release.
Server Side Appearance (SSA baking) is planned for the release the week of July 7-13. The Lab is expecting it may be on the 8th or 9th.
Firestorm and Phoenix users will see a huge notice on the viewer’s splash screen that they need to update. If you have not yet updated to 4.4.1, avoid the rush and do it now.