Drax put his latest episode of the World Makers out today. This is a fun interview with Rod Humble. It runs 5 minutes and there are some interesting bits of information.
[youtube kwNCU3RGruE]
If you have listened to Rod’s 2011 speech at UC Santa Cruz’s meeting Inventing the Future of Games, you may not be able to pick up on some of the context included in the video. See Rod Humble Speech Released for a brief summary and links to that video.
AvaCon is the group that arranged the Second Life™ Community Conventions. They provided the service to Linden Lab™ via a paid contractual arrangement. This year the contract terms were unacceptable to AvaCon. They are not saying what the deal buster was. Of course I haven’t heard anything out of Linden Lab either way.
Whether the Lab will retain another company, arrange the event in-house, or just forget it, we don’t know. But, it doesn’t look good. Someone will have to be hustling to arrange the convention.
Daniel Voyager apparently noticed the post on AvaCon’s blog. He has an article about it: SLCC 2012 Cancelled, which seems a bit overly pessimistic to me, but he may be right.
I am sure someone has a call into a contact within the Lab to see if they can get a statement. I don’t have those kinds of contacts within the Lab. I won’t give up all hope until I her something from a Lab spokesperson. I also won’t be betting against Daniel’s conclusion.
I heard someone talking about MetaReality having new information from Qarl on the Mesh Deformer Project. So, off I go to listen to it, an hour and 20 minute audio. This one is titled Damage Control, which inspired my title… just in case… never mind.
Well… there is new discussion about the Deformer Drama… but not much on the actual Deformer, nothing that I haven’t already covered. Since I have my notes from the listen I’ll publish them.
Again the time marks are approximate. The descriptions are my take away from the listen. Any resemblance to what is actually in the audio is more than coincidental. Any actual quoting is improbable. But, I did try to convey the ideas expressed in the audio tape.
Several things are coming together. First is my slow FPS rate. I’m looking for a solution. I can’t find my processing bottle neck. The research is taking me far outside Second Life ®. Complaints about slow or poor performance in OpenGL based games are not limited to Second Life. So, I’m not accepting it is solely poor programming on the Lab’s part.
New Tech - Image by sidduz - Flickr
As one moves through the technology world in such a search it is obvious that we are becoming highly dependent on computer technology. OMG! At my favorite bar they did a BBQ event and brought in a company to do the BBQ food. Patrons pay the caterer direct for the food. The cash register was an iPad with an app.
It is hard to know what anyone is thinking when they don’t tell you. One tries to figure it out by watching actions and pondering statements made. In the case of Linden Lab, we have lots of people analyzing what is known about the Lab. Recently we have seen the Alpha release of Pathfinding and the acquisition of Little TextPeople. So, speculation swirls around those new items.
Crystal Ball Speculation
When Hamlet at New World Notes posted on the acquisition of Little TextPeople Rod Humble, Linden Lab CEO, commented:
Hey Hamlet. Just by way of clarification this team is working on product 3.
I first started to talking to them December (although I have known them personally for longer).
When we chatted about IF/Adventure a few months ago it was in relation to product 2, which is also still in production, not this product 🙂
Hopefully things will become less opaque in the near future but yes this team is working on a separate product (one of several we have in development).
Sorry for the cloak & dagger stuff, shouldnt last to much longer.
Posted by: Rodvik Linden | Friday, February 17, 2012 at 08:32 PM
Hamlet follows up with some speculation based on the comment in: Rod Humble Drops Hints About Linden’s New Projects. Hamlet’s speculation is rational and suggests some directions the Lab may have taken.
Torley Linden’s user page just changed, adding a cryptic sentence, “My work focuses have drastically changed as of mid-October 2011. I hope to eventually update this. I know the Observers are watching me; if you get my drift, I’m the Olivia Dunham of this shiznit.”
Olivia is a character in the TV series Fringe. Her notable characteristics are a doppelganger in a parallel universe, a sort of mind link to her dying lover-partner, higher mind function from a childhood government experiment (or is it from an experiment on children?), the ability to discern whether objects originated in a parallel universe, and other unspecified psychic abilities.
That makes for a pretty broad drift to ‘get’.
Lots of hints are appearing that changes are coming to SL.
Well… this should be interesting. We are getting a new Viewer Interface by the end of October or there about.
It also explains why the viewer development team has basically disappeared. While the Lindens were proclaiming they would never do another Hide and Develop project without user input, our new CEO having messed that fiasco has the Lab apparently doing exactly that… we’ll see how it works.
The announcement is at SLUniverse. This is an expansion of the recent SL Forum announcement of New Things in SL. The information is about a week old. Finding these gems of information in odd places plus some stats someone posted in the SLUniverse thread about how many have read the SLUniver forum vs the SL Forum shows the Lindens have yet to figure out how to communicate with the users.
Yesterday (9/9) Kim(RL), who is Gianna Borgnine in SL, put up an audio recording of an interview with Charlar Linden. Most of us know him from the Mesh Project, at least I do. Charlar is a senior project manager at Linden Lab in charge of creators, those that make things in Second Life. The following is an index of the audio tape and my take on it.
The tape has problems and the volume is inconsistent, making it hard to listen to and understand. Charlar is, I guess, close to the mic so he can be understood.
Reed Steamroller and Draxtor Despres participate in the discussion. Unless you already know their voices, I have no idea who is who.
You’ll find the audio here: A Chat With Charlar on Metareality. There is kidding around that I have left out. Charlar seems nice enough and gives some candid answers.