Designing Worlds

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Vivienne Daguerre mentioned that today Designing Worlds was having a show on the Future of Second Life or that is what I understood. I decided I had time to stop by and see what they had to say. But, they were recording a show. So, 5+ hours later it was done. Interesting experience.

Designing Worlds Pre-Show 2014-27
Designing Worlds Pre-Show 2014-27

The result will be two one hour shows. Originally planned for one show, but there was so much interesting stuff the one show grew into two. This is an excellent discussion.

If you haven’t been around for a recording at Designing Worlds, I’ll tell you it is way more fun than just watching the finished product. They were having fun, making mistakes, laughing, and joking. Most of which I suspect will get cut. But, then there were the microphone problems from JJ’s system that nearly deafened us all. Those need to be cut.

I’m not going to go over what is in the show. No spoiler. Watch it when it comes out. I will tell you there is no really new news regarding SL2. There is some new information on SL1. It is the depth of the discussion that makes this worth watching. it is amazing and the viewpoints are diverse. From this show I think you will get more insight into what is going on and what people are planning for than anything else I have seen.

I’ll post when the shows are posted.

Firestorm Q&A on #SecondLife’s Future

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Wednesday morning at 7AM PDT at the Firestorm Auditorium a Q&A meeting was held. Oz Linden and Peter Gray were answering questions. For most of the meeting Jessica was asking questions I think she took from previously submitted ones and that she or she thought the community was interested in.

And I’ll be proofing this after it is posted… so…

[youtube uO2Ean6Vzxk]

Toward the end they opened it up to audience questions.

The meeting was recorded so you can see it at several places; SLArtists, YouTube, and other places… sound is better on the SLArtists video, but it is hard to jump around in that player.

As always I am paraphrasing and not quoting.

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#SecondLife Viewer Snowstorm

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Today my viewer updated to the Snowstorm RC. I have it set to use RC Viewers. So, I’m using Second Life 3.7.11 (291465) Jun 25. The release notes are here.

Summerfest '14
Summerfest ’14

I went over to Summer Fest 2014 to try it out. First, the cute little pacific island theme used at Summer Fest makes it a really fun build to explore. The foliage is awesome. The buildings have a weak LOD, but if you have your viewer’s LOD setting turned up, they are OK. I don’t I prefer performance in this case.

The viewer runs faster. I was getting 20 to 40 FPS at the Fest. But, rendering is still a problem. Oz Linden said at the Firestorm Q&A that they are working on changing the viewer to allow it to use more of the video RAM you have on your graphics card. I doubt any of that work is in this viewer. But, possibly. So, that may be why we are seeing this problem.

The main viewer and this Snowstorm RC both have the problem of texture thrashing. The textures render sharp then blur and reload, sharpen and repeat. It makes taking pictures a pain.

I think the problem is worse in this viewer than in the main viewer. Again, I don’t see the problem in the Firestorm viewer.

I don’t expect to see texture thrashing in a GTX560Ti with 1GB of VRAM.

Second Life 2 Won’t Change Me

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I am curious how many people will be affected ad how by the announcement of a coming new world by Linden Lab™. Hamlet at New World Notes ran a poll last week to find out. He published the results here: In Survey of SL Users, Plurality Believe Linden’s New World Won’t Change Their Second Life Usage.

Click over to see the results.

@ Server-Scripting UG 2014-27
@ Server-Scripting UG 2014-27

It is interesting to see that the group of those that feel it isn’t going to change their use of Second Life™ is about twice to 4 times larger than the other groups in the poll.

Since about a quarter of users are not sure how the announcement will change their use of Second Life, no single group is a majority. But, the larger number of people feel there will be no change.

The Change in MMO Appeal

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Over at New World Notes Hamlet has an article up titled: The MMO is Dead; Long Live the MMO. He points us to an article over at Paste Magazine (site about entertainment). It has an article titled: The Moment of the MMO has Passed.

Playing Around
Playing Around

The author is writing about how the age of MMO’s (Massive Multiplayer Online) has passed. He feels that much of their popularity was from socialization. If you have read the study Longevity by n-Yuen Teng and Lada A. Adamic, that I often refer to, you’ll see how the two support each other. It seems social interaction is more the key to player retention than any other single factor in a game. So, I see the study as supporting the author’s thinking.

The author, Ian Williams, feels that while MMO’s once filled this niche for social interaction in our lives they now have competition and thus are not going to be as popular as they once were. He may have a point.

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