EverQuest Next

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Dayset alerted me to EverQuest Next® by Sony Entertainment. Polygon has an article up with comments from Sony Entertainment’s president  John Smedley. There are some interesting comments about games in general that will probably interest you and my Myst friends.

Most festinating is the idea Sony is going to pay fans to make content for EverQuest Next. Pay?

There video is from a Sony Entertainment Online event at which EverQuest Next debuts. It runs 38 minutes in part 1 and 42 minutes in part 2. Whew! Read the index of the video before you start watching it. Beta sign up link is last thing on my second page.

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Index

Glurge alert! The first 10 minutes is user experiences and stories of people’s experiences in the original EverQuest.

From 10:00 to 12:00 John Smedley is talking about how great EverQuset and its fans are…

At 12:00 an artist does a sand drawing telling about the creation Qeynos. Boring…

At 18:00 the artist starts another drawing about the Ring of Scale Attacks… OMG, doubling down on boring… someone in management thought this was a good idea? I guess there are hints to something about the game in the drawings… but 14 minutes?

At 26:30 the sand drawing is over… I am so glad there is a way to skip ahead in YouTube video.

At 26:45 we get to some interesting stuff. The concepts guiding what the Sony team is doing with EverQuest Next is in this area. It includes concept art. Then they get into characters they are adding. 

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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 #2

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I’m lagging on the news. But, there isn’t much happening… well that affects us. The Lindens are busy. It is just stuff is in testing and incomplete.

Rollouts

The main channel and Blue Steel and Magnum got the roll outs we were anticipating. But, the Blue Steel roll out did not happen. The package planned for it failed internal QA testing and was held back. So, Blue Steal is running the same version as the main channel.

We found out Thursday that the main channel updates for faster texture retrievals cannot be used by the current viewers. However, the code to take advantage of that change is in the pipeline, somewhere. 

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Mesh Deformer and the State of Mesh

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The Deformer project remains pretty much on hold. The JIRA thread STORM-1716 has turned  in to a massive discussion where the uninformed and technically illiterate rant about what should be done. It is now a useless JIRA report too long to read with good technical information buried in thousands of words of useless rhetoric. The purpose that report best serves is to demonstrate why the JIRA was closed.

Mesh Shape Changing
Mesh Shape Changing

So… until Oz Linden can convince Linden management to assign people to the Deformer/Avatar project I see it remaining on hold and the JIRA item having devolved into a waste of time.

With In-Worldz deciding to adopt the Deformer, we are likely to see it added to viewers that support non-Second Life grids. But, for those viewers to be used in SL, they have to be classed as experimental viewers. That likely means little use by residents and lagging support. But, it might increase the Lab’s priority for the Deformer… might…

But, there is a need now and an annoying problem with Mesh Clothes.

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1,122 Record Cold Temps in the U.S. in One Week

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This is the type of story that you don’t see in the mainstream media. It doesn’t fit the agenda. If you haven’t seen any mention of this information, realize you are only getting part of the news and consider finding a more complete news source.

1,122 Record Cold Temps, 173 Record Warm temps.

Record Breaking Hi & Low Temps - HamWeather.com
Record Breaking Hi & Low Temps – HamWeather.com

View the map on HamWeather.com for the interactive map. Move your cursor over dots to see the previous record. Let me know if you find high records that break records older than 1950. There is at least one: 1940.

If you are well informed about weather and temperature measuring you know that most of the world’s high temperature records were set in the 1930’s. The recording stations with broken records weren’t around in the 1930’s. So, it is sort of cheating to say these are new ‘weather’ records. They are new records for specific stations not the area.