It’s starting to Mesh

All Dressed Up, a photo by Becca Ashbourne on Flickr.

Having previously said that I am not a great fan of Rigged Mesh, I’m slowly starting to discover things that I like, and that fit me (or fit near enough that a minor tweak is all that is needed). In this case it’s this lovely dress by Baiastice and hair by elikatira (I still want to say ETD, which dates me I guess!).

The dress is lovely, but not without limitations. For a start you can’t wear shoes with it, and I love shoes! The other is that occasionally when dancing, you can see that it’s invisible inside and that I have invisible legs. I guess that’s an intrinsic issue with Rigged Mesh.

 

 

Video – My home

I made a little video of my home in Second Life today. More to capture the memory of it for myself, than for any other reason. But I thought I would share it with you as well.

Lack of engagement

Inara Pey recently blogged on the state of Second Life, and her comments on ‘Engagement’ and general malaise struck a real chord with me.

In the 5½ years I have been in SL, I’ve experienced the usual ebb and flow of interest that I think most long-timers do, but I’ve found myself in a particularly long ebb lately, to the extent that I felt I was mainly logging on in order to be with my SL hubby. He had been feeling much the same, and sadly a few weeks ago announced to me that a number of factors, including increased workload, RL, and this same lack of engagement, meant he did not know when he would next be logging into SL again. We’d been together well over a year, which is a long time in Second Life terms. We still email each other every day (he never fails to leave an email for me when he goes to bed so that it is waiting for me when I wake up), but I have no idea when I will see him again in SL.

Since then I have gone from logging in every day to rarely logging in, and when I do log in it’s been for a specific reason such as a music event (usually the wonderful Gina Gracemount or the amazing Tukso Okey) or to spend time with my friend Bunny. But most of the time, I find that other things are holding my interest more. My own RL has got a little busier and is filling my evenings more, such that I don’t have as much time available to spend on SL. But the fact is that if I was bursting to go on SL, like I once was, then I know I would find the time. So this really corroborates what Inara is saying.

Perhaps I should be trying to find new things in SL to experience, maybe increase my circle of friends, perhaps try to re-ignite my love of SL photography. But I just find myself without any real motivation to do so. My SL photography is particularly depressing, because I can take ages (hours, even) over a SL picture and then find myself lucky to get 200 views in a month, yet with my RL photography I can post a picture of me in a nice dress and get 200 views in a day. I’m not saying that in a self-aggrandising way, but to illustrate how soul-destroying that is for the SL photography. I have a very similar experience with blogging.

So where does this leave me, where does it leave my SL, my SL photography and also this blog? I don’t know. Certainly this is the first time since August 2012 where I’ve felt I have had anything I wanted to say and I don’t know when I next will either.

Second Life to become a game?

Well, perhaps not quite. But Linden Lab has made an announcement that Second Life will be expanding to Steam ‘in the next month or so’.

The announcement reads:
“As some sharp-eyed developers have speculated, we’re going to make Second Life available on Steam in the next month or so.

Many of us have friends who are avid Steam gamers, but if you’re not familiar, Steam is a very popular online game platform that offers a wide range of titles (and will soon also offer other software as well).

What does this news mean for Second Life? You’ll still be able to access Second Life just as you can today; there won’t be any change to that. But, the more than 40 million people who use Steam will also be able to get Second Life as easily as they can get games like Portal.

We’ll make an announcement on the blog when Second Life is actually available on Steam, but in the meantime, if you have friends who are Steam gamers, let ‘em know it’s coming!”

Source: community.secondlife.com/…

This is a very interesting announcement, given that Valve have recently announced that they will soon be allowing non-games applications to join Steam. This does give an ambiguity as to whether Linden Lab are continuing to move Second Life towards a games platform or whether this is simply a case of them taking advantage of Valve’s more relaxed policy on what applications can join Steam.

Certainly there is a strong case that Steam has a high density of the kind of people who have the computer hardware necessary to run Second Life at its most graphically-intense settings, so raising awareness of the Second Life platform on Steam may have benefits.

However, I see a less positive side to it too. As anyone who has read my previous articles will know, I have a strong sense of wanting to live my ‘second’ life unencumbered by the trappings of my first. And I view this (hopefully optional!) integration with Steam as being yet more example of the lines between SL and RL being blurred. Steam is a real life service, with your real identity (although ‘handles’ / nicknames are allowed). And it strengthens the concept that SL is just yet another service that you create a username and password for.

Having said that, as someone who has played Skyrim a lot (which is a Steam game), I didn’t feel that it was RL ‘me’ playing it – I created a character and advanced her though the game. So perhaps I am unduly concerned here. Perhaps all will work out ok. But I do still have this nagging feeling that entering SL via Steam will make people think it is just another game, or MMPORG and I feel that would miss the point of Second Life being a Virtual World and not a game. Or, certainly how it started out anyway. I’m not so sure what it is now or where it is going.

(All in my opinion, of course)

[With thanks to Inara Pey for her blog article that alerted me to this]

Update

Some interesting (and long) articles that give further insight into the ramifications of this move. Really worth reading if you have the time:

• Fleep Tuque – Why Anyone Who Cares About the Metaverse Needs to Move Beyond Second Life; Now, Not Later
• Gwyneth Llewelyn – Full steam ahead for new horizons!

 

Mesh deformer: interview with Qarl Fizz

Reblogged from Living in the Modem World:

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Note this is a 4-page piece. Please use the page options at the bottom of the article to page through.

Wednesday June 20th was Mesh Day at SL9B, and featured speakers and presentations on the subject of - you guessed it - mesh. The day saw the auditorium area swamped with people anxious to hear all the news and join in with practical discussions (for future SLB events, it might be worthwhile putting the auditorium at the junction of adjoining regions if hot topics are to be featured as a part of events).

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Some really interesting points raised by Qarl here. I have to concur with his comments about the new TPV policy and how it stifles innovation; it can't do otherwise. It's funny that he should comment that Linden Lab didn't see Mesh clothing coming because I was having the same discussion with a friend just recently. The Lab's response has been very much "but why would you want to do that?" and then bury their head in the sand about it. The fact that pretty much every major clothing Designer is offering Rigged Mesh clothing now is surely a pretty bloody strong indication that sorting the Mesh issue is of prime importance, yet their support of Qarl and the Parametric Deformer project seems lukewarm at best. I'm still unswayed in my opinion that this is make-or-break for SL.

SL scheduled maintenance - next 3 days

Reblogged from Living in the Modem World:

The following has been posted in on the SL Grid Status page:

We will be performing scheduled maintenance today, Wednesday and Thursday of this week (May 8, May 9, May 10), beginning at 6:00pm PDT each day. Each maintenance is scheduled to last around 8 hours. Please save all builds and refrain from rezzing no copy objects, as some regions may be taken offline and remain offline for extended periods of time.

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It was absolutely awful yesterday. I had a bit of a shopping spree on Marketplace yesterday morning (UK time) and 33% of my items failed to be delivered. Then in the afternoon I crashed and couldn't get back on for ages and it said that logins had been disabled and to check the grid status page - which hadn't been updated in 2 days. And then today I got hit by a rolling restart on two different sims, both of which gave 5 mins notice to get out. 5 mins! What kind of notice is that? Also, SCHEDULED maintenance is maintenance you know about beforehand. So how about publicising it with a little more notice, Linden Lab?

Differing definitions of ‘crowded’

I was at a concert for the wonderful Lisa Brune last night, and the sim was absolutely packed – my Firestorm ‘People’ list told me there were 66 people on the sim and it certainly felt like it – people were grey, the lag was insane like the air had turned to wallpaper paste, and people were crashing all over the place. In fact Lisa herself crashed and couldn’t get back in but valiantly carried on with the concert anyway. I myself gave up trying to get back in after the 3rd crash and was listening to the stream with an external media player.

Anyway, all this got me thinking about the perennial issue of what we think of as ‘crowded’ when we’re in Second Life. It seems to me that a concert in real life where the performer only had 66 attendees would be considered ‘intimate’, ‘tiny’ or ‘woefully under-attended’ depending on the size of venue and the expectations of the performer or their management. Yet in Second Life it’s considered a massively popular attendance.

Back in the early days of Second Life, much was made of the educational and media event possibilities, and many people dipped their toes in the water with such things as Virtual Embassies, learning centres, corporate presences and the now famous Suzanne Vega concert, but interest very quickly waned as it became abundantly clear that the Second Life platform just simply cannot cope with a decent attendance.

My understanding is that the fundamental limitation is that each full sim in Second Life is hosted on a single core of a multi-core processor (for Homestead sims it is 4 to a core) and it’s simply not possible to throw more processing power at a sim. The nearest that can be achieved is to use two or more adjacent sims playing the same stream so that people can get some sense of “being there”, but even then that’s not really ideal.

I am sure that this issue has had Linden Lab scratching their collective heads for years, and I would like to think that they have it on their roadmap to address it, but we’re in 2012 now. I joined SL in 2007 and we had the issue even then and we still have it now.

What Second Life needs is to somehow break free from these limitations and for the servers to be truly scalable. Once that is achieved, it could be monetarised with perhaps a graded tier for sim capability or a dynamic billing model not dissimilar to webserver bandwidth. I am sure that the owners of popular sims would be happy to pay for the ability to have a decent number of attendees to an event without the whole thing falling over in a horrible mess. At the moment there is simply no choice, no option; it’s a hard limit.

Second Life is a wonderful place to be, but this limitation is fundamental and if it isn’t addressed I can’t see how Second Life is ever going to progress beyond where it is today.

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Footnote

After a little googling, it turns out the Suzanne Vega concert was in 2006 and in order to get 80 attendees people had to have not a single prim attachment on themselves, not even hair. So really not a lot has changed in 6 years.

Round, round, I get around

Hello! And welcome to another of my little tutorials that have been born from a conversation I had in-world and thought might be useful to someone.

This time it’s to do with getting round within a sim and also keeping up with someone who is doing it. Or, to be more specific, the trials and tribulations of my hubby as he tries to keep up with me when I’m shopping!

Show Me the Money! – getting more L$ for your US$

You know how it is; you’re out shopping, you don’t have enough L$, so your cursor heads up to that familiar button in the top right of the screen labelled “Buy L$”. It’s so easy, it’s so convenient, and it’s so quick.

But, wait! That convenience comes at a price. You are buying L$ at whatever rate Linden Lab feel like giving you, and that’s not the best rate.

What do I mean by rate? Well, when you go abroad you often convert some of your normal currency into the currency that the country you’re going to uses, and you are offered an exchange rate. In other words you buy some of that currency, just like you might purchase any other service or ‘thing’. And, just like buying anything, different people have different prices and it is a good idea to shop around for the best price.
It’s not just limited to people going on holiday either – there’s a whole area of Finance called “Foreign Exchange” (often abbreviated to ForEx or FX) that deals with this.

It’s a less-known fact that Second Life has its own little Foreign Exchange Market, called the Linden Exchange (or LindeX for short) which is accessed via the Second Life website.
Here people buy and sell L$ using US$. And it is here where you can get more L$ for your US$.

So, how does this differ from the good old “Buy L$” button? Well, it’s way less convenient I will admit, although I find it kind of fun! But you have the reward of getting more L$ for your US dollars by being able to shop for the best price, which is what it’s all about.

Instead of just converting US$ to L$, you offer to buy L$ for a certain amount of US$. This is known as a Limit Buy which is a conditional purchase. You are offering to buy L$ from one or more people who are selling for a certain price or better. On the LindeX your offer will stay open until it is either ‘Filled’ (ie. the transaction completes successfully) or until you cancel it.
Depending on how aggressive your Offer Price is, how long it takes to fill could be measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days or never! Also, for larger purchases, you may get a partial fill, which is when more than one seller fulfils part of your order as no single seller is selling at the price you want to pay in the quantity you want to buy. The remaining unfilled amount keeps the order open until all of the order fills.

(If you’re interested in further reading, then some of the basics of ForEx are available here, although it is in no way needed and I only provide it for your interest because I think I’ve covered enough here already)

“Enough with the waffle, Becca. Just tell me how to do it!”, I hear you saying. Well, ok, if you insist.

Second Life increasingly a misnomer?

There has always been a blur between Second Life (SL) and real life (RL), with residents choosing how separate they want to keep the two.
However, it seems to me that Linden Lab (LL) are losing sight of what SL is meant to be. Or, if you prefer to rephrase that, they are moving SL in directions that are different from how they started out. And, increasingly, those changes are removing some of the choice residents have as to how separate the two remain.

For me, the clue is in the name “Second Life” – an alternative life, secondary and separate from your real one. But it seems that is becoming less and less the focus of SL, with residents being encouraged (and in some cases forced) to involve their RL more and more in their SL.

So when did this rot start to set in?

Some might say it started with Age Verification where you were required to provide some form of RL identification. This was probably the first time you were required to disclose your RL identity. Up until then, provided you didn’t have payment information on file and were using a free email address like Hotmail, Yahoo, etc., there was no link between your RL identity and your SL one.

Others might say it started when LL stopped the idea of a firstname & lastname and instead moved to having just a username and an optional Display Name. In many ways this weakened the separation between SL and RL – a username is just a login for a website or service. You were no longer creating an identity or character; you were just creating an account. Perhaps the distinction is subtle, but I think it is relevant and significant.

Others might say that it was the introduction of Viewer 2.0 and the different way in which it presented profiles, no longer calling the tabs “2^nd Life” and “1^st Life” but “Avatar” and “More Info”.
Or perhaps Viewer 2.0’s emphasis on voice chat, with text-based interaction being de-emphasised and harder to find in the User Interface.

But, for me, what really highlights the fundamental shift in attitude are the profiles at http://my.secondlife.com

One of the sections of your profile is called “Social Identities” where you are able to link with your Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Plurk, Twitter and YouTube accounts.
Now I happen to know that Facebook and LinkedIn are adamant that you must use your real name and real identity to have an account with them. Yes, many SL residents do have a Facebook account for their Avatar but you are on borrowed time there – when Facebook get round to noticing they *will* delete that account.
So Linden Lab are encouraging you to link your SL account with RL services that only have relevance to your RL.

Of course, you could argue that just because LL allow you to do this it doesn’t mean you have to – and you would obviously be right. But I think it highlights a push by LL to make Second Life just another social media / social networking tool; a glorified 3D chatroom and messaging facility for the casual user, with the immersion and roleplay that many of us enjoy being of secondary importance. There is even talk of a reduced functionality internet browser-based Viewer to make SL “more accessible” to more people. And if that doesn’t sound foreboding to you, then it probably should do.

So one has to beg the question at what point Linden Lab should rename “Second Life” to “Augmented Life”?

 

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Update:

Here are some links to the issue of Facebook deleting accounts of SL avatars

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Forums-Blogs-Answers-and/Facebook-deleting-Secondlife-Avatars/td-p/887663
http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Deletion-Of-Hundreds-Of-Second-Life-Facebook-Accounts-Being/td-p/884697
http://virtualoutworlding.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/your-avatar-identity-in-facebook-issues.html