Recent Comments:

Microsoft's historic first

Massively

Apr 25th 2008 11:59PM Ah, make fun of Microsoft, but for one, I'm very pleased to see that Microsoft has not given up on Second Life yet.

Although they might grumble a bit once they figure out that LL's ToS on trademarks was based on... Apple's own ;)

Speaking of which, Apple and Yahoo continue to be the most reluctant tech companies to even admit that Second Life exists. Ironically, it was through an official Apple site that I found out about SL, ages ago.

And Google's stance on SL is... ambiguous. The unofficial statement is "we have no clue what to do about it", which, coming from Google, is probably worrying. But more worrying to Google shareholders I guess ;)

Second Life Daily News

Massively

Apr 21st 2008 9:03AM Hmm, why does I-World Island have some Fachwerks in it?... I guess that the spirit of Neufreistadt is hard to quench ;)

Key Second Life metrics for March

Massively

Apr 16th 2008 12:33PM Oops sorry. Your own comment came up before mine hehe. Glad that's sorted out, then!

Key Second Life metrics for March

Massively

Apr 16th 2008 12:33PM Nacon, that chart lists growth. So it means that SL, instead of growing 6-8% per month like it did in 2005, or 14-30% in 2006, it's just growing around -2 to +2% per month.

Now this doesn't mean that people are leaving, just that the number of new accounts, expressed as a percentage over the total population, is lower than it was some months ago, and in recent periods, the number of new accounts in one month is actually lower than the number of new accounts on the month before.

Note that in February 2005, when SL had, uh, 5,000 premium users (?), 10% growth per month would be 500 new users — an astonishing feat! Nowadays we have around 100,000 premium accounts and what the chart shows is that around 2,000 downgrade every month back to basic (or leave SL). So this is not as bad as it looks... specially when we know that the future of Premium users is unclear (they hardly make a difference — it's not for the L$300/week you get as a Premium account that people will pay US$9.95/month — and 83% of all land is on private islands anyway, where you don't need to have a premium account to own land).

1.20: Changing your mind about avatar lag

Massively

Apr 14th 2008 10:32AM Ah, no luck in seeing this. SL 1.20 RC sadly messes up the avatar movement, the UI, and the camera, by trying to do all three things simultaneously with the mouse :) I blame Apple's Mighty (NOT!) Mouse, but there might be another issue lurking beneath my Preferences.

Still, the issue is interesting enough and worth analysing. I fear the "ARC Police" in the future, but I can very well understand how useful this feature might be...

Second Life's best viewer ceases development. The "mad patcher" has had it.

Massively

Apr 7th 2008 7:13AM This is shocking news, Tateru! We were all expecting that at some point Nicholaz would be hired by Linden Lab to support Zero, Soft, and the others that work on the open source team to quickly incorporate the dozens of fixes and patches that he has released in the past and kept up to date with LL's freshly released viewers.

Well, we can't blame Nicholaz — he did *outstanding* work for free for such a long time — but I understand his frustration perfectly!

Cinemassively: Avatar Puppeteering possibly coming to Second Life in 2008

Massively

Mar 29th 2008 9:18AM This looks surprisingly like what Ventrella showed the people at the SL Views internal & secret meeting in... June 2006.

Well, after 4 years, nobody expected Havok to ever be upgraded to version 4, and here we are, with almost 600 sims running it on the main grid :)

Moo, I only wonder how Ventrella will excuse himself to Philip (or the next CEO) when Philip clearly stated "no new features in 2008". WindLight is, as Tateru Nino once reported, a bug fix — the old renderer was impossible to continue to maintain, and changing it further to correct annoying bugs was a pain, so the move to a new renderer was needed. The move from Havok 1 to Havok 4 is indeed done because of the same argument. Ditto for Mono vs. the old LSL virtual machine. All these things that sound like "new features" to us are just replacing dated technology, impossible to miantain, by more modern things.

Still, I can't explain why HTML-on-a-prim was introduced (definitely a feature, and one with a HUGE impact), but much less Avatar Puppeteering, which is completely new (no more need of using Poser for anims, yay!). A new UI can also be explained as "making SL more easy to use" (and thus less bugs in the confusing current UI). But what about this project to incorporate facial expressions from your webcam on SL avatars? It's definitely a new feature, not a bug fix.

So mmh. What does that mean? Are they regretting their announcement that "2008 will be only about bug fixes" and going back to their usual routine of splitting their development time with bug fixes, scalability and back-end reliability, and new features?

Mind you, I'm definitely all in favour of avatar puppeteering... with more skeletons if possible... and — who knows? — new avatar meshes (yay!). Ventrella is definitely the person with the know-how to do those — the presentation made in June 2006 was pretty functional, so say the reports, only 3 months after Ventrella joined Linden Lab. Since then he had well over a year to polish his code — so is should be perfect. Let's just hope that Linden Lab is not following too strictly their commitment to "only fix bugs in 2008" and throws in one or two features as well.

Flexisculpties, anyone? :)

Peering Inside: Linden Lab IPO = Epic Fail

Massively

Mar 24th 2008 2:19PM Ah, excellent analysis, Tateru. Thanks for explaining the unruly crowd around here why "IPO" is not a magic word that can be applied to *all* companies in the world, ie. as if all companies had just one goal: "going public"... which is far from the truth.

There is an added issue here. None of the investors of Linden Lab are so keen to "let it go" out of their control, too :) They're not in for the "short-term" profit — they have more than enough from their past ventures — but the "long-term" aspect of virtual worlds, where they hope to be major players/decision makers/opinion leaders. Which, frankly, is much more exciting — if Linden Lab becomes the Microsoft of virtual worlds, they'll be in a position to push for *their* vision of the Metaverse — even a fragmented one, of course, with lots of incompatible technologies.

But I'm pretty sure that around Second Life as a "core technology" we'll see a SL-compatible Metaverse emerging. And, well, anyone at LL right now will have a huge stake in calling the shots, so I pretty much believe they wish to continue to be "in control" for another decade or so :)

I didn't understand why "The only place to go with that money would be acquisitions -- which would be a convincing sign of lost direction." The acquisition of the WindLight technology and a whole new team to develop the new renderer was not "losing direction" I guess. What about, say, acquiring the SpeedTree company? ;) That would certainly be very much in line with what LL *needs* — excellent programmers, untainted by the "Tao of Linden", and willing to deliver technology that *works* in a reasonable amount of time.

HTML-on-a-prim kills sims

Massively

Mar 8th 2008 8:23PM Indeed, Qarl Linden was assigned to it and it should be fixed quickly enough.

Jay, I actually wondered if it's only Mac-generated bytecode that crashes sims. Did you use Windows to compile and test it on your sims?

The war of words for Sony's PlayStation Home and Second Life users begins

Massively

Feb 29th 2008 7:18PM It's "Next Week" now :) Eloise, where is the huge Massively article saying: "Sony Home Launches and PS3 Enthusiasts Are Drooling Over It"? :)

Let's see, hmm... http://www.homebetatrial.com/ still uses the future tense when talking about the "closed beta". And that's all I found on Google besides the announcement (made late September) that it would be launched "Spring 2008" — which could mean "as early as March 22" or "as late as June 21".

Wait... this might be helpful: http://www.ripten.com/2008/02/25/playstation-home-released-march-20th/ which points to a countdown: http://www.colorize.net/home/

Who knows what "COLORiZE" is and how they're related to Sony Home? Their domain was registered through a French registrar. Searching through their site via Google, you won't find much (use +site:www.colorize.net)

... it just looks like a "placeholder domain" for doing some tests (most links are unavailable, but Google gratefully keeps them in cache).

So, well, this countdown might just be a demo that the COLORiZE company is doing for Sony... and not related to the actual launch date. As for the many images released by Sony of how Home will look like... well... one wonders if they're not simply done on a pretty decent renderer (Sony has plenty of those!) with some menus (and speech bubbles!) Photoshopped on top of them...