Posts Under SL Technology Category
Towards a National OpenSimulator Grid
A bit over a month ago, Andabata Mandelbrot, addressing a Portuguese-speaking audience, launched an interesting challenge: let national OpenSim grid operators join forces together into a single OpenSim grid. Simple as that. It shouldn’t come as a surprise for OpenSim users and operators. After all, isn’t “joining forces” what OpenSim is good at? I mean the ability to HyperGrid across grids, which works more and more flawlessly as time goes…
Paying content creators with micropayments
A few years ago, I wrote about models to pay for content creators in this age where everybody wants to share content for free — except for the entertainment industry, of course, that seems to look upon 2012 as the year to come down with a legal jackhammer on top of anyone doing something that can be remotely called “piracy” or “content theft”, even if the Internet is destroyed in…
SOPA will backfire
While discussing SOPA with Moon Adamant, after reading this nice article from the WordPress gang, we came to the following conclusion: are legislators so stupid as not to foresee that all this will backfire? Imagine that I’m ruthless Zuckerberg, the kind of guy who kills the animals he eats, and face being threatened to have Facebook shut down by Disney and Sony Entertainment and Warner Bros because some silly user…
2012 – Not So Dark
SL Bloggers usually publish their 2012 wishlist (and an analysis of 2011) around this time of the year. Well, I’ll skip it for 2012. Doomsayers might claim that if even Gwyn cannot make predictions, then SL is truly and utterly doomed… I prefer to see it from the reverse perspective. When something is way too difficult to predict, it usually means that so many things are happening at the same time, with…
Virtual worlds research conference in Second Life
When Linden Lab removed the land tier discount for academic and non-profit institutions, and most organisations simply moved to an OpenSim-grid instead, one started to see less and less announcements about academia in Second Life — with research grants cut to a bare minimum, SL tier, specially for long-lived projects requiring a lot of virtual space, is simply not affordable for most research projects. Still, OpenSim is not Second Life. It’s…
Mesh quality using up a single prim? Nah!
When I read Inara Pey’s article covering Ample Clarity‘s PrimPossible shop, I was a bit skeptic: top-of-the-line furniture design in Second Life® with just a single prim? No way! As meshes have been introduced, residents have noticed that they are almost worthless for furnishing small parcels — except for some well-designed furniture, the result will end “eating up” way more of your Land Impact allocation (or, for you on older or…
Google Translator becomes a paid service
Inara Pey reported that in a little less than a month, Google Translator would stop being a free service, and what this would mean for SL residents who regularly use this built-in feature on most (not all) viewers, both from LL and from third-party viewers. Inara explains how LL is going to deal with this issue: by allowing users who pay for the service to be able to add their…
New model for software development for Second Life?
When Linden Lab released SL Viewer 3.0.3, I was dreading the worst. During the 3.0.0 “final release” cycle, I spent uncountable hours sending debugging reports for the crash-on-login bug which plagued certain hardware configurations. Linden Lab correctly tracked down the bug and fixed it; one developer mumbled something about “fast timers” and promised it would be released on the next development cycle. But after seven years of dealing with Linden…
Shooting LL’s own foot: why meshes will not be a huge immediate success
So now you’ve bought your first meshed dress and/or avatar and are generally excited about the bright new future that meshes will bring. Well, after you persuade your friends to switch to a mesh-enabled viewer, of course; thankfully, even the non-LL viewers are all starting to include meshes (yes, even the ones based on SL 1 , so I guess soon everybody will be seeing meshes in all their glory….
Innovation, yes, but wrong turn
These days, I have to humbly admit that I cannot keep up with the whole of Second Life. So I just read what others, who still can, write about SL, while remaining at my little corner of the virtual world and do my own things which nobody cares about But there is something I have noticed in the past few months. Like a crescendo finishing at SLCC, Linden Lab has been…
Google+: Waving the Buzz away
Instead of working hard, which is what I should be doing, a minor health issue (at least I hope it’s minor!!) forced me to take an unwanted rest for a few days. By a mere coincidence, this was the week that Google decided to launch their new not-so-close-but-now-definitely-closed-again social service, Google Plus. Ironically, I was stuck on doing Second Life-to-social-networking integrations and needed a break, when my PhD supervisor managed…
WordPress users: register with your avatar name! [Update]
I’m afraid that I forgot the name of whomever requested this plugin for WordPress. It was a nice little chat in IM, and at one point, this person said they would love to see a simple way to automatically register avatar names on WordPress blogs, by having them touching an in-world object. My apologies for forgetting your name, or I’d be giving you full credit for the idea. Since I’m…
Meshed drama
A few weeks ago I took this picture near my home (it’s the white modern house by the river, just slightly to the right). I used slightly higher settings than I usually have as default — my old iMac is nearing collapse (lots of vertical stripes appearing on its LCD screen) and I’m back to the framerates of 2005 or so — but naturally this made me think a bit…
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