Jo Yardley

Eve online sounds horrible, but that is because I don't like Science Fiction, I am also allergic to Fantasy so I don't like WOW either. But neither of those can be compared to SL I think. I've only been in SL for 4 years and in our sim we have a gallery of people who have not been active in SL for the last 2-3-4 year, but who've actually been living in our community for all that time. Many of my friends have been in SL for years, some even close to 10 years, and I see most of them online regularly.

So what is the best sim monitor available at the moment? We used to have one, but it exploded. What I am looking for is something that will give me statistics and numbers on how man people visit a sim, what the busiest time of the day is, etc, etc. As much info as possible really and on an internet I can check without having to go inworld.

I've also been an active member since 2007 and own 2 regions. I can see gamers give SL a minute of their time, or more. I am a gamer myself and have been spending at least an hour in SL almost every day for the last 4 years. Most of my SL friends are also gamers, they like SL, why wouldn't other gamers? Yes the recession is tough and life is not cheap although it doesn't really affect me, I'm just as poor as I've always been and I've always lived in a very cheap way. But I managed to make my sim pay for itself, I've got a shop that makes a profit and am about to expand into being a landlord. I do agree that tier has to change, I'm not saying LL should cut all tier at once, but I feel that a system with different kinds of tier would work really well. For instance offer people the option to rent a sim for just the weekends (making life for clubs easier), or give discounts to premium members, like a region costing only 50% tier the first month or so (making it cheaper for people to set up something temporary or try out an idea), etc. Sim crossing is not an issue that bothers me much, but yes I can imagine it is bad when you try to fly planes. I love the idea of planes flying between sims, dropping off passengers. But I like to consider myself a serious sim owner, managing a community with over 70 tenants for over 4 years now. I've probably spend thousands of hours working on it as I keep improving it all the time. I've invested very little money and it started looking after itself almost from the beginning, so even though it won't make me rich, it isn't draining my rl bank account either. And the rewards are priceless, every day the sim still brings a lot of joy to me and being able to share my passion with others is a great feeling. And with my shop, the commercial region and going into real estate, I reckon the financial rewards are becoming more interesting as well, although of course the money is nothing compared to what I make with my rl job. But if you are planning to make big bucks from SL, historical roleplaying sims are probably not the best way.

Rod Humble (CEO of Linden Lab) playing with the Oculus Rift in Second Life: http://joyardley.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/rod-humble-playing-with-the-oculus-rift/

The Oculus team want the Rift to become as cheap as possible, ideally they would want it to be FREE! They speak of one company "subsidizing consoles because there’s enough money to be made on software and other areas". Imagine if Linden Lab became that company... "Become a premium member of SL and get the Rift for free"... SL will get more premium members then ever before. http://www.edge-online.com/features/oculus-vr-wants-to-release-its-headset-for-free/

Masculine Women! Feminine Men! (1926)

I went to Nelsiona and observed people arriving. At first I didn't spot much of an improvement, but then I started counting to see how long it took for someone to fully rez, most avatars rezzed fully between 5 and 15 seconds, even if a bunch of them arrived at the same time. And no fuzzy textures anywhere. When i returned to 1920s Berlin, one single avatar took more then 40 seconds to rez. So yes, I did notice an improvement and can't wait for it to come to 1920s Berlin. Any idea when that may be?

Ignore that last bit. Just crashed. llrender/llvertexbuffer.cpp(1695) : LLVertexBuffer::mapVertexBuffer: memory allocation for vertex data failed. again.

Good question. I haven't seen rez errors and when I returned to my own sim it took almost 40 seconds for a simple avatar to rez. So comparing that to the 5-15 seconds at the SSA sims, makes it look even better. And, perhaps just a coincidence, but I've been online for over an hour now and have not crashed once, lately that hasn't happened much. I crashed a lot because of the running out of texture memory errors.

Must admit I'm a little disappointed, just expected more I guess. There is some improvement, I went to the hub at Nelsonia but with some visitors it still took 15 to 30 seconds for an avatar to rezz fully. Others rezzed a little faster and there was no fuzzy textures that took ages to load. My expectations were just to high, I hoped every single avatar would rez in a flash. But after hanging around for a few minutes I realised that even when 5-6 avatars teleported in at the same time in the same spot... they still rezzed pretty fast. So the longer I waited, the more obvious the improvements became. Eventually I spotted avatars rezzing within 5 seconds and that is pretty good. I think I will really notice the difference even better when this SSA comes to my sim.

Yes. I live above the bar I own so every day I just go down the stairs. But I also have another job working as a secretary at city hall. I once drove my car from home to city hall, but as a result, 23 neighbours ended up in hospital. So now I take my bike or motorcycle. Sometimes I walk, sometimes I take a tram. Sometimes I teleport.

Rod Humble says Oculus Rift going public in Second Life late summer! http://joyardley.wordpress.com/2013/07/06/oculus-rift-in-second-life-goes-public-late-summer/

I think it is a hardware problem as well, but I also think that you should be able to set how much memory your system uses for this or that.

Very annoying, I have the problem as well. BUT wait a few more days, on the 9th they are going to start up this new texture thingy that may change things a lot. See how that goes.

We have a famous Berlin statue in Berlin of Friedrich the great, but it is primmy and sculpty. I'm thinking about hiring someone to mesh it. If you are interested in making a mesh statue of a man on a horse, let me know!

A long time ago someone made a really great sculpted 1:1 scale car for us in 1920s Berlin, unfortunately this person appeared to have left SL. I am looking for someone who can build a authentic, detailed 1920s car, preferbly German model. It of course has to be able to drive but when it comes to looks, details and other options, anything can be discussed. If you're interested, give me a call!

I don't remember exactly what brought me to Second Life the first time, in 2007. I think it was just something I found on the internet, maybe while searching for stuff about the Sims. I hated SL almost from the start, I saw naked avatars, hanky panky, people obsessed with shopping, avatars looking like barbie or ken, lots of swearing and well, nothing much to do. Wherever I went, it was either horrible or boring. So I ran away. A few years later I got a new computer and wanted to test its limits, I remembered Second Life being rather demanding, so I reinstalled it, just to see how the new computer would handle it. SL was still pretty horrible and I was just about to leave again... when I decided to do a search for the 1930s, an era I love. I found flashmans, the first sim in SL that I liked the look of, it was a rather peculiar and surreal but old fashioned and nostalgic bar. I heard 1930s music and saw a few avatars that didn't look like models, freaks, or Fabio, and they were wearing vintage clothing. I enjoyed the music, learned that someone was actually playing that from their home in RL and talked to people there who, like me, were in love with the past. I decided to not deinstall SL until I had at least visited Flashmans one more time. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The Berlin orphans;

Oculus Rift co-founders talk about Second Life http://joyardley.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/oculus-rift-co-founders-talk-about-second-life/

Just throwing this in here; my ideas on keeping new users in Sl a little longer; http://joyardley.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/starting-your-second-life/

Oops! Sorry about that, I actually thought a while about where I should post this... Must be having a blonde day

/me nods Yes I agree with you, they should be more visible. But still it was good to hear that they are at least more online and more part of our world as many of us thought. Eventhough I already knew, it was still nice to hear Rod talk about actually exploring SL, wandering around communities with alts and having an island where he loves to build and script. I now think that at least some Lindens are probably more like regular users then I thought before. Either way, you are right, even if it is just for PR and morale, it would be good to just order all LL employees to spend a few hours a day inworld with their Linden avatar. Just like women were told to wear makeup during WW2, it makes no sense, it uses up resources, but it was good for morale

Exactly! For all expensive complicated programms out there, there are free and easy alternatives. Even for photoshop and mesh software. BUT I still would like LL to offer these to their users as part of the viewer. Shouldn't be that difficult. As for Lindens being inworld, they are. Just because you don't see them, doesn't mean they aren't everywhere. As Rod himself said, he uses alts, lots of them. There may be a Linden right beside you at this very moment... or not I've had Lindens visit our sim, public and anonymous. But I also agree that I miss the time when Lindens manned the support chat. Everytime there was an issue, you would not only get to talk to a Linden but in some cases they could teleport to you and actually fix the problem for you. Last couple of times I called chat support all I got was someone who clearly knew very little about SL and just mumbled something about filing a ticket. Either way, I think it is a good idea that Lindens show their noses a little more, even if they are just exploring a bit, have a do-not-disturb-status or fly very high in the sky. It is just nice to see them pop up on your radar, even if they are not there to do anything, it is nice to know that those in charge use their own product. I know for sure that they do know, but well, if they are undercover, we can't really be sure.

If meshing it doesn't lower the landimpact, I usually don't bother, especially with the confex hull settings, prim land impacts can be very very low. When I mesh buildings I get to add a lot more details and still keep the land impact lower then the original prim one, most of the time anyway.

And what was their 'weak' excuse?