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WolfBaginski Bearsfoot

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Blog Comments posted by WolfBaginski Bearsfoot

    Linden Lab

    Fitted Mesh Is Here!

    in Featured News

    A group blog by Secondlife in General

    Posted

    I have built rigged meshes for other rendering coftware, and making a Fitted Mesh for Second Life is going to be more work. I think it will be a while before having a Fitted Mesh viewer is going to make an obvious difference. Mesh clothes already respond to some changes to Avatar Shape, things such as arm and leg length, so I am hopeful about this.

    I hope the Marketplace team are doing a better job than when I quit selling in the Marketplace, but I don't have any confidence that they will handle this well. All we can do is urge merchants to be careful of the phrases and keywords they use.

     

    Linden Lab

    September Update

    in Featured News

    A group blog by Secondlife in General

    Posted

    The sandboxes, I have very mixed feelings about them.

    You see, I hang out close to a sandbox and associated help location, and since you publicised them in the Destination guide, the region has been heavily loaded. I have a small land parcel, so if I want to do a complicated build I have to use a sandbox 

    The big ones, the Linden Lab ones, are nearly unusable. There's no policing. Maybe the Premium Account requirement will stop the griefers, but that's not the only problem. Something well-known attracts crowds, and if you don't keep an eye on things, user numbers in particular, they're going to be unusable. Sandboxes need prompt object rezzing, and I've not been seeing that when a sim gets loaded with users.

    So, possibly a good idea, but the devil is in the details.

    And I'm afraid the same can be said about Mesh. If I use a Mesh-capable viewer, overall reliability plummets. TP-and-crash almost seems the default behaviour. Both group and person-to-person IMs get horribly unreliable. The world can end at a region boundary, and that seems to be a sign of a slow, drawn out, death of a session.

    Without a reliable user-experience, none of the new features (and Mesh is really big) are worth anything.  

    Linden Lab

    Posted

    Since there is a lot of free furniture out there, I'm not sure this is so dreadful for merchants.

    If some of these freebies can start showing off things such as Mesh. well, I expect to hear the screaming from here. But, once the Viewers are giving a decent frame rate, a Mesh freebie pack is going to be worth doing.

    There is a huge amount of free, or very cheap, material out there. Some of quite good quality. Scripted freebies aren't so good, usually. Is this really going to change things? 

    Linden Lab

    Posted

    I would have thought this would be under "Featured News"...

    Yes, it does depend on Viewers being available, and used, which support it. I hope we get a clear announcement of when a Mesh-capable Linden Lab viewer is available, and not a Beta.

    But past experience biases me towards waiting for Firestorm. With such a large number of people not using the Linden Lab viewer, this isn't going to be a fast take-off.

    Linden Lab

    Posted

    I'm afraid, from my experience elsenet, that sophiaquo looks to me to be some sort of spammer, and I wouldn't touch the link in the post with a bargepole. It has the feel of something written by some sort of robot, possibly triggered by the word "Christian". Whether Second Life has enough Google-fu to be worth the effort of setting up an account, I am not sure. I anticipate there being a large number of posts, blog comments and in forums, from this account, and maybe from others with the same IP address.

    (The site I usually see suffering attempts at this sort of abusive SEO has developed an effective system of detection and control. Were this to have happened there, I wouldn't need to write anything this long.) 

     

    Q Linden

    Posted

    Whether being searched on the web is a "huge plus" depends on what the user wants. I don't expect you to want the same as me. Which is why I'm a little surprised this choice of access levels wasn't in from the start.

    I'm afraid I know a few dirty tricks that can be pulled with HTML, and I'm really not sure how I can keep an SL viewer as secure as I keep my web browser.

    Amanda Linden

    Posted

    I find the use of JIRA to take reports of technical problems to be intimidating, and I don't consider myself to be ignorant of computer technology. It is a channel biased towards the jargon of the computer programmer, using methods intended for professional management of bug reports. All this is necessary, even desirable, within the process of developing software. But for those of us not amongst the cogniscenti, it remains a barrier. What shibboleths do we use to discover if the problems we experience have been reported? How do we classify the thousand un-natural shocks that virtual flesh is heir to? When some problems seem to have JIRA entries referenced by fewer digits than Django Reinhardt needed to play his guitar, how may we be confident that you are listening?

    We've have had plenty of fine words. When are you going to deliver?

    Brooke Linden

    Maturity Changes in the Marketplace

    in Commerce

    A group blog by Secondlife in General

    Posted

    There are a lot of problems across the whole internet with search results being swamped in un-wanted content. Having better filtering can help, but I couldn't say that's what is currently happening is better filtering. Some people have been using SEO tricks on their marketplace and in-world seach for a long time, and it gets tedious which somebody uses the equivalent of "I also sell $_WANTED" in every entry they make.

    If this is catching out some people who deserve to be embarrassed, I don't care, but this is like fishing with dynamite: noisy, wasteful, and indiscriminate.

    Brett Linden

    Posted

    So I have to join Facebook, and compromise my privacy?

    No thanks, guys.

    Besides, you think I'm going to tell you where Freya and I will be, having fun? There's a beach us Landing Force veterans know, which is a bit tricky to reach by land. A bit of a sun-trap too.  I just hope Antoinette can keep her daughter from taking the outboard to pieces. At least the two of 'em could put it back together.

    Smallwolf might be bringing a girl along this year, somebody he knows from school. I wonder if she realises what she's getting into with this family...

    Brooke Linden

    Maturity Changes in the Marketplace

    in Commerce

    A group blog by Secondlife in General

    Posted

    I know that quite a lot of items suitable for general historical situations are tagged "Gorean". John Norman took a lot of historical info and fitted it to his setting, so you have books centred on Vikings and Mongols as a starting model. If you're merchant selling a longship model, it's been worth the "Gorean" tag. But John Norman's fictional world of "Gor" is notorious for the controversial sexual customs built into it. And now we've got Teens on the main grid, the Lindens are nervous.

    So. painful though it is, I can see merchants taking a hard look at that label. It may be better to drop it for the history-based items, so that all customers can see them, and those wanting items for a Gor-inspired location or AV can find them by looking for real-world labels. What I remember from when I read a few of the books (I was a teen) was that the historical settings used for Gor did overlap in similar ways to the real history. Vikings in Constantinople, for instance, or meeting Arab traders. Even some of the caste-colours he used in Gor are real-world plausible--red for warriors, wasn't it?

    Brooke Linden

    Maturity Changes in the Marketplace

    in Commerce

    A group blog by Secondlife in General

    Posted

    I'm not sure of the real-world age limit on buying tobacco--like RL age-of-consent it may not be 18 in other countries than the USA--but there are age limits. So at that level, it isn't crazy. Though virtual items for roleplay--pass me the pipeweed, Mr. Underhill--maybe should be less tightly restricted than reality. Do Linden Lab have something better than the initial automated pass to clear this sort of ambiguity? I don't know.

    Q Linden

    Posted

    A couple of days ago, I was thinking that stuff such as the HippoGroups service were on the way out, with the increased number of SL Groups allowed.

    Now I've realised there's another scenario. It looks as though Hippo Technologies is based in the UK, part of the European Union, which means that it is subject to the Data Protection Acts. Also RIPA and a few other things. So if they leak that random.resident is a member of some gay-friendly group, they're in trouble.

    At least, I can see a plausible argument for claiming that an SL username is personal data within the meaning of the Act. After all, your name, address, and phone number are classed as personal data under the Act, even though they may be published in that thing called a telephone directory.

    I am not a lawyer. Don't trust my advice on this. But if you're concerned about the privacy implications of running a group within SL, the alternatives do seem worth a look.

    Q Linden

    Posted

    I'll cautiously welcome being able to connect other websites to my Profile. I can see the advantages, and I can also see the security risks. I can set up my web browser to be very restrictive on running scripts and other executables. How do I do the same for an SL Viewer?

    I do not want to have to open an account with a third party to find out what you are doing. You already have a website. If you want to use Twitter or Facebook as one of several channels of communication, fine. I don't have to. But you're talking as though you'll only listen to foodback via Twitter. This seems particularly dumb.

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