New World Notes' Memorial Day Weekend Open Forum

Say anything as long as it's virtual in some way. Will update this post if any interesting event or announcement is posted in Comments. BONUS POINTS: Please tell us if you know of any virtual world event, fundraiser, or memorial on behalf of Manchester's horrific terrorist attack this week.

Comments

[Carlos Loff]

Coral Homes is born at SL estate called - Squirt (rented - no choice on the name, lol) - This adult resort is not the average bungallow paradise and is not cheap land for many prims - It is an investment in quality of life and capacity of virtual worlds builds to offer the best, to immerse people as much as possible, cause I spared no expenses on it - Coral Homes provides beautiful big homes, along with a private parcel of paradise where you can do whatever the hell you wany and the common areas offer the best free ammenities you can find, all in an atmosphere of wonder and deep immersion - Doing last touches today, specially underwater and will soon have an big opening live concert, but dont take my word, just visit and SURRENDER TO - CORAL HOMES - Freedom, Privacy & Control - I still believe in SL

[Pathfinder]

http://blog.virtualability.org/2017/05/mental-health-symposium-opens.html

The Virtual Ability community in Second Life invites you to join us for our sixth annual Mental Health Symposium. It will be held on Saturday, May 27, beginning at 6am Pacific (9am Eastern), and continuing through 5:30pm Pacific (8:30pm Eastern). This year's conference theme is "I can relate to that." It is free and open to the public. The Symposium takes place in Virtual Ability’s The Sojourner Auditorium, on Virtual Ability island. The SLURL for the auditorium is: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Virtual%20Ability/54/170/23

[metacam oh]

Hamlet, would like your thoughts on the game/engine Space Engineers. Looks like could be something to keep an eye on

[Better then Ezra]

I am pulling out of High Fidelity, Sansar and Space for now to focus all my online time to learn how to create in 3dsmax and be in second life.

I needed the room on my M.2 card for programs that I use daily with it only being a 250GB Boot drive so had to delete HF,SS,Sp. that cleared up around 10GB

High Fidelity is going to be big one day that will be in the upcoming decade as the foundation and backbone for future virtual worlds until then it has less then my needs expect.

Sansar is so alpha and who really knows what it will become, but for now it is boring with me never having seen another avatar while the whole 'lets build an area of 3d model props' for a social experience is just old thinking as is the marketplace idea. I like sansar but feel everything I can do as an average resident could be done in SL at this point while it's lacking the tools promised to make it different.. I do not have years to waste like i did in There,blue mars,cloud party.

just like with every project linden lab has done besides SL they ruined it like Desura why would you get rid of the platform that would have worked perfect with sansar? they pulled the plug on the patterns community overnight! and real VR/AR is years away with VR on the back burner until they can offer it without the stupid goggles while inexpensive home PC that are powerful enough to run it are still 4 to 5 years away.

Space keeps bring up how they were the founders of open sim, ok and how did that turn out?..you leave a project to it's doom and that success?... well just like I learned in openlife,spoton3d,kitely.inworldz,avination, do not trust them with personal data, I do not trust space and will not unless I see more then 10k online and they are at least on a professional level as linden lab. no open viewer or cryto currency? how about cool build tools like landmark has? no? then a no starter for me or more of pulling out before too much time is invested.

I will spend my time in a proven VR world like SL until the day comes a true replacement comes along and that most likely will be based off high fidelity.

As for the FCC killing net neutrality, i say this to the FCC.

Think about the future for everyone not backroom briefcases full of money or campaign contributions.

As for the recent witch hunts against 3rd party viewer developers, just remember they are volunteers, who do not get paid, they create and update viewers out of the kindness of the hearts that beat in there chests!

If you download Alchemy,Black Dragon,Firestorm,Kokua, Catznip, Radegast, Lumiya,KoolVR,or other clients, you downloaded it with 90% of you never making a donation of any kind to help back with any of the costs from website and hosting costs to time developing new features hoping linden lab might adapt them for the community.

Let me say this several times! YOU ARE NOT A CUSTOMER, YOU ARE NOT A CUSTOMER!!, you were able to download a free viewer then use it in SL/OS, that does not give you any rights to expect those same volunteers to wait on you hand and foot, expecting them to be what you expect them to be, if any thing you should be grateful while thankful they stick around, otherwise second life would implode if everyone had to use the official viewer that's a fact!

[Earl Dinkin]

#1366 Woman Getting Ready for Dinner Movie Date by Replacing the Faulty Camera Module of her Always Wear VR Helmet

http://cdn.epicdewfall.ca/paintings/1300/1366woman.jpg

[Adam]

Hey Ezra,

It's a shame you've moved on from the next gens, but I absolutely understand the reasoning, - that said - I was only one of the opensim founders. I know it does get raised every now and then, because at least at the time I hopped off - it was quite thriving --- my reasons for departure was the tech base the viewer is built off, simply can't be modernised. There is no way to build a next-gen world off that platform base without a completely rebuilt viewer and a lot of fundamental architectural changes; I want to make a modern virtual world on a platform that can last decades, after putting three years into it full time - I did decide that a alternative design was going to be the best approach.

As far as we go, Sine Wave Entertainment Ltd is a professional registered company with physical offices, a board of directors and investors. Our staff come from a variety of backgrounds, we have people from the film, game industries, large tech companies and more.

We do take data privacy seriously - we store as little as we need to run our business (e.g. we don't store credit card info, we rely on our credit card processor to handle that); data that we do store is segregated (we don't store merchant info in the primary database server for example). Many of our risky subsystems (i.e. the forums, wiki, etc) we run on totally isolated infrastructure to limit damage during an intrusion.

I know we've still got a road ahead before space is a large popular social virtual world - but it's absolutely our goal to get there, and we've got a fairly feature-complete roadmap in the days ahead; but if you want to wait for a while, that's understandable; that said, don't write us off yet. ;)

As for opening the viewer / crypto currency / etc - there's a few points against each holding us back; first up: the viewer - we've debated this internally in the past - the problem with an open viewer is it's best in a more mature product; and we also need to ensure that our policies regarding content infringement can be enforced (the policy is the real defence, but the more protective layers sitting around it, the better). It's not a decision we want to take unless it makes logical sense for everyone (inc. all users), that we can wholeheartedly support, - right now we simply can't in good faith.

Cryptocurrency is a cool technology - but it has some serious problems for end-users. First up: we can't get in the middle of a merchants transaction and reverse it - say a creator sells a broken product through our central marketplace - we can't easily reverse that and refund the customer, which means they lose confidence in the marketplace. Likewise pirated and stolen goods. Our platform has to be consumer friendly - you have to be able to get refunds on broken/misrepresented products, otherwise you end up with a wild west scenario with everyone ripping everybody off.

Second problem: cryptocurrency has a long settlement time (minutes to hours) - this means we can't verify a transaction has actually occurred on-the-spot, which means that we can't sell you a item instantly (otherwise you could 'steal' from the marketplace using fraudulent transactions that will get bounced). We can reverse the item delivery, but it's absolutely not a foolproof scenario.

Finally, cool tools - we've been focusing a lot on making the processes simpler for creators as a first step - I talked a little bit in another thread on here why I don't think Landmark's tools make sense as a general-purpose tool; but they don't. They do make sense for landscaping and a few other types of content - we've already had people using voxel based tools for landscaping. But, our focus lately has been working on tools which make creators lives simpler - we have a automatic skinning/rigging/weighting tool so you can import straight from e.g. Marvelous Designer, into Space. We also have automated systems for deletion/tucking/refitting/resizing - some of which just got a fairly substantial upgrade (and will be coming to a viewer soon).

We're also working on some systems for better lighting - this has shown up as a weak point, so we're addressing how to get 'next-gen' lighting into your content more easily (this is what makes the difference between stuff looking like SL and looking like a AAA game). It does sound 'tinkering around the edges' - but with a hundred, or thousand 'small features' like this, it becomes much easier for creators to build really high quality content easily; and that's a very important point I think for a truly successful mass-market mass-creator world. We don't want to lock the coolest tools to the people who have 4 years training as a AAA game artist and know how to use them.

[Edo]

"say a creator sells a broken product through our central marketplace - we can't easily reverse that and refund the customer"

Gee wiz adam, no wonder Space is not taking off, your wanting complete control not even linden lab takes.
I take care of my customers and for you to get in the middle deciding who is right or wrong, well, Space is one place your never going to find my business in, pfft.

[Adam]

Hey Edo,

There's a couple of reasons why we do this, and I do still think it makes sense, our goal isn't to be controlling, or to issue unfair refunds, that kind of thing. 99% of the time, yes - you do have the control you want.

Where we want the right as the platform owner (and owner of the marketplace) is cases where there's piracy/IP theft (the ability to intervene, also gives us the ability to intervene on pirates), Fraud (i.e. things falsely advertised) and cases where the consumers trust is degraded; our creator agreement spells out the cases where we can do this - and it's only for a specific violation of that agreement. We want every user to be able to trust the marketplace is full of quality, legitimate content; so if they buy something there, they know it's going to the creator and it works as advertised.

That's good for you too - because it makes users more willing to spend on something without them going "Well, I've never bought from this person before, and none of my friends know about it, so do I risk it?"; it also means all the money users are spending, is going towards legitimate products (i.e. every dollar earned by a pirate/ripper is a dollar lost to a legitimate merchant).

[Adam]

I'll follow-up there that as operators of the marketplace, we also take on a lot of the customer support duties for simple stuff like 'How do I wear this item?' with the goal of again making it easier to operate as a designer and not tech support for your customers. The goal of our central marketplace is to make everything as painless as possible for everyone.

I am always happy to chat about concerns or issues with our platform policies - we've tried to be as fair as possible with everyone in setting up how everything works - users, creators and us alike; so if you think something is unfair, I would like to chat through the reasons behind our decisions, and if it's still a sore point after explaining them, then I'm happy to give it more thought, and pass it onto the staff members responsible for that area. A lot of our reasoning has come from trying to support creators/merchants, which may manifest in odd ways (e.g. the point in the previous post above), but there is a (hopefully good) reason for it.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Not sure why the article is requesting Manchester related events when Memorial Day is more about fallen veterans, but I guess that's how a left-leaning mentality sees it. Not to belittle those victims, either.

@Adam: Keep plugging, watching from afar with interest.

[Han Held]

I'm not sure why you're objecting to events related to a very recent tragedy, but I guess that's how a far-right mentality sees it. Not to belittle Memorial Day, either.

@Adam, thanks for the detailed comments -that's definately food for thought, thank you.

[Iggy 3.0]

@ Edo..Sounds like another cookie cutter platform like realextend or blue mars.
Trying to control creators..check
Another marketplace how innovative LOL..check
Another disbeliever in inworld building tools and user creation tools, no matter the excuses..check
Another walled garden..check
lets ride the vr hype..check
no Crypto currency ..check
no open viewer..check
no open source..check
same old land scheme..check
5yrs from now second life will still be going strong while those who insist the next virtual world citizens must be consumer sheep will be looking for a new job. the only visionary right now seems to be Philip Rosedale while everyone else is trying to rehash secondlife.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

@Han Held: It might be nitpickery on my part. Probably bringing in some baggage of politics trying to downplay Memorial Day and what it means from elsewhere.

[Adam]

Hey Iggy, you might want to check a few of those points. ;)

We did actually add a whole bunch of new inworld creation tools about two months back, and there's more on the roadmap. We've currently got inworld build/placement/layout tools, and inworld clothing customisation (with some limited 3D painting that'll get a further overhaul at some point). I see inworld tools as ideal for remixing/expanding content, and quick work - but serious work needs serious tools, and 'inworld' tools will always suck when compared to more professional ones (and people who try end up making the worst of both worlds).

Where I believe inworld tools fail is when you're trying to do higher quality work - as many people as we put onto cool inworld tools; there'll be a hundred times more at Autodesk, etc.

Yep, we're a walled garden - part of our goals is to be a good platform for creators/merchants. That currently can't be done outside that kind of environment. I'm also a big skeptic on the VR front - we're not focusing on VR as the first target. VR is interesting, and at times cool - but it's not something everyone is onboard with, it's expensive, bulky and complicated - I'm in the 'let's check back in 2-5 years' camp there.

As for the land scheme - we do actually offer a free region to all users, we do have paid pricing beyond that, but it's fairly reasonable (our highest plan offers 10 regions with the highest content and concurrency densities, for $70/mo -- each region can be much, much larger than in SL/OpenSim; stretching tens of kilometers on each bound, and packed with content), I won't apologise for having to charge for something - but our pricing is fairly reasonable and much closer in line to webhosting for example.

[Wagner J Au]

I'd love to blog about SL events and sites befitting Memorial Day and American military personnel who sacrificed all, but sad to say they seem non-existent lately. The great Vietnam War memorial, for instance, is no longer in SL (I just checked), so this post and video from over 5 years ago is its last testament I'm aware of: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/05/vietnam-war-memorial-in-second-life.html

[Dartagan Shepherd]

@Hamlet: Ah, thanks for that clarification.

[LagOh]

@Adam, give it a rest dude. We get it; we disagree - no further clarification needed.

[Adam]

Heh. I'll shut up now then.