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Major Second Life grid failure
At 5:10PM SLT (US Pacific) the Second Life grid suffered an unexpected subsystems failure, resulting in the disconnection of approximately 7,000 of the 45,000 users online at the time. Users report problems with assets, inventory, simulator border crossings, teleportation and group IMs. As of 5:45PM SLT, problems seem to be easing, but no acknowledgement or notification from Linden Lab at this time.
Age verification arrives on the Second Life grid (updated)
Age verification is now in beta on the Second Life grid. We think it's called Age Verification, anyway. It's undergone a couple name changes since inception. Initially, Linden Lab were calling it Age Verification, then Identity Verification (IDV) and now we're back to Age Verification again. We're not really very sure if it is going to change its name again. There are a few things, though, that we do know ...
New Second Life release candidate 1.18.6
Linden Lab have just released a new release candidate view for Second Life, the first in the 1.18.6 series. This one incorporates the start of the new login system that there has been much ado about in development circles recently, as well as age-verification. That's a big deal.
Cinemassively: Making of Richard Hawley's Second Life
It's not every day that a musician takes you behind the scenes on how he performed. However, that's exactly what the team behind Richard Hawley's appearance in Second Life did. Hawley was there as a cheeky response to a ban on smoking in the UK, dubbing it the "first" virtual gig for "puffers." He even encouraged his fans in-world to light up. The American Cancer Society would not be pleased ...What I'm more interested in, though, is the technology behind the performance. As you can see from the video, he was fitted with motion capture sensors, so that his real-life movements would be mimicked in-world. Most performers in SL use canned animations, which makes this quite refreshing!
Cinemassively Specials: PotBS Machinima preview
When I was growing up, Sid Meier's Pirates! was one of my favorite games. Released in 1987, you could choose your own destiny by being a dirty swashbuckler, or serving your King. Pirates of the Burning Sea brings me back to those simpler days, when the biggest dilemma was whether to use a rapier or a cutlass in battles of honor. Alas, I went for the Leisure Suit Larry style of MMO, otherwise known as Second Life. Oh, how things could have been if PotBS had come out sooner ...During a recent conversation with an SL friend, Bebop Vox, of Natural Selection Studios, he mentioned that he was in the closed-beta program. When asked about the Machinima capabilities, he admitted that they were a bit rough around the edges. However, when the NDA lifted today and he showed me this video, I wasn't expecting that kind of quality at all!As you can see from this short clip, you can sail the gorgeous seas and engage in gun fights with a rival crew. At the end of the day, you can relax with a brew in the local bar. I'm sure you can even meet a real lusty wench or two, although you could do that in SL as well. There's no doubt about it - PotBS is the action-packed MMO that we've been waiting for, and Massively has all the dirt you're looking for on it!
Cinemassively: DiVAS
Phaylen Fairchild is no stranger to Machinima, but it's been a long time since her last effort. She's back in full force with DiVAS, dubbed as the first virtual comedy sitcom. Starring herself as an alcoholic that accidentally burns her house down, she is taken to rehab. Once there, she begins to exhibit withdrawal symptoms. I can only assume that she starts having hallucinations that take her into a dream world, where the real magic takes place.The storyline not only flows well, but it's clear and concise. You can actually feel the emotions that Phaylen is trying to convey, from boredom to excitement. The music, by Mika and Darren Hayes, is fantastic as well. Machinimists outside of Second Life are already touting it as one of the best examples of what the virtual world can do for storytelling.That's not to say that it doesn't have technical flaws. The transitions are too flashy and clash with the black bars, which change in size throughout. The editing is a bit rough. In addition, she used the word "first", which is a personal pet peeve. I'm not even sure that it's actually a comedy or a sitcom, but I doubt that it's the first. It mainly felt like a long music video to me. Nevertheless, I liked it. What did you think?[Thanks, Phil!]
Second Life holiday shopping guide - December 1st edition
It's Christmas season already, which means Limited Editions, holiday outfits, and freebies! Sifting through all the blogs, ads, and forum posts can be quite tedious. I'm going to be taking care of the work for you every Saturday!In order for you to get the most out of your Second Life shopping experience, I've broken the items down by pricing. They are categorized as freebies, cheapies, group only, sales, and regular priced items. They are listed with the shop name linking to a store SLURL and what they're selling, with a link to their blog or forum post about the item. If you release something in the coming week, let me know and I'll include it in next week's guide. Happy shopping!Freebies: Dawnshop/Dazur - Christmas outfit Ephemeral Creations - Free Holiday Chenille Scarf Essentia - Christmas tree earrings Inspired - Stocking treasure hunt - 12 in all! Ivalde - Freebie gifts under the Christmas tree MANTRA - Free Christmas tree Pixeldolls - Free holiday decorations Second Mirage - Advent calendar - Stop by daily to get a free ornament only available on that day. This event runs until Christmas. Sin Skins - Pearl treasure hunt - 12 items, including skins, manicures, and lashes! Style Your Destiny - 8 Days of Hanukkah freebies, starting December 4th Subtle Submission - Lucky chair Christmas tattoo and shirts Talisman Designs - Free snowman earrings The Body Politik - Snowman necklace and earrings WRONG - Daily freebies until Christmas Eve! Cheapies: Callie Cline - 99L Reindeer antlers Dark Eden - 50L Candy Cane..."prim attachment" (Warning: Website NSFW) She's So Unusual - 25L Googly-eyed Rudolph slippers Subtle Submission - 100L 3-pack Christmas stockings, 50L each for holiday separates, 50L Bettie Page Christmas necklace, and a *cough* 100L Santa's Little Whore costume Talisman Designs - 1L snowman shoulder pet, 40L Frosty snowman choker Read on for group only, sales, and regular priced items ...
Second Life Christmas shopping for a good cause
Several months ago, Alyssum Therian, of Love, Aly, blogged about a friend's child that had been born with a malignant brain tumor. In order to raise funds for her friend, she created an outfit in baby Abby's honor, with 100% of the proceeds going to her medical bills. Sadly, it only managed to amount to about 25 USD.Alyssum hasn't given up hope, though. She's designed an adorable Christmas outfit with many components to it, including a blinking skirt! At only 100L, it's a bargain, but even better, all proceeds will go to Abby! Let's hope that this second attempt fares better. Currently in her ninth round of chemotherapy, this child will need all the help that she can get.
Second Life users warned of QuickTime flaw
Second Life users are being warned today (and the rest of you should be aware as well) that there's a security issue with Apple's QuickTime that allows an attacker to potentially crash or attempt to inject code into the software under which QuickTime is running. That would be your web-browser, or Second Life viewer, for example. Second Life uses QuickTime to stream video - though not from Linden Lab's servers. All video in Second Life comes from other sites and from web-sites controlled by users.
Track structure announced for SLCC 2008
After receiving feedback from SLCC 2007 attendees, the Future United Group (TFU) has decided to open up tracks to the public. In the coming week, they will be posting a Request For Proposal (RFP) form that organizations to fill out for their specialized topic. Some of the info required will be proposed track content, presenters, and potential sponsors. The form will explain everything, from responsibilities as a track leader to deadlines for submitting everything. As far as actual structure of the tracks, they will run for 1/2 of a day, or about 3.5 hours. In order to keep prices low, there will be an undisclosed sponsorship amount needed to get your track on the program. TFU will be reviewing the RFPs based on several factors, including uniqueness of content and perceived interest from attending residents. You can soon find further details about the Second Life Community Convention on their official blog.(Disclosure: I was the Machinima Track Leader last year, but I am not on the planning committee this year.)
Second Life rated one of 3 worst HUDs by GamePro
GamePro just listed their '10 Best HUDs in Gaming' feature, with a final section entitled 'The 3 Worst HUDs', and Second Life is 3rd on that list, just behind Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, and X-Men: Legends. While they say "Looking at the gameplay involves a lot of guess work to figure out what's going on in the world", they could have, and should have been a lot more critical.Residents of SL know just how difficult it is to get around the interface as a newbie, and while I understand that's one of the major pieces Linden Lab is working on (I know someone who was recently hired to work on UI changes specifically), it's still an intimidating thing to look at, much less try to sort through when you're looking for just one simple command. I mean, look at that screenshot. Technically, those are just menus that have been torn out of the bar, and not the entire interface, but it still applies -- they're ugly, they're complicated, the choices are somewhat obtuse. So now that it's been officially noticed, what will LL have in store for us? How would you fix this?[Thanks, Mitch!]
Grid problems don't make Linden Lab happy either
It's no surprise that Second Life has been having some trouble this week - mostly apparently related to bug fixes and upgrades, unfortunately. If you didn't much notice it, you probably didn't spend a whole lot of time online actively poking the asset and inventory servers (or trying to buy land) - particularly in the early hours of the SL morning. Linden Lab have had just as rough a time with the platform this week apparently as well, with some of their own applications and batch jobs faring no better.
Should the dead live on in avatar form?
Tragedy struck hard in Second Life this year. I can think of at least three influential residents that passed on in real life - Feliciaa Feaver, Jesse Malthus, and Ginny Talamasca. While some have been honored posthumously, and others are petitioning for a Remembrance Day for all fallen residents, there's a trend going on that really disturbs me.When Jesse was tragically taken from us, his mom decided to continue his work in SL. This meant that she would need items from his inventory, requiring her to log into his account. Every time I saw his name pop up as logging in, I remember recoiling in shock. When Ginny died, it was revealed that there were two people behind her popular clothing line. However, the operator of the Ginny avatar, and the person we came to know and love, was the one taken from us. Yet I still see blog entries on her blog and group notices of new products.Once an avatar's typist is gone, the avatar should be removed after a certain period of time. In Jesse's case, I felt pain every time he was logged in from the afterlife, but in Ginny's case, I feel anger that the name/image is allowed to continue on hawking products. That brings me to my question - Should these avatars live on even though their creators haven't?
Cinemassively: Mercury Metropolitan's 18th birthday
Mercury Metropolitan, an enterprising former teen from the Second Life Teen Grid, turned 18 today. The moment it happened, teens donned picket signs labeling him a pedophile and urged him to be transferred to the Main Grid. Well, no, that's not really what happened. However, the moment he turned 18, he was torn from his friends that he's known for 2.5 years.I'll be publishing an interview with him later today, but the teens asked me last week if I'd prepare a video slideshow for his surprise birthday party on Tuesday. It seemed like a good excuse to discuss moviemaking software for those that aren't artistically-inclined. muvee AutoProducer 6 allows you to add songs, video clips, and pictures. It will turn them into a movie for you, cutting according to the song and the style that you chose. At that point, you can swap out clips on the timeline if you don't think that they fit in well.This software, which runs $110-130 USD, actually gives you a decent amount of control if you're not that into editing. They also offer the opportunity to purchase additional style packs that will change the look, feel, and editing style of your Machinima project. They even announced today that they plan to support the h.264 codec! muvee isn't for anyone above novice skill level, but it does take the sting out of editing hundreds of pictures into a movie.
This week's patch process not kind to Second Life
Yesterday saw the preparations for today's rolling Second Life update - an 'update to core systems' (Linden Lab have never really explained what that means, but we can reasonably assume we're talking central databases, monitoring systems and a chunk of the backbone code). The update caused assorted difficulties throughout the day yesterday, and apparently partial services outages through most of the morning this-morning, leading up to today's rolling restart of simulators.
Double bonus voice maintenance
Either we've been drinking too much coffee here at Massively central, and seeing double, or Linden Lab just announced scheduled maintenance for the Second Life voice system twice for the same downtime window. One notice here, and the other here. Take your pick. Either way, in-world voice services will be unavailable from 2am to 3am Friday 30 November for upgrades. An upgrade with twice the notification has to be twice as good, doesn't it? Obviously, Linden Lab are just very, very keen to communicate. [Update: Linden Lab have caught the double-up now, and one of the two notices has been removed]
Windlight: what all the fuss is about
When the old Windlight First Look viewer for Second Life was withdrawn there were assorted howls. Then, after it recently returned in a fresh First Look viewer, the cheers outweighed the grumbling of "Oh great, features instead of bugfixes" despite the fact that there's been a significant shortage of new features compared to bugfixes in the last year and a half. When an updated release-candidate viewer that contained a slew of bugfixes for some irritating problems, a lot of folks just plain didn't want to download it, preferring Windlight to bugfixes. So, what is it with Windlight? %Gallery-11032%
The Daily Grind: Home sweet home
In all the years we've played online games, one of the things that many of us have had some disagreement about the real use of was that of player housing. Some of us don't really care for it, equating having to bother with a space like that to playing The Sims Online. Others of us liked the idea, thinking it's a great way to show off our personal achievements and house things so we don't have to carry them around, if nothing more. In some games like EverQuest II, being a game veteran (or for that matter, having played the original EverQuest) can land you some extra goodies for your house. In games like Second Life player housing takes on a whole new meaning with people wheeling and dealing in land deals with one another. As for me, I always wanted a house in WoW, but that was largely to show off personal sets of armor that I'd collected from running both normal and raid instances to death. I also figured it would be nice to have a small cupboard somewhere that I used to toss in mementos of adventures I'd been on that I simply didn't need anymore. Blizzard has met the desires of players like me slightly with the creation of Guild banks -- thus allowing me to off-load all the bags I made for new people and make more room in my bank. But for those not in a guild, there still remains no real place to house all those bits and baubles without taking up valuable personal bank space, or having to go through the hassle of starting a guild just to get the extra room. So today we ask you to join in the discussion we've been having for some time. Do you think that player housing is just a form of mini-game or time sink for trophy hunters, or do you like the idea of having a place to show off the stuff you've gathered together on your travels in your favorite world? Are you one of the many who have a player house? If so, what kinds of things do you do with yours? Are there any games that really need to incorporate player housing that don't currently have it?
Second Life wiki failure
The Second Life wiki is being unresponsive this-morning, with browser requests that are directed at it failing during SSL negotiation. Non-SSL requests for the wiki URL are being directed back to the Second Life homepage, which may have something to do with the services failure. It seems that the wee hours of the Second Life morning are becoming troublesome times for the virtual world and it's assorted services lately. Linden Lab has not yet acknowledged the service failure. [Update: Still no word from Linden Lab, but the wiki came back up shortly after 5:45AM. There are additional signs that a widespread subsystem failure is in progress with many asset and inventory problems being reported to us]
Linden Lab on Battery
You may recall that earlier this year (May 12) Linden Lab split their Sansome Street, San Francisco office in two, moving roughly half of their staff to the office around the corner in Battery Street, all observed by curious San Francisco residents. Well, the operation in the larger office in Battery Street seems to have expanded. Today, we received a letter from Linden Lab telling us that their Sansome Street office had closed, effective immediately and that all deliveries, post, and walk-in visits be directed to the new Battery Street office.
