With the acquisition of Avatars United and the release of the Secondlife 2.0 viewer, we clearly see Linden Lab relegating The Grid All Hail The Central Grid to, at best, a side feature of their decentralized social platform. Profiles in 2.0 will be replaced by web content from AU as the interface becomes more Facebookish. Inworld interaction will be steadily supplanted by features, such as working group chat, that are hosted on external services not connected to, or flowing through, The Grid, but that the clients connect to directly.
Having a little window that looks into a customized, interactive 3D environment will just be one of several social components of the package. Linden Lab is targeting audiences that might just as soon turn off that overtaxing video aspect and work just with text, pictures and sound. In addition to the general howling we hear, people are expressing concern that mesh import is close to being implemented and that prim-based content will become unwanted by the masses.
That may be true of the dyed-in-the-wool Ancients of Second Life. However, the new waves of users will only see the world we know as a cute little avatar feature that they can customize a bit and use to interact with people they don’t know in an interactive 3D space. The fact that it’s connected to a wide grid of spaces is likely not going to attract or keep their attention with a constant stream of chat et al scrolling through what they will consider the important windows.
My thinking is that older, inexpensive, prim-based, content will suit them just fine. Anything they have to pay notable money for, or that drags their performance down, will not be considered necessary for so minor a part of their activity. I find it interesting that LL are working so hard to introduce content-oriented features, such as web-on-a-prim and mesh import, at the same time their working hard to obscure the idea of being in a world with the idea of having a 3D chat feature as one in a collection of interactive windows.
Second Life 2.0 Interface
February 25th, 2010 in
Ruminations |
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The Grid All Hail The Central Grid has become windy of late so I decided to set the trees’ flexible wind setting to 0.3 from 0.5 but, discovered that when the parent script changed the setting, it immediately reverted to the old value. After all, an old LSL bug bit me on the backside. When a user specifies a new height, the tree sections have to deactivate their flexibility in order to resize and move toward, or away from, the center. Of course they then have to reset their flexibility to waft in the virtual breeze; and they were individually doing just that to counteract the parent’s new flexible parameters.
Realizing what was happening not only solved the problem of the phantom flexible wind value, but also afforded me the opportunity to take that code out of the child scripts so that all they do now is size and move themselves. llSetLinkPrimitiveParams() is a wonderful command that now allows my parent script to do everything except resize the plants. Global sizing doesn’t work because the sections must always be .01m thick. It’s just another Second Life example of something that doesn’t scale.
The Fate Gardens sim is built around and into a mountain with an ancient stone forum area, a swampy boardwalk, a dwarven mountain gate, a little hidden cave, a super sekret laboratory, and a couple of quiet beaches to explore. Unfortunatley, the comments and behaviours I’ve compiled indicate that people have a hard time shopping in the sim. Having items scattered throughout the build, requiring people to walk or fly around to various areas, is confusing and unameniable. Another odd item that’s been mentioned regularly is that, although the product is fully functionally visible on the landscape, in such a unique fantasy setting, people can’t envision the trees placed in their “real world” home and office environments. My attempts to provide some virtual-style entertainment seems to be cutting into the sales that support the sim in the first place.
Much as I dislike the idea of scrapping the environment that’s evolved from my imagination, it seems that the business needs a more traditional build, in which the trees are quickly found and seen in a familiar type of setting, in order to survive. Granted this is likely not the only reason figures have slipped over the past couple of months. One is the holiday listings of Christmas Trees and such that are already disappearing from Search. But I believe, based on what people have said and done, that a complete rebuild of the sim will make a difference to a number of shoppers. Ideas and suggestions are of course welcome. In fact, a few comments on the blog will be nice in general.
January 6th, 2010 in
Ruminations |
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Metaverse Exchange seems a nice change of pace from other listing sites. So far the uploads and edits have been intuitive and instantaneous; the speed and colour schemes are nice; and there seems to be a bit more activity than I’ve seen on the others. I’ll list the same items there that I’ve put on metaLIFE and see how they perform side-by-side for a couple of weeks. Will let y’all know the results as soon as they’re tallied.
The Fate Gardens Apple Tree Listing on Metaverse Exchange
The Fate Gardens brand is now listed on metaLIFE. So far I’ve added the seasonal Ice and Mardi Gras trees, and am in the processes of adding the falling fruit trees to the listings. My plan is to sell via the website with only one vendor on the homestead to provide an inworld gifting option. I really really like the ease of content management and especially the use of existing texture UUIDs to provide graphics for the web and vendor displays. After delisting from XStreet, and having surveyed all the available options of web-based malls, this one seemed the most tailor made to fit my needs. We’ll see how successful the brand proves to be and report back here in a month or two.
The Fate Gardens Mardi Gras Tree listing on metaLIFE