Third Party Viewer Policy Drama

I'm watching the Third Party Viewer Policy Drama (there's a good round up of it here.)

New viewer with customizable buttons, and a Humble interview

Spotted Rod Humble interviewed in an article about game innovation.

Trying out the new release viewer. I like being able to pick and position buttons. I'm still pissed that you can't move things around on the Inventory Recent tab (I really hope that's a bug and not a deliberate change!)

Mesh clothes

Remember the mesh clothing deformer project? They're fully funded. I'm buttering that popcorn.

Buying a sim? Buy now and pay no setup fees.

Want to buy a sim without paying setup fees?  I can't remember the Lab doing this before. I guess it will help answer the question about how much a barrier the setup fees are vs the monthly fees.

Would you like mesh clothes to just fit?

I'm making popcorn. There's an independent project trying to get funds to pay the former Qarl Linden (of sculpt map fame) to make mesh clothes fit by modding viewer code. Prim Perfect has the best wrap-up of the mesh clothing situation I've seen.

Clouds

Changing your cloud texture is making the rounds... I like my sky to be surreal. How do you like yours?

AU gone

Goodbye, Avatars United!

SLCC 2010

Lots of news rolling in from SLCC 2010.

*Teen grid to be gone in Dec this year, and the main grid to become 16 and up. Costs sited. I guess the younger kids will go to opensim?
*Open source Client development to get a boost. Philip does love him some open source movements.
*Mesh is supposed to be open beta by the end of this year.
*Some kind of avatar name changes or new options for naming, not sure what yet.
*Raise the avatar limit on sims.

LL CEO change 2010

A few things changed yesterday. Philip's back in the driver's seat, M's out.

Among the things I'm most curious about are the layoffs. Did Philip let M break the bad news to his friends so he wouldn't have to, or are some of the old timers getting job offer letters?


EDIT: And on October 19th, he's off again.

Beta Viewer and Avatar Toolbox

Thinking about the changes I'll be doing if the features in the current Beta Viewer reach the main release. The ones I know of are avatar masks, more avatar texture layers, and possibly more options for basic avatar height. The first two are already working in the beta.

Just updated the Invisiprims page on Avatar Toolbox to include that glow is occluded by them while shine and bumpiness no longer are.

Snowglobe logo design contest

If you like designing logos, there's a contest with a cash prize for designing the logo for the Snowglobe version of the viewer.

LL buys XStreetSL and OnRez

The rumor about XStreetSL and OnRez being bought by LL is true. OnRez is being closed, so transfer any outstanding balances by Feb 11.

Three tiers of sim

Now in three flavors...

Three tiers of product, with new restrictions on number of avatars present. The base model (opensim) has 750 prims ,allows 10 avatars, and costs what the opensim used to cost. The midrange model (Homestead) allows 3750 prims and 20 avatars, and will cost $95USD a month moving to what was proposed each month starting in July. Education discounts are back for homesteads but not opensims. Everyone's getting less, but *shrug* what we had was generating horrible performance problems.

If you have an opensim and want it to not be converted to a homestead sim, follow the link to the knowledge base article. You've got some work to do.

Zoning on the Mainland?

Zoning? On the Mainland? Woah.

A quick look at Lively

So like everyone else today who isn't on a Mac or Linux, I decided to try Google's Lively. There's a download, but it goes pretty quick.

There's no building, although the press says there will be options to create content. You can add music to a room, or link to youtube videos.

The emote system is delightfully simple; just right click on your avatar or someone else's to animate. No consent needed. So go ahead and body slam that fellow standing next to you!

The avatars are all prefab. I don't like that I can't edit my avatar by itself. Have to be in a room to do that.

Change: Fairies, Steampunk, and CEOs

Found a lovely skybox while flying around.

I bought some land in New Babbage to build on. I've got ideas, so many ideas! And I've been feeling the urge to put down virtual roots. Surprises me a bit, I've been here almost two years without that. Somewhere for my steam powered motorcycles, a comfy couch, and an assortment of shiny things...

And for anyone who's been living under a rock *grin* LL has a new CEO, Mark Kingdon aka M Linden.

Met another pair of avatar crazed people - we had fun showing off to each other. :D Ended up at Grendel's of course.

Um

So here's the clarification on SL trademark policy we were waiting for.

On The Care and Feeding of Communities

Word is that there'll be an official blog entry sometime soon about how the new TM rules affect bloggers.

Gamasutra has an article up about online community management. I'm glad that it points out both the age of the field and the high human cost - I've seen more than one community caretaker have a meltdown or require an extended vacation.

Relationships between a legal team and their video game company clients

In an oddly timely coincidence, Gamasutra has an amusingly written essay on the interaction between video game companies and their lawyers. The basic message is good; learn to work with your legal team instead of seeing them as an obstacle or something to point at instead of facing difficult decisions.

Unicorns, Trademarks, and other ramblings

As some denizens of the grid have already discovered, I've got some new unicorn ( or horse or pegasus ) avatars up for sale. They're the first quad I've ever made. I used them in another "making an avatar" article for Avatar Toolbox. I have to go through AT and check it for trademark stuff, and I want to update it with some new links (and some links to a couple of Torley's new videos, especially the advanced attachments video.)

Still fussing around with the motorcycle. Did some clothes shopping. Visited a couple people I hadn't seen in a while. Had to go to sleep before Veyron's party, but I gave her a party favor the day before. Timezones suck. :P

I'm wondering why Linden Lab doesn't have some sort of official contact for the blogging community, and one for businesses on the grid. The concierge group just doesn't cut it - some issues overlap but many don't. It would have been a simple thing to have a channel (blog, forum, mailing list) where they could put up a discussion about "How the new trademark rules affect you" and clear up all the confusion and upset. A wee comment buried in a long blog post is not good communication.

And I'm very curious to see how they're going to handle domain and business name cases like SLExchange or the Second Life Herald. The old trademarks page said "You agree to refrain from using any domain name that closely mimics our proprietary domains, including secondlife.com and lindenlab.com." I don't know if that would have had additional meaning in lawyer's english, but in typical usage it didn't suggest that you needed two nouns in your name if you included SL as a reference to Second Life.

The new inSL logo makes me wonder what was being smoked in the Lab - when the eye-hand image has such recognition, why would you rip it out and replace it with something that no one recognizes and (I know I'm being catty) is so unappealing? Were they playing off of the SLGrid icon, or thinking of your basic plywood cube? If you're going to dump the recognizable, at least give us something with style!