On Saturday I had a divorce party over at Edloe. Now I thought i figured out what was going to happen that night. I was however a little wrong in that thought. Hope and Keeme presented this video…
After the video played, Keeme brought out “SLPN Jr.”. I am still not sure what to make of it but, it was funny and all that stuff. Go watch the video and the latest episode of RezzedNecks if you haven’t already.
This is a kind of continuation post from my last blog post entitled The Greenies Problem. This entry is going to be about Donations.
If you ask me, it is entirely reasonable for any place in Second Life that offers an event to the public to have a donation / tip jar area for offering events or resources. When we look at something like the Greenies, they would likely make a lot more money from donations than charging an admission fee.
One example of an area in Second Life that offers free entertainment but gets donations is the Music scene. Every musician makes a good sum of money for doing the music and also the venues make money from it as well. The venues could easily say “You can’t get in without paying L$1000″ and in some cases they do when it is a big musician like Louis Volare.
Another place in Second Life that offers a service to residents is the Destination Station. Itazura recently added a tipjar for people to donate to. Again entirely acceptable because they make no money for promoting these places free of charge and is a hell of a lot better than any standard telehub.
Soon enough SLPN will be getting a donation jar as well and we have some cool stuff coming down the pipeline.
Harper Berseford made an interesting comment on my last blog post on the Greenies that I completely understand the point of view of.
“They have to insure the survival of their business so they can provide MORE content and pay the electric bill to keep the server running.”
Again, my argument has always been, If they people like it, they will be more than happy to donate. If I ever see a donation jar at a sim that is fun, helpful, informative, entertaining etc. then people will donate. Combine that with Merchandise (Greenies sells merchandise already!) then THEY will surely make money.
I know this is old news but I feel like I had to write about this. A while ago on Podmafia we explored the Greenies sim which is an amazing build that all newbies and oldies should see. However they are now charging for entry into the sim, which in my opinion sucks.
OK L$99 doesn’t seem like a lot of money, but to a newbie that’s like L$1,000,000. When a newbie joins Second Life it can be a daunting experience and I think it is important to let them know about the good stuff quick so they can understand what is cool and possible about the virtual world.
What I’m trying to say is that Second Life builds when its a public place that you want people to visit should not be blocked off at all. The only times something should really be blocked off is a residential area or if someone has been banned.
When you think about the Internet you get websites that need to be paid to gain entries to certain areas, most of which never really work out well. Second Life is entirely the same, people expect to visit somewhere and be able to explore it for free. Sure there’s a cost attached to it for the service provider but they can make money other ways like Donation kiosks that can help facilitate the venue or merchandise.
I’m sure that Rezzable is making some money from the Greenies but to be honest I think they are already successful enough to not need to offer a charge for admission. I’m sure events like the Hair Fair make them money and the Greenies has always seemed to me like a good promotion of what Rezzable does.
Basically, charging for admission in my mind is a stupid idea and if people start copying the idea then it will negatively impact Second Life.
I am sure most of what I said has been said before but I don’t care because this is my opinion that has been badly written. Also thanks to Dakota Blackmountain for pointing out a typo 
For over a year I have been using an open-source piece of software called OpenSim which is a reverse engineered Second Life simulator. (If you don’t know what a simulator is, it is the thing that gives you land and prims and all that happy stuff). Ever since it was released I have always felt that those servers would one day interact with the Agni grid.
Another thing that I love about the OpenSim project is the ability to run your own simulator locally. This is great for a variety of reasons. Testing scripts outside of Second Life, Building Practice, Tutorials etc. I basically love OpenSim. There are a few problems with it i’ll admit. It is still unfinished in terms of physics, inventory and usability but this will all be ironed out in the future.
So, recently the main grid was able to connect to an OpenSim server, which of course excited the hell out of me. Then this happened to appear in my feed reader. Open Grid may still be in it’s early days but it is something that makes me excited for the virtual worlds. This obviously opens up so many possibilities such as independantly run servers.
I will continue to keep watching the space and finding out what happens with OpenSim because whatever it will bring. It will be a good thing for all.
Currently…
I am Stuart Warf. An avatar who was born on the 2nd of May 2006 in Second Life. My avatar is an evil timelord who’s TARDIS was left stranded in this world remaining in the current timeline until I can escape this virtual world (In case you don’t know, Heres a Doctor Who Wikipedia Page). My hobbies include Physical Prim tricks, building and podcasting. I currently live at Podcast Island where the SLPN Studios lie.
A Brief History of Stuart Warf
I originally joined Second Life in 2006 when alot of the podcasting community discovered Second Life and thought that it had amazing potential, which they were correct but failed to see it and left when the eighties has-been left. During 2006 I, along with Gomem Desoto, formed a group called The Podmafia (the actual group name is The Pod Mafia), which later in August - September had 5 episodes of a podcast called The Podmafia Podcast, which originally was aimed at going around places in Second Life and teaching the masses about podcasting.
Then came 2007. In the early beginning I was partnered but that soon ended. So became my life of living. For a month I resided in SoHo, but for some reason I just didn’t like renting there. So I left but still hung out to see the crazy and wacky stuff going on there. It was around this time when I temporarily brought back The Podmafia Podcast for 3 episodes. Then came Life, Living in Nowhereville. From around March until August I rented land under Madison Carnot while hosting the Take it or Leave it at Nowhereville. This however stopped for me when Take it or Leave it ended. But that was short lived when Crap Mariner injected new life into Nowhereville shortly after the Second Life Woodstock event that took place in the Five Islands. During August Podmafia Podcast came back after troubled times and stayed strong with Yxes Delacroix as host. I re-rented at Nowhereville under Crap Mariner and continued to live there.
So in comes 2008, When I launched SLPN, a network dedicated to podcasts for the metaverse. During the year I continued to work on SLPN by bringing in new shows and new challenges such as live podcasting in Second Life. Up until July 2008 I had continued to live at Nowhereville. However after some thinking and a polite request I decided to leave Nowhereville and move to Podcast Island…
That’s the story so far…
Last Updated on the 18th of July 2008
OK so Stuart Warf has not been in Second Life a lot recently…
So, in this blog entry I am going to be clearing things up with reasons (or excuses) to my disappearance.
So, on Friday 9th of May 2008 my motherboard (after some other difficulties) practically died. After days of trying to diagnose the problem I pretty much figured out that it was a brick. But just in case, I contacted the MSI technical support via my laptop. It took them 6 days to reply… and the advice was pretty much useless.
So…where do I stand now?
Well I am looking for the reciept so the motherboard can be returned and I am hopefully going to be back online with my awesome machine by the end of the week.
So… While I wait for the conclusion to this chapter in my PC’s life, I will probably be doing some blogging and get some SLPN stuff sorted out.
OK, so a previous post of mine about Dazzle got some traffic and I was informed that the idea of Dazzle is that it can indeed be skinned. Thats great. Infact Itazura Radio even linked me to some skins that are already being shown on the Second Life wiki.
After some prodding around on what it can do I’ve come to some conclusions and formed an opinion.
The current methodology of skinning is far too complicated for newbies and people who aren’t fans of editing code. I personally don’t mind getting around the code and copying & pasting stuff but some people just may not want to touch it.
Secondly, there appears to be no menu in the preferences that allows the changing of skins on the fly.
Also, there are no tools currently that could help people create and customise their own skins.
So here is my proposal on what I think needs to happen. Firstly, the Linden’s need to get their act together and bring in an easier system of importing GUI skins. They should do this by adding a new tab on the preferences called “Interface” or “Skins” (or anything else that describes it. Calling it just a Skin could confuse some people because of the avatar skins).
Next they need to implement a new structure on how skins can be stored. IE. SecondLife\Skins\* (* being the name of the interface)
Then the lindens should make a program that makes it easy for people to create GUI’s as easily as possible. If the lindens don’t do this then it should be fairly easy for someone to make a GUI application in something like Visual Basic .NET or whatever the tools are for the Macintosh. Preferably an open source tool since then its free for all and people can contribute and improve the code and stuff.
Thats my opinions for the designing. I personally don’t mind editing code but I would trade it any day for a simple little tool that can help me easily make a GUI for the new Dazzle interface.
Last week the Lindens announced that they were going to be introducing a new land store system which promises almost instant delivery of sims. With this a price drop was announced for the purchasing of Estate simulators.
When the new Land Store launches, setup fees will be:
* Normal Islands: USD$1000 setup
* Normal Openspaces: USD$250 setup
* Educational Islands: USD$700 setup
* Educational Openspaces: USD$175 setup
For some reason people started to interperet this as being a move against the OpenSim project or that the Lindens are having poor sales.
But if you take a logical approach to it. You will realise that it really isn’t the case. The fact is that technology gets cheaper and cheaper. Take an iPod for example. As more features and storage is added, the prices drops. This is the way that the tech industry moves and it obviously ripples into Second Life.
But wait, what about OpenSim?
Well… I am pretty sure that just last week, it was announced that OpenSim and Linden Lab are working together to integrate OpenSim servers into Second Life.
How is that going to work?
I think that they will probably have a message that pops up every time you enter the area of an OpenSim based server like, “This is a third-party server and Linden Lab is not responsible for what may happen”.
Personally I am excited about the prospect of having third-party servers in Second Life as this will lead to even cheaper server options for people. Of course all the backing up is down to the third-party or you instead of Second Life, hence the cheaper aspect. After all part of the cost for sims is that you need to pay the maintainence fees, backup charges, bandwidth etc.
As stability slowly comes to Second Life…so does some really exciting stuff that I just love the idea of.
Another new thing in Dazzle in the Advanced section is called Avatar Rendering Cost. This helps to calculate the whole lag that an avatar is ultimately causing. This can help banish some myths about avatars and prim hair stuff etc.
My avatar usually doesn’t wear prim hair since the skin has hair painted on to it. All I really wear is 2 trainers (sneakers to the yanks) and a suit (which is actually a nod to the Tenth Doctor in Dr Who).
Anyway, I tried out this setting and found that my rendering cost was typically 105-110. Which is actually a brilliant score. Compared to Jane2 who at the time had a cost of 2500.
I also tried it out with some prim hair on and that brought it up to about 505. So in a sense I am happy because my avatar is grid friendly and stuff and in a world filled with lag. Especially events, I am doing my part to bring down my “Prim-Emissions”
OK, We all know it. The logins were broked for an extensive period of time and yes it did indeed suck. However it wasn’t a problem too much for me (personally). A lot of my friends will know that I am indeed a Dr Who fanatic. Infact my avatar is not of Human based origin BUT a Time Lord (but that doesn’t really matter).
The point is that last night, Dr Who returned and with other things like YouTube the grid downtime did not affect me. However I shall now write some of my top tips for downtime.
1. Download Podcasts!
You don’t need an iPod to listen to any podcasts. All you need is something that plays .mp3 files and IF you don’t have one of those then you don’t have a computer that can run Second Life’s client. A lot of great audio podcasts can be found at http://slpodcast.net and no that is not just a plug. I’ve had people come up to me and say they listen to the shows at work/in-world/car etc. The point is there is some great discussions there for everyone. However if you like the idea of TV there is all those great video shows over at SLCN such as Tonight Live (which i am watching streamed live right now as I right this).
2. Read…
Another thing I was meaning to do was get through all my RSS feeds and stuff. If you like to read internet content but don’t like the hassle of entering in all those URLs there is a better way. Use a webapp called Google Reader. I use it personally and love it. What I do is tag all the blogs into certain categories like say “Second Life” or “Tech News” and as soon as a new entry is up it displays on my window to read. This helps me get up to date on all the news so I can find all the good content about things. That’s one of the things I do with podcasts. Go through all the junk and podcast it in a entertaining way if possible.
3. Get Away from that computer…seriously
Sure you need your SL fix but just step away from that monitor and get some of that good ol’ fresh air. I personally try to do a hell of a lot more these days because even though I am young…I really need to start getting out more. A lot of the time when nothings happening in the feeds or in SL for me, I just sit around. One thing I have been trying to commit more to is walking around. The area I live in is a village so theres some good scenery. What I do is A) Get my podcasts synced… B) Grab my dogs leash C) Go Walking…
I read somewhere that we as humans are naturally lazy and being the climate today we just become victims to it…
Theres a few things for some avatars to do while the grid is down and being broken. Also I mentioned in section 1 that I was watching Paisley Beebe. Well as i still write this the show hasn’t really started yet because of all those SL problems. If Linden Lab™ is wanting to make sure that it’s product is to succeed in the future they need to tackle the problems now. I predicted earlier this year (i’m sure I said this on The Podmafia Podcast) that this year was going to be the year when the Linden Lab™ was going to try and sort out all of the problems with lag such by rolling out things like Havok4 and Mono. Right now they are at the deployment phase. The next task is refining those tools in the real enviroment of the grid and getting to all work. At least thats what I think they are doing
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