I was just to late for a picture of the peak.
Makes you wonder why on other days the grid is behaving so poorly? Are there still some unknown factors in the system, or are Sunday users just less demanding of the system?
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Peak concurrenct of 42k+ For Second life.
It took longer then I expected, but the peak concurrency of Second Life has today for the first time gone over 40k, to be precise the max concurrency was 42.285. I actually logged in to see how the grid was behaving and everything seemed to be doing fine, all the searches worked, profiles loaded, scripts uploaded and objects rezzed from inventory. Even sim border crossings where causing no extra troubles. Only thing that didn't load for me was my friendslist, which I understand is a the cause of a bug and not due to the high peak concurrency.
I was just to late for a picture of the peak.
Makes you wonder why on other days the grid is behaving so poorly? Are there still some unknown factors in the system, or are Sunday users just less demanding of the system?
I was just to late for a picture of the peak.
Makes you wonder why on other days the grid is behaving so poorly? Are there still some unknown factors in the system, or are Sunday users just less demanding of the system?
Friday, May 04, 2007
First DWELLNOR, now TRAFFICVS!
A cosmetic change was made by Linden Lab several years ago, when the decision was made to change the name of the land parcel popularity statistic from "dwell" to "traffic." In the most recent town hall, Cory Linden has announced that the statistic, which has been gamed since it was introduced, will be removed: "Removing the current traffic metric is part of the new search project, so the goal is to pull it as soon as possible." Many artificial systems were put into place by Linden Lab to encourage community building in the early days, to attract the initial user base. Many of these programs, such as subsidizing events with money, and giving bonuses to more social players through rating systems, have already long since departed our grid. Once a system can be gamed, Linden Lab either morphs it into something else, or removes it, which is completely understandable. Dwell had actually replaced an earlier system with voting booths, where avatars would click a booth to register their vote as approving a place, once per day. You can still see some of these booths around the grid, although they do nothing.
The benefit of gaming traffic hasn't been what it once was for some time now. Traffic used to pay out a daily bonus to the land owner, and determine the monthly "Developer Incentive Awards", or "Dwellopers," as they became nicknamed. Frankly, it amazes me the amount of money and server resources people are willing to waste just to seem popular, which is the only current benefit of having an obscenely high traffic number. While I will miss it as a metric of how much foot traffic my plots get, it was always a fuzzy metric, at best. More accurate systems are now available, that track actual visitors, and how long they each stays on your plot. Traffic was always somewhat tainted as a metric, since camping chairs and other methods ruined the purity of what a single traffic point was worth. The only way to get a truly valuable metric is to have one that isn't tied to popularity in a search listing or financial rewards in any way. Hopefully the end of traffic will lead to a better reporting system for all of us.
The benefit of gaming traffic hasn't been what it once was for some time now. Traffic used to pay out a daily bonus to the land owner, and determine the monthly "Developer Incentive Awards", or "Dwellopers," as they became nicknamed. Frankly, it amazes me the amount of money and server resources people are willing to waste just to seem popular, which is the only current benefit of having an obscenely high traffic number. While I will miss it as a metric of how much foot traffic my plots get, it was always a fuzzy metric, at best. More accurate systems are now available, that track actual visitors, and how long they each stays on your plot. Traffic was always somewhat tainted as a metric, since camping chairs and other methods ruined the purity of what a single traffic point was worth. The only way to get a truly valuable metric is to have one that isn't tied to popularity in a search listing or financial rewards in any way. Hopefully the end of traffic will lead to a better reporting system for all of us.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Havok 4, for Real?!
Upgrading the physics engine has been a long, long wish by Linden Lab and the second life community. It was always pushed back and left us with the old Havok 1.0. Havok 4 could bring us better vehicle physics, springs and other nice features. Most have give up hope that it would ever arrive after many disappointments, but reading Cory's latest blog post might give us hope once more.
Havok 4 is in testing prior to hitting the Beta grid and the Mono project has fixed the major blockers for us, so we are waiting for resources to free up from other projects there.I can hardly believe it is for real, but who knows, maybe in a couple of months it will finally arrive.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
A future for Live Music in Kaneva?
Oftentimes, when exploring brave new worlds or re-visiting old and forgotten ones, the ever-churning mind of the futurist sometimes has to endure the very things that others would be so quick to dismiss. It's not an easy job, and it certainly thrusts the futurist far outside the comfort zone.
I find this when studying Kaneva, one of the other virtual worlds that may surpass There.com to be one of Second Life's major competitors. One of the areas that I see success for Kaneva is with music-- live and otherwise.
But before I go into that, I have to explain a bit about how I have to prepare for the exhibition of Something New: I must know what the criticisms are before they are said (I probably share them too!) and I must understand how people react when presented with Something New. I am aware of the following behaviors:
More often than not, a loyal user is a loytal user-- if something is better, well, frankly, it doesn't matter.
In other cases--and this is especially true for the techie mind--if Something New does not match 'item for item' then it is immediately disregarded as inferior, a waste of time, pointless or, simply, "I don't get it".
There are valid flaws and room to grow in the future. Just because something doesn't work like A,B,C *today*, is not necessarily how it might work in the future.
And naturally, the presence of the strawman will always exist. "It's Windows only, ergo, it sucks for all time!"
Now, with the place settings of expectations neatly arranged at the table, let's talk about Kaneva, another virtual world, that might hold much promise for live (and not live) musicians that currently perform in Second Life.
Kaneva (kaneva.com, windows-only), is curently an interior-only virtual world that feels a bit like There.com. It is in no way as flexible as SL is for content creators, and building is probably one of the more frustrating exercises I've ever engaged in (Second Lifers will be inside Kaneva, most certainly complaining about how crappy their hair is. Trust me, I'm a hair geek. We SO have it better).
One thing that Kaneva does right out of the gate is something Linden Lab is possibly working on for our own grid: a web-based interface to do SOMEthing, although the release date has not been announced. Kaneva's web-based front end is online, active, populated and resembles the architecture of mySpace-- this is important.
Before I go a step further, let me attempt to adjust thinking on mySpace, because there will certainly be an eye-roll or bashing of mySpace. What I look at when I talk about or use mySpace is not the oftentimes *hideous* designs or performance, but the structure of data. Indulge me. :)
If you go to kaneva.com/spin, you'll see my profile-- everything starts with a profile. I can receive private messages there; I can maintain friends; I can blog; I can share media (audio, video and pictures). Other users can comment on my blog; other users can comment on my profile; and most importantly, I can start my own group-- my own community.
When you first start in Kaneva, you are given a place-- an apartment, which can be upgraded later. That's a concept that doesn't exist in Second Life or There. Instead of being on the street, on the beach, in the forest-- you have a roof over your head (amusingly, you can't go outside in Kaneva but hey, you start someplace where you can stash your stuff).
And more importantly, when you click that 'start a community' button on your profile, you are essentially creating a group, complete with the functionalities I mentioned earlier-- blogs for the group, media files just for the group, access control *just for the group*. And that community creation process also generates a community hangout in the world of Kaneva, which, like your apartment, can be upgraded into a conference room, coffee shop, or nightclub.
Now let's talk about inventory inside of Kaneva, at least, the inventory of media--- textures, audio, video, photos. It all starts on the web site-- something which is certainly not foreign to us in the Web 1,2,3,4,5.0 era. If I want to put a texture on something, it has to be uploaded web-side. If I want to make a playlist of music or video-- it's uploaded to the web, and I can access it in-world.
This makes what I create bi-directional-- something of great importance to the performing musician. Upload media to a player that others can embed on their own sites (or their own profiles), very much a la YouTube, and have it readily available in the world.
Having even a fraction of that group/inventory management inside of SL would be a blessing-- sadly, it's not for a long time to come.
The final point to illustrate is about who is a creator and who is a consumer. It could be argued that in the event of a live concert, there are concert-goers (shut up and dance!!) and the musician and finally, the venue owner (which can very well be one in the same). The *need* for content creator certainly leans toward the musician in this case, while everyone else is there to consume, watch, listen or dance.
The figures aren't a secret that most people in the world consume and a much smaller percentage of the population creates. Forrester Research has yet another testament to this by way of the graphic shown here.
This whole idea is a very early, high level overview of what *could* be. Live broadcasting is on its way as indicated by a brief conversation I had with a VP from Kaneva at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference in New York a couple months ago.
But put those pieces together--- mySpace-like structure to managing media inventory AND community, that is accessible to the outside world AND the in-world world, with pre-fab places to get started. That could be a recipe for expanded success for a musician or band that wants to tackle those new frontiers. Your hair won't necessarily be as hot, but you'll have an infinitely larger amount of control over groups and announcements.
We're not yet at the point where an industrial indie band can perform atop a mech in Battlefield 2142-- but who knows? Second Life, Kaneva, and many others to come-- they might very well change the video game industry to evolve to a social platform. It's the same conversation all over again that we had about blogs and podcasts and videoblogs and of late, Second Life, and that's what excites me the most.
See ya at the show?
I find this when studying Kaneva, one of the other virtual worlds that may surpass There.com to be one of Second Life's major competitors. One of the areas that I see success for Kaneva is with music-- live and otherwise.
But before I go into that, I have to explain a bit about how I have to prepare for the exhibition of Something New: I must know what the criticisms are before they are said (I probably share them too!) and I must understand how people react when presented with Something New. I am aware of the following behaviors:
More often than not, a loyal user is a loytal user-- if something is better, well, frankly, it doesn't matter.
In other cases--and this is especially true for the techie mind--if Something New does not match 'item for item' then it is immediately disregarded as inferior, a waste of time, pointless or, simply, "I don't get it".
There are valid flaws and room to grow in the future. Just because something doesn't work like A,B,C *today*, is not necessarily how it might work in the future.
And naturally, the presence of the strawman will always exist. "It's Windows only, ergo, it sucks for all time!"
Now, with the place settings of expectations neatly arranged at the table, let's talk about Kaneva, another virtual world, that might hold much promise for live (and not live) musicians that currently perform in Second Life.
Kaneva (kaneva.com, windows-only), is curently an interior-only virtual world that feels a bit like There.com. It is in no way as flexible as SL is for content creators, and building is probably one of the more frustrating exercises I've ever engaged in (Second Lifers will be inside Kaneva, most certainly complaining about how crappy their hair is. Trust me, I'm a hair geek. We SO have it better).
One thing that Kaneva does right out of the gate is something Linden Lab is possibly working on for our own grid: a web-based interface to do SOMEthing, although the release date has not been announced. Kaneva's web-based front end is online, active, populated and resembles the architecture of mySpace-- this is important.
Before I go a step further, let me attempt to adjust thinking on mySpace, because there will certainly be an eye-roll or bashing of mySpace. What I look at when I talk about or use mySpace is not the oftentimes *hideous* designs or performance, but the structure of data. Indulge me. :)
If you go to kaneva.com/spin, you'll see my profile-- everything starts with a profile. I can receive private messages there; I can maintain friends; I can blog; I can share media (audio, video and pictures). Other users can comment on my blog; other users can comment on my profile; and most importantly, I can start my own group-- my own community.
When you first start in Kaneva, you are given a place-- an apartment, which can be upgraded later. That's a concept that doesn't exist in Second Life or There. Instead of being on the street, on the beach, in the forest-- you have a roof over your head (amusingly, you can't go outside in Kaneva but hey, you start someplace where you can stash your stuff).
And more importantly, when you click that 'start a community' button on your profile, you are essentially creating a group, complete with the functionalities I mentioned earlier-- blogs for the group, media files just for the group, access control *just for the group*. And that community creation process also generates a community hangout in the world of Kaneva, which, like your apartment, can be upgraded into a conference room, coffee shop, or nightclub.
Now let's talk about inventory inside of Kaneva, at least, the inventory of media--- textures, audio, video, photos. It all starts on the web site-- something which is certainly not foreign to us in the Web 1,2,3,4,5.0 era. If I want to put a texture on something, it has to be uploaded web-side. If I want to make a playlist of music or video-- it's uploaded to the web, and I can access it in-world.
This makes what I create bi-directional-- something of great importance to the performing musician. Upload media to a player that others can embed on their own sites (or their own profiles), very much a la YouTube, and have it readily available in the world.
Having even a fraction of that group/inventory management inside of SL would be a blessing-- sadly, it's not for a long time to come.
The final point to illustrate is about who is a creator and who is a consumer. It could be argued that in the event of a live concert, there are concert-goers (shut up and dance!!) and the musician and finally, the venue owner (which can very well be one in the same). The *need* for content creator certainly leans toward the musician in this case, while everyone else is there to consume, watch, listen or dance.
The figures aren't a secret that most people in the world consume and a much smaller percentage of the population creates. Forrester Research has yet another testament to this by way of the graphic shown here.This whole idea is a very early, high level overview of what *could* be. Live broadcasting is on its way as indicated by a brief conversation I had with a VP from Kaneva at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference in New York a couple months ago.
But put those pieces together--- mySpace-like structure to managing media inventory AND community, that is accessible to the outside world AND the in-world world, with pre-fab places to get started. That could be a recipe for expanded success for a musician or band that wants to tackle those new frontiers. Your hair won't necessarily be as hot, but you'll have an infinitely larger amount of control over groups and announcements.
We're not yet at the point where an industrial indie band can perform atop a mech in Battlefield 2142-- but who knows? Second Life, Kaneva, and many others to come-- they might very well change the video game industry to evolve to a social platform. It's the same conversation all over again that we had about blogs and podcasts and videoblogs and of late, Second Life, and that's what excites me the most.
See ya at the show?
Upgrade of network between Datacenters
Linden Lab has selected Level 3 to provide high speed internet access and Wavelengths via two 10 gigabits per second (GigE) ports, connecting Second Life's data centers in San Francisco and Dallas.
Quote from the Press Release.:
Quote from the Press Release.:
"During the past 15 months, Second Life's population has expanded from 100,000 to more than five million registered users worldwide," said Joe Miller, vice president, Platform and Technology Development for Linden Lab. "Level 3's tier 1 infrastructure and 10 gigabit capacity will help us to enable Second Life's 'Residents' to experience fast, reliable access, and allow us to increase bandwidth as our needs and user growth dictate."We can only hope, this will mean any positive difference for our inworld experience. TP and border crossings might get faster between San Fran and Dallas sims. But likely this more a upgrade in anticipation of further growth of the grid and residents number.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Open Letter to Linden Lab
Dear Linden Lab,This is posted in support of projectopenletter.
In the past eighteen months, Second Life has expanded, growing from a small community of early adopters to a platform supporting millions of users. Linden Lab has created a world that inspires a deep level of passion in its users and provides unprecedented opportunities to share creatively, socially, and financially.
With explosive levels of growth often come unexpected problems. In keeping with your company's policy and rich history of resident involvement, we the undersigned would like to take this opportunity to address some concerns that we feel have gone unanswered for too long.
There are some consistent, ongoing problems that are getting worse under heavy load, not better, and are not simply irritants but problems that are causing financial loss in some cases, which is unacceptable. Here is a brief list of the main concerns:
* Inventory loss - this is a devastating problem that is worsening. We have no ability to protect our own inventories through backups, and are trusting you to protect that data. This is the highest priority. Sensible inventory limits (on non-verified accounts only), combined with better management tools and ways to protect our inventory ourselves would help to mitigate the problem as well. Regardless, this cannot continue - we will not accept financial loss as a feature of Second Life. It is your responsibility as service provider to ensure our data is not lost, and you are failing us.
* Problems with Find and Friends List - we continue to see search outages on a far too regular basis. It is bad enough trying to get anywhere without being able to use search, but many users are also paying money for classified ads. Our friends lists just do not work reliably any longer, after years without an issue with them. If America Online/MSN/Yahoo can provide presence information for hundreds of millions of users, surely there is a way to make our friends lists work again.
* Grid stability and performance - teleports fail quite regularly, especially under heavy load. Attachments end up in places they did not start out in, and sim performance varies wildly. None of this makes for a very pleasant experience for users. Long promised improvement to physics and scripting would help dramatically to reduce these problems, but there are a lot of other scalability issues as well. It often feels like the grid is coming apart at the seams. The promised use of limiting logins of non-verified accounts during peak load has been severely lacking. This would be an effective interim solution to load issues, but Linden Lab seems unwilling to use it.
* Build tool problems - the importance of build tools that actually work as promised cannot be overstated enough - we rely on them to create content. Prim drift, disappearing prims, imprecise placement, problems with linking and other issues with the tools need to be addressed. Too much time is being spent trying to work around the problems.
* Transaction problems - inventory deliveries are failing with an alarming (and annoying) frequency, leaving merchants with the burden of replacing missing content and having to try to confim the transaction in the first place. We trust that our L$ balances are accurate, but given recent problems, that is a cause for concern as well, and one we place our full trust in you to ensure its accuracy.
We remain fully supportive of Second Life and are more than willing to continue doing our part to help, but our confidence is steadily being eroded due to a general lack of communication and the apparent failure to successfully address the many issues detailed above. What we are asking for is that these problems are addressed immediately, ahead of new features, and that we are able to see tangible improvements. We accept that this will not happen overnight but it also cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely either.
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.
Sincerely,
Frans Charming/Jeroen Frans
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Speak up.
Cristiano Diaz(creator of slpics) has written a open letter to Linden Lab, to address the continuing issues with Second Life. The goal is that many people sign it and on Monday post the letter on their blogs/websites, to give LL a signal. While i do think that LL is aware of the issues, I think it is important that we use this opportunity to express ourselves. Fixes won't happen because of it overnight, but I think it will force LL to give a more in depth response about what they are doing to fix these problems. Do we have to wait on a entire rewrite of the back end, or are there fixes on the way in a short time frame of a month or 2.
http://www.projectopenletter.com
http://www.projectopenletter.com
Friday, April 27, 2007
Sexy Curves
I haven't blogged in a while, but I thought this was worthy of a NEWS FLASH. It looks as if a new type of prim is on the way: the Sculpted Prim. There's info about it over here on the Second Life Wiki: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims
Cubes with rounded corners, at last! It would take a long time to really think through all of the ramifications of this great new tool. But just think how many prims one could save, creating even simple shapes like rounded cubes . . .
Looks as if I'll have to get Maya. I'm always a bit bummed out when I have to use a tool other than Second Life itself to create content, because I like my virtual workspace in SL. I like shoving prims around the surface of the frozen pond between the cabin and the covered bridge on my snowy Second Life parcel, with my friends working around me and joking in Skype. Looking at a modeling program running in a window somehow just isn't the same. But I'll still be virtually "with" my friends/coworkers, and it'll be worth it to build even cooler stuff.
I wonder how things built with the old prims are going to look next to things made out of these sculpted prims. I usually design things so they are pretty compatible with the SL building system, so I think most of my stuff will probably look all right. But wow, there's going to be such a temptation to redo things!
Hope they get the Blender exporter working pretty fast, because Autodesk's Maya costs a pretty penny, and I would hate to see a lot of folks unable to make use of the new prims. There's a free Personal Learning Edition of Maya available over here for anyone who wants to give it a try: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7639525. It's free to use for non-commercial applications, but there's a watermark, and I don't know how that might mess up a sculpted prim. And I don't know if anyone is entirely clear on where to draw the line between Second Life businesses as a game and Second Life businesses that are RL businesses.
MORE NEWS: Torley Linden just blogged about the new prims, with a bunch of info and images: http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/04/27/the-advent-of-an-illustrious-age-of-sculpted-prims/. Included is a link to this amazing video: http://s3.amazonaws.com/Media_Archive/Videos/Sculpted-prim.mov .
Cubes with rounded corners, at last! It would take a long time to really think through all of the ramifications of this great new tool. But just think how many prims one could save, creating even simple shapes like rounded cubes . . .
Looks as if I'll have to get Maya. I'm always a bit bummed out when I have to use a tool other than Second Life itself to create content, because I like my virtual workspace in SL. I like shoving prims around the surface of the frozen pond between the cabin and the covered bridge on my snowy Second Life parcel, with my friends working around me and joking in Skype. Looking at a modeling program running in a window somehow just isn't the same. But I'll still be virtually "with" my friends/coworkers, and it'll be worth it to build even cooler stuff.
I wonder how things built with the old prims are going to look next to things made out of these sculpted prims. I usually design things so they are pretty compatible with the SL building system, so I think most of my stuff will probably look all right. But wow, there's going to be such a temptation to redo things!
Hope they get the Blender exporter working pretty fast, because Autodesk's Maya costs a pretty penny, and I would hate to see a lot of folks unable to make use of the new prims. There's a free Personal Learning Edition of Maya available over here for anyone who wants to give it a try: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7639525. It's free to use for non-commercial applications, but there's a watermark, and I don't know how that might mess up a sculpted prim. And I don't know if anyone is entirely clear on where to draw the line between Second Life businesses as a game and Second Life businesses that are RL businesses.
MORE NEWS: Torley Linden just blogged about the new prims, with a bunch of info and images: http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/04/27/the-advent-of-an-illustrious-age-of-sculpted-prims/. Included is a link to this amazing video: http://s3.amazonaws.com/Media_Archive/Videos/Sculpted-prim.mov .
Monday, April 23, 2007
XS4ALLmost all. [update]
A big group of Dutch Second Life residents haven't been able to use the grid for the last 2 weeks. Specifically customers of the Dutch ISP XS4ALL.
Menno Ophelia is one of the affected and he told me: "...basically i can login, but within a minute I can't move my avatar anymore, quickly followed after that ims stop working and then the mini map turns red and I get disconnected. This is going on for over a week now..."
The problem is big enough that a story about it appeared on the Dutch news site nu.nl, they report that the problem is somewhere in the USA. According to the reports on the Jira, something is wrong in the connection between Sprint and XS4ALL. A more in dept explanation can be found in the comment of Jira. When i write this 111 people voted on the issue, making it the 2nd highest issue on Jira, showing that a large enough number of people see it as a big problem.
So far the problem seems out of the control of Linden Lab to fix. Hopefully they will be able to work with Sprint and find a solution. This reminds of the email problem between Dreamhost and LL, which seemed only to get fixed after a lot of people complained about it to both sides. So speak up if you can't connect and hopefully it will get you, Menno and my other fellow Dutchies back on the grid. They are being missed.
Update: The problem only occurs on sims that are located in San Francisco, and not on those in Texas. You can use http://neighbours.maxcase.info/ to see where your favorite sims are located. The info might be old or incorrect, ask a buddy to grab a hud and go visit the sims so the info gets updated.
Menno Ophelia is one of the affected and he told me: "...basically i can login, but within a minute I can't move my avatar anymore, quickly followed after that ims stop working and then the mini map turns red and I get disconnected. This is going on for over a week now..."
The problem is big enough that a story about it appeared on the Dutch news site nu.nl, they report that the problem is somewhere in the USA. According to the reports on the Jira, something is wrong in the connection between Sprint and XS4ALL. A more in dept explanation can be found in the comment of Jira. When i write this 111 people voted on the issue, making it the 2nd highest issue on Jira, showing that a large enough number of people see it as a big problem.
So far the problem seems out of the control of Linden Lab to fix. Hopefully they will be able to work with Sprint and find a solution. This reminds of the email problem between Dreamhost and LL, which seemed only to get fixed after a lot of people complained about it to both sides. So speak up if you can't connect and hopefully it will get you, Menno and my other fellow Dutchies back on the grid. They are being missed.
Update: The problem only occurs on sims that are located in San Francisco, and not on those in Texas. You can use http://neighbours.maxcase.info/ to see where your favorite sims are located. The info might be old or incorrect, ask a buddy to grab a hud and go visit the sims so the info gets updated.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Humpty Dumpty (Alternative Ending) [UPDATE]
To those who have been asking about the status of my SL inventory loss (last Friday, a number of us experienced total inventory loss), I am happy to say that I am largely back in business. As far as I can tell at an initial review, it looks like LL managed to recover everything except for textures in my Textures folder which had not yet been placed into sub-folders [UPDATE: see below]. This happens to be a lot of textures, since I was desperately in need of a housecleaning session, but so be it. I have my new book and my Starax wand back, so I'm happy. It was definitely an interesting and frustrating experience going a week without inventory -- I didn't realize quite how often I dip into it until the option was gone.
UPDATE: my missing textures have been restored, so I am happy to report that as far as I can tell I have a full inventory recovery.
UPDATE: my missing textures have been restored, so I am happy to report that as far as I can tell I have a full inventory recovery.
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