This week we discuss Linden Lab’s acquisition of LittleTextPeople, new products in development at the Lab, ISM’s return to Second Life, privacy issues & more!
This week’s topics include:
- Pathfinding Experiments Being Conducted in Second Life
- Honour McMillan’s experience with pathfinding in SL
- Loki Elliot’s pathfinding tests
- Nalates’ update on SL animation changes
- Linden Lab Acquires Game Studio LittleTextPeople
- About Galatea
- Play Galatea
- SL is Barbies meets Legos?
- Rod Humble Drops Hints About Linden’s New Projects
- OpenSim’s Top Grid To Purge 50%+ Regions Due to Inactivity
- A Second Look at Second Life
- SL’s Spaceflight Museum Returned to the Grid
- Responding to last week’s comments
- First Kickstarter Project to Raise $2 Million
- Project Avatar
- Mobile Internet devices will outnumber humans this year
- Why Most People Say They’re Addicted to the Internet
- Websites Can Now Block Pinning
- Social Networks Can’t Be Forced to Monitor/Filter to Prevent Infringement
- Google’s New Privacy Policy
- Flufee on a Meshion – Episode 11: Ladies Men
- MMM12 Early Entry Press Application
- Joshua Bell in the DC subway
Guests:
William Reed Seal-Foss (Reed Steamroller) is a 3D artist and virtual world content creator for Sand Castle Studios, LLC.
Bernhard Drax (Draxtor Despres) is a musician, new media producer, and machinima journalist.
Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz, formerly Qarl Linden) is visual effects artist, software developer, and interactive designer extraordinaire.
Thank you to our sponsor, Pretty Feet!
OMG! I had to stop the podcast and comment on the animation format thing. Anim files are nifty, that’s about it. It’s something to play with not spend precious coding time on for a corporation. Custom arbitrary bones would be FAR more useful than anything you could do with anim files. If anything, the focus of so many on anim files just pisses me off, because it is so shortsighted. It’s a small group of people who like to make character that are incompatible with all other animations in SL. This is not something any1 should consider a smart move. Incompatibility is not a bonus, ever. This is such a waste of LL’s time. I can’t even believe people focus on this crap when something like custom bones would completely eliminated an anim files usefulness.
On a similar topic, if and when LL does work on custom bones, I would not advise people to just create their own skeleton from top to bottom. Again, this makes your character incompatible with other aspects of SL. The way I hope it will work, is that you just create bones to attach to the SL skeleton. So, in the end, we could have freestanding objects with skeletons, even NPCs, but you can also take these objects and attach them to ourselves.
From an animators standpoint, incompatibility is a huge problem. We have people that are great avatar creators, but then they want this custom skeleton, which only they can animate, cause they are the only person with the rig. These creators don’t even have motion capture system. So they end up making stiff 2004 animations for an otherwise kickass avatar. Some do very well with the animations, but they are still not motion capture. In SL, we have different people with different talents. Many times, creators get so shortsighted, they can’t see the overall picture. So many creators make avatars that do not utilize the talents of the communitity. Please, let’s let the avatar makers do their magic, and the animators do their magic, and the set designers do their magic, and the clothing designers do their magic, and so on, AND IT ALL WORK TOGETHER.
Really great insight. After reading it.. I couldn’t agree more!
Dear Draxtor,
every episode I’m getting somewhat upset at your unfounded and uneducated comments, but in this episode, you definitely made me angry. Linden Lab made an offer to educational institutions at a certain price, the institutions accepted that (of course expecting the offer to remain at the same level in the future) and planned and calculated accordingly. They put lots of effort into making their sims useful in SL and promoting it to their students, getting them involved and excited about SL. And then, the company they all relied on decides to simply double the prices for them, without offering anything extra. Why would you *not* be upset being treated like that? Or actually, if you think that’s fair, I think I have a virtual bridge in Grignano to sell.
As a result, many educators find that this price change blows their budget out of proportion and are back at square one, looking for a new platform (which – more often than not – is OpenSim), try to learn how to use the platform, how to bring whatever they can salvage from SL to OpenSim, try to get their students excited *again* about this new platform, and deal with all the setbacks it brings. Just today, there’s been yet another educator on an OpenSim mailing list, asking for ways to bring objects he had custom made for himself in SL into OpenSim, and there’s plenty of blogposts by educators to read about this as well, if you were interested. But then, as you said, you don’t really care.
So Vanish, for you, the anger stems from Linden Lab taking away the discount after educators had already formed their budgets and planned on having it which forced you to look at other options and basically start from scratch? Am I understandingly that correctly? What, if anything, could Linden Lab do to fix their broken relationship with educators?
Well, my anger stems from Draxtor’s impertinent ignorance, but as far as educators are concerned, I think that ship has sailed. But yes, if anything, the Lab should stand by its original offer and at least give grandfathered discounts to those who had it before. At this point I’m not even sure it will bring anyone back, since those that have left are by now accommodated with OpenSim and can very well do the math themselves. Here they get at least 75% feature parity with SL at 10% the prices; I don’t think LL can beat that.
What people expect is to be entertained, first and foremost. When these same people, that are programmed this way, walk into SL. It is not what they expect. To this day, finding any areas that are there explicitedly to entertain in a quick and easy way are rare. It complex, and most still aren’t experienced enough in programs to just jump right in. This is changing tho. Especially in the younger crowds. As more in the world are used to using programs like Photoshop, or any other program to create with, SL will continue to be the place they will choose to play it because they will prefer to engage with everything, instead of chosen paths created by game designers. We are still a bit ahead of our time here.