Filed under: Second Life

This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're having our monthly roundup of news items. Things that got missed, things that didn't make the cut, things that got buried, and things that really should have gotten your attention anyway.

In a sense, script memory limitations aren't coming to Second Life; they already exist.

What's going on is the process of Linden Lab making those limits predictable, and setting things up in such a way that script memory usage doesn't cause simulator processes to thrash madly (from paging memory to and from disk).

There's some interesting side-effects emerging from the overall prototype implementation, however. Mono (and, eventually C# when or if it becomes implemented as a scripting language) look like the losers.

This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're asking "Why virtual environments?" – Not why are they anything specifically, but just why.

Depending on your definition of virtual environments, people have been building them and using them for decades now, since before the Web; since before the advent of the personal computer. To make a virtual space from a real space, or to fabricate an entirely original virtual space from whole cloth – what's driving that and where is that going?

This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're going to take a selection of reader questions that we've received in comments and in the virtual mailbag and do our best to offer up some useful answers. Join us as we whirl through the mail. Not surprisingly, the two most frequently asked questions involve the demise of virtual environment, There.com.

The Imprudence project has released version 1.3(beta 1) of their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers, and the only third-party viewer that we're certain complies with all of the source and asset licensing.

This edition merges all things Imprudence with the codebase for 1.23, providing one of the fastest and smoothest viewers currently available that we're aware of, along with the usual featureful experience.

This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're looking at virtual environments (and their subset of virtual worlds) as products and platforms.

As their developers and operators seek to grow and mature their markets, they carry the risk of rendering themselves irrelevant to the very customers that they court.

The hallmark of a good license is that it is clear, easy to understand and unambiguous. The gold-standard for a good contract is that it is all of the above and provides all parties with equal amounts of protection. There are bonus points for not conflicting with rights guaranteed by law, or with other prerequisite licenses or agreements.

Linden Lab's Third Party Viewer (TPV) policies, as published on Tuesday, regrettably reflect none of these ideals. We'd go so far as to say that it's the worst day's work that we've seen come out of the Lab to-date. So much so that almost immediately after publishing them the Lab has sent them back to legal for both clarification and rewriting.

Over about the last 60-90 minutes, Tom Hale's been delivering a keynote at the SL Pro! conference held in Second Life. There are multiple hefty announcements from Linden Lab involved, and some of that should be reaching the official Second Life blogs as you read this.

Golly, what do we have among all of this? We've got the Second Life 2.0 viewer public beta, which should be available right now. We've got the new third-party viewer registry and third-party policies being announced today; We've got changes in the names of content-ratings. We've got the official release of open source viewer Snowglobe and the announcement of Snowglobe 2; and all capped off with a slew of supporting FAQs, guides, video tutorials, wiki pages and what-have-you!

Sharp-eyed Massively readers spotted Linden Lab Brighton office staffers hard at work shifting premises over the weekend, with everything being moved upstairs. Was this some sort of fiery, demonstrative protest where office furniture would be flung from the roof? Could it have been some penthouse variant on the yard-sale, and we could get a deal on that slightly balky laser-printer that we've had our eye on for a while?

Alas, neither was actually the case. The Lab was moving to larger premises within Brighton's prominent Tower Point building.

Over the last few weeks, Linden Lab staff have been talking about a few upcoming Second Life projects during their in-world office-hours sessions. Now the Lab has always been quick to stress that the accuracy and reliability of information obtained through those venues is questionable, and that we shouldn't assume that anything said at them is actually accurate.

With that in mind, we went back to the Lab about several identifiable (or at least apparent) projects to get the skinny on them and find out what's actually happening with them, and where they're at.

This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're taking a look at the vigilante side of intellectual property rights.

For many, it seems like a good idea to mass-report or name-and-shame intellectual property rights violators whenever and wherever you see them ... but is it really?

Linden Lab's pushing Valentine's day in Second Life pretty hard this year, particularly the commercial aspects of it. In fact, it feels like it's being pushed hard enough that it has taken on a slightly creepy and embarrassing air, rather like that guy at the Christmas party who won't shut up about the mistletoe.

Nevertheless, the Lab's implemented an open beta of product wishlists on their Web-based shopping portal, Xstreet. There doesn't seem to be much that is overtly difficult, weird or special about the implementation, though we'd question the wisdom of launching a public beta of the feature right on the verge of the heavily-promoted Valentine's day. Far better, we'd think, to let it settle a while first and get the inevitable kinks out of it before a major commercial date rolls around.

Linden Lab is in the throes of closing the official Second Life forums and is creating alternative discussion spaces in its Clearspace blog/forum hybrid.

According to previous figures from Linden Lab staff, fewer than 700 of 18.1 million registered Second Life accounts ever participated in the official forums provided by the Lab. The partial closure of many of the most heavily trafficked areas of those forums when Lab announcements were migrated back out to the blog in 2006 did little to boost participation in the official forums.

The official vbulletin-based forums "did not scale" according to Linden Lab and were difficult to maintain, even for such modest usage levels as they experienced.

This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're going to take a selection of reader questions that we've received in comments and in the virtual mailbag and do our best to offer up some useful answers. Join us as we whirl through the mail.

There's a been talk going around among users that a Linden Dollar bonus made to users that sign up for Second Life premium accounts is not paid to users who are upgrading an account from basic to premium. That is, it was said that only users creating a new premium account got the bonus and users who upgraded did not, despite Linden Lab's advertising material apparently promoting it for both.

A number of you wrote in asking us about that yesterday, and we contacted Linden Lab for you to get an answer one way or another. That line of questioning bore some definitive fruit.