Massively^™

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• Give us your feedback -- Tell us what we're doing right, doing wrong, or not doing enough of.
• Augmentation vs Immersion -- You know what? It's not about that.
• Real recessions, virtual economies -- Does one impact the other?
• ION'08: User-generated content -- Second Life and Pirates.
• Half a grid restart -- When in doubt, add a backup asset system.
• Mono very soon -- Could arrive on the main grid in less than a month.
• Official response on megaprims -- Well, finally.
• MacBook SL -- MMOSX takes a look at MacBook Second Life performance.
• Aimee's sandbox for sale -- We're not sure of the bat and ball are included.

The finalization of the this week's Second Life server update Thursday morning reinstated the prim-creation size-constraints that prevent larger than normal prims (megaprims) from being created by users. Linden Lab officially confirmed today that it was a bug and not an intentional feature (While Andrew Linden had suggested this at his in-world office-hours earlier in the week, we've been repeatedly advised that statements by individual staff at such meetings do not necessarily constitute or reflect official policy or positions of Linden Lab).

Furthermore, Linden Lab confirmed that account sanctions still apply to users who are using megaprims in mainland simulators, though they are permitted for use in simulators within private estates, except where disallowed by the land covenants or owner.

Depending on how the new code travels through the QA process, Mono could come to the main Second Life grid within the next four weeks, says Linden Lab.

Mono (an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET) is to be deployed as an additional, faster script runtime engine that should greatly speed many common scripting operations, increase stability and reduce load. Linden Lab says that it is unlikely that we'll see Mono deployed within two weeks, but within four is certainly not out of the ballpark.

Currently Mono is available for testing on the Beta grid, and scripters should take the opportunity to test their scripts there and get bug-reports filed sooner, rather than later.

The new script runtime engine does not add (and is not presently intended to add) support for any languages other than the already existing LSL.

Between 5AM and 10AM SLT (US Pacific time) on Friday, 16 May, Linden Lab is planning to restart approximately half of the Second Life grid simulators, in order to connect those simulators to a backup asset system. Why only half? Well, the other half got the treatment in this-morning's rolling restart.

The asset system, as you may have noticed, has been plagued with issues since November 2007, and the recent vendor-provided fixes have not improved matters. In fact, there's indications that there may be increased instability as a result.

MMOS X is a bi-weekly column dedicated solely to gaming on the Macintosh natively. "Running Boot Camp or Parallels" is not an option here. This column is for people who want to get the most out of their Mac gaming, as meager as it is.

There aren't a lot of MMOs that fall into the "I've got a few minutes and want to goof around in" category. Second Life to me is one. Sure, we can argue the "Is SL an MMO argument" while we're taking a break from the "Which is better: Mac or PC?" argument. For me, SL is good for that hour I've got to kill because I got to my night class early, or I'm sitting in bed with my laptop and my RSS feeds are up to date. Really, some days I'll play anything to avoid a daily quest.

The gotcha is, when I got my laptop I had a hard time convincing my wife err myself that I needed to blow almost two grand on a laptop. I still don't have too much buyer's regret over my regular Macbook. Games aside, the three apps that do most of my heavy lifting are Twitteriffic, Mail, and Scrivener (these days, it seems like I write more than game). World of Warcraft runs OK on it, but, lordy, does Second Life crawl on it. I'm not sure which gets better FPS: Second Life running on a Macbook, or frozen molasses rolling uphill. Yeah, I know, the integrated video on the 'book isn't supported and that's what I get for running unsupported hardware and I shoud be using a Macbook Pro. Duly noted.

That said, an unscientific study conducted at my school's cafeteria and library, taken randomly on Mondays between 4 and 5 pm shows a heck of a lot more college kids sprung for the cheapo 'books. Second Life could be considered a good game for non-gamers in the way The Sims was considered a good game for people that hated Quake. So, lets take a good, hard look at what's involved with Second Life on Macbooks, what you can do, and what realities your going to face running SL on a non-Pro 'book.

Current TV viewer and contributor, Vasilis Siskos, created this look into the virtual economy of Second Life. Curious as to whether the real life recession trickled down into the virtual world, he asked some experts, including Robert Bloomfield, of Metanomics, John Zdanowski, or Zee Linden, the CFO of Linden Lab, and Alliez Mysterio, of d'Alliez Estates. They had some interesting insight on the situation, but ultimately felt that it wouldn't be a problem, as crafty residents would find what worked better next and adapt.

[Thanks, Kai!]

If you have machinima or movie suggestions from any MMO, please send them to machinima AT massively DOT com, along with any information you might have about them.

Since around the middle of 2006 a debate has swirled back and forth, over Immersion vs Augmentation, sparked by Henrik Bennetsen. Discussion groups in Second Life have wrangled over it, blogs have argued the point in no less than three directions, papers have been presented on the topic. We've been a part of that ourselves, in the past.

The curious thing about the debate, though, was just how spectacularly varied the positions were, and how none of them seemed to form divisional boundaries-- a very curious thing in what you'd expect to be such a polarized topic.

And then, just recently, we finally realized ourselves that the reason was that the terms of reference were essentially flawed and as a result, more than half the material written on the topic is invalid for all practical purposes.

Arguably the most recognizable Second Life resident from the outside, with her blue-and-purple butterfly wings, Aimee Weber has made a name for herself with her metaverse development company Aimee Weber Studios. She's become so successful, in fact, that she no longer has the time to play on her own private island, so she's selling it. In a statement to Massively, she says:

"I used to love filling the sim with half-completed projects, fun little experiments in unusual texturing, experiments of my stream of consciousness, simulations of RL places I like to hang out in so that I could have virtual getaways. As Second Life became a profession I've found I had less and less time for such indulgences. SL is less a kiddy sandbox these days, and more like a serious construction zone."

Aimee takes care of the transfer fee, and you get full ownership of her jungle retreat. Such a deal! Interested residents can contact her in-world.

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• ION'08 Redefining virtual worlds for the mass market -- Are you a mass market or are you a mass?
• NASA CoLab -- Collaborating for space and technology.
• Flap your lips with the upcoming RC7 -- Lip-synching didn't work so well for all those pop-stars. Better for you?

Bridie Linden has updated the development roadmap (actually, it's not a roadmap so much, as a set of directions, but bear with us) for upcoming releases. The release cycle for the 1.20 viewer is going to be longer than usual, expecting to end in June.

The map is a bit tangled, with a commingling of server-side and viewer-side changes kind of munged together, but there's a new feature in the long, long list of bugfixes and bughunting tweaks: New feature: VWR-4794: Basic voice lipsync for voice visualization. Now that's going to be interesting.

Viewer 1.20RC7 and Simulator 1.22 are both expected to see the light next week.

Nothing much new in SLS1.22, except work to further ease load on the asset servers (if some of you are winding up at infohubs and welcome-areas instead of at home, or getting teleport routing failure messages, those are a part of this work), and code to help identify possible failure points in other systems.

We've wanted to visit NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) for years, but haven't previously had the opportunity. Some of us live on the wrong continent to do so, for one thing. We've visited NASA now however, and you can too. NASA has a presence in Second Life.

NASA created the CoLab Island to enable 'co-working and project incubation ... for NASA staff and the entrepreneurial technology community'. There's a bunch more marketer-speak on their 'NASA CoLab SL Project Overview' notecard, but the English form of it is that they want to talk to us, and want us all to talk to them.

What's a virtual world? Why do we even call them virtual worlds when we could easily call them digital worlds, or just simply, worlds? This was just one of the many interesting topics discussed at ION 08 this year in a panel entitled, "Redefining Virtual Worlds for Mass Markert Consumption" which is quite the mouthful. So lets put things in a more understandable -- and far more interesting -- perspective.

Whether you're talking about Club Penguin, Gaia Online or Second Life the truth of the mater is that these "worlds" are here to stay and they all share similarities -- social interaction. Not only are they here to stay, but they've only just begun to grow as a market. Which is why this panel was all the more interesting. The panel includes Erik Bethke (GoPets Ltd), John K. Bates (Mindark/Entropia Universe), Craig Sherman (Gaia Online), Rob Lanphier (Linden Lab/Second Life) and was moderated by David Elchoness (Association of Virtual Worlds).

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• Linden Lab moves to block megaprim creation -- Bug, not feature.