Clicking the yellow prompt leads to the white popup which encourages users to check the knowledge base. Why when clicking the orange doesn’t the second window provide the knowledge base information? Have you ever visited the Second Life Knowledge Base and tried to use it to find something? I tried various different search queries to locate more details about why I was seeing this message yesterday and couldn’t find an answer.

Today the message isn’t appearing, so whatever it was, it’s been fixed. Any ideas what this message is about? Yes, I understand it’s partly self-explanatory: different versions of SL software are running, but what does that mean to me the user? How does this impact or change my experience? Am I open to beta-like problems under server version x vs. y?

This will probably be of most interest to multiplayer game developer readers, but I found a lot of the information interesting and wished every MMO worked like Dungeon Siege with no pauses or loading screens. The phrase continuous play is defined in the paper as:

All map-specific game content, such as geometry, scripts, and textures, is loaded on demand in the background as the game plays out, and not preloaded all at once at the start of the map … Designers can create rich and dramatic worlds with a high density and variety of placed objects, huge vertical distances, spiral staircases, lots of fat textures packed tight. The density of textures and objects is a critical part of the “look” of Dungeon Siege … Multiple players can simultaneously move through any part of the world, playing together, in bands, or solo, joining and leaving the game on the fly, in a client-server setup … It must be possible to teleport from one part of the map to another in a “continuous” way, i.e. without stopping gameplay. This was an unexpected and scary (but critical) feature that we hacked in at the last minute.

No loading screens? Let’s say that again: no loading screens! I’ve seen Dungeon Siege at the store a few times and thought about buying. The website rather annoyingly prompts you to verify your age twice before you get to the screen shown above. I was expecting nude pictures or something more graphic than a map after that much blocking.

When I looked at Dungeon Siege RPG at Amazon (affiliate) I found the following description:

Take away inventory wrangling, lame shopkeepers, limited storage space, hunting for dropped loot, and loading screens, and what’s left? Pure RPG goodness. Relieved of the baggage found in most RPGs, the player can focus on exploring, fighting, working with party members, character advancement, and experiencing the classic tale of a farm kid’s quest for glory. –Mike Fehlauer

Now here I am wanting to try this game out on Thanksgiving. Is it available to buy online and download, or do you have to go the retailer route? The company behind Dungeon Siege, Gas Powered Games, offers a free download demo. Downloading!

Any VTOR readers fans of Dungeon Siege?

Tim Johansson, core Opera technology developer, explains Opera’s experimental build support for SVG with the canvas:

The canvas is more or less a bitmap that you can draw on using JavaScript. The actual drawing is done by a (rendering) context. The specification includes a 2d context that must be implemented, but also allows browser vendors to add their own contexts. When I first implemented the canvas tag in Opera I though it would be cool to have a 3d context, so I added one.

You can download Opera 9.5 experimental build from the Opera labs. Once that’s in play check out the Tim’s example rotating cube example and Mathieu ‘p01′ Henri’s Snake 3D game (pictured above).

Note grafio in the comments area speculating that Microsoft will never implement OpenGL in Internet Explorer. Duly noted, but I wouldn’t say never. Microsoft abandoned IE7 at one point and then picked up the pieces with a mea culpa when Firefox started to gather momentum.

And I thought… wait a second, are you serious? That’s some terrible code work then. Apparently when you add a person into a group, it doesn’t automatically assign titles. You can’t do mass conversions or additions because each one has to be done individually and applied to the right sub-section of the group. That seemed absolutely ridiculous to me.

For version 1.18.3(5) of Second Life, as of current, there shouldn’t be this type of bad code work for things as easy as group listings and titles. Here’s the thing. The fact that you’re designing the group listing around a “group” should have triggered the fact that owners of groups would have to manipulate massive amounts of users within the groups for whatever reason. So there should be a “select all” or some sort of function similar to multi-user selections and applying the same change to everyone. The way it’s written currently, it’s like the person that was in charge of that section only thought about how a user interacts with the group, and not so much on group administration.

Talk about oops and bad design. Especially at the level of maturity of the product for such a simplistic thing.

I just tried this out, encountering difficulty getting in (maybe the server is getting pounded?) and found it way too slow to be able to do much. Not meant as a slam because Katharine clearly admits this is an early work in progress. Here’s a screenshot:

Impressive for a single developer, never mind the fact that she’s only 15. Ajaxian has plenty more screenshots to look at. Might want to check out when the rest of the world isn’t using. Keep in mind if you try with one of your ALTs that your username/password is moving across Katharine’s server. She claims she isn’t sniffing them but you’d be best advised not to use an important alt.

Just imagine what kinds of creations we’ll see when (if?) the server side of Second Life is opened up.

There have been numerous battle cries against the beleaguered Second Life, most recently from Kaneva, but so far nobody has replaced Second Life. There really hasn’t been anything comparable.

Metaplace sounds close. It’s the brainchild of Raph Koster’s San Diego-based startup, Areae currently in limited alpha testing. It won’t be in open beta until Spring 2008.

An intriguing, detailed post on Gigaom explains:

Metaplace … is “A Web browser with virtual world capability.” And it’s a browser that comes with its own tool kit, for people who want to build worlds, and a community/marketplace where developers can give away or sell their templates, scripts, and so on, hosted on the Areae network.

The idea of not having to download and run a program to experience the virtual world is appealing. I’ve noticed an uptick in web-based MMO since our group started this blog. The ability to run Metaverse on a mobile phone (iPhone?), PDA, gaming, music and other portable devices is attractive to both developers and gamers.

Scaling, oh yeah
Scalability is the reason this writer is most looking for some real competition for Second Life. Something web-based should be better suited to handle scaling issues than a setups like SL.

Speaking of scaling and competition. One of the alleged SL competitors to watch, Outback Online which claims to be able to support 10,000 avatars on a single server is still MIA.

Developers
For developer readers, Metaplace is using the Lua programming language.

As part of the Second Life Birthday celebration, this libsecondlife event is an open discussion about libsecondlife. It will start with a short introduction and background information and then everyone will be free to discuss any aspect of libsecondlife.

Open Source, The GPL and Second Life
25 June 3:00 to 4:00 PM SLT

Gareth Ellison will be discussing how LL’s recent GPLing of the source code is starting to affect the community, both technical and non-technical members.

This talk will be general discussion about open source in SL and what future might hold, and the merits of the different FLOSS licenses will be discussed along with some SL-related projects which have been generated by the community.

“It is my firm belief that in opening up the viewer and supporting open source in general, LL have laid out the path for Second Life and systems based upon it to expand in a way other 3D worlds would never have dreamed possible,” stated Gareth.

Yesterday was the day new avatars came to Kaneva!

They can actually be made to look somewhat better than these examples, by working with a few clickable arrows and a slider or two, but much diversity is still allowing user created content.

I logged into the Kaneva’s world upon completion of the download and nearly had a heart attack when I reached my apartment and found every texture I had placed had been replaced with the texture of a new Kaneva T-shirt. Thank goodness I lost server connection and had to log back in again…. and my L.S.U. Textures were back in place.

I decided to go to the mall and spend some of my reward credits on all the new men’s clothes, as I do not particularly enjoying wearing the same thing everybody around me is wearing. I teleported to the mall, which only had 58 people in it when I arrived, only to move about three steps then freeze up and after a few moments lost access to the server again.

At this point I figured I may as well check on the Kaneva web page to see if they were mentioning anything going on with the servers. Couldn’t find out anything about the wold servers, but found this shopping catalog page, where there were listed samples of the new women’s clothing.

They also have pictured in the shopping catalog pictures of the empty apartments so you might get a very limited idea on what you are wanting to buy for an apartment…. hardly anyone would want the closet they start you off in.

I wanted to go back to the mall and buy some clothes, and I tried again.  I was heading for a clothing store when I noticed there was a Kaneva Bank over in one of the corners of the center of the mall.  I went to see how much Kaneva Credits were going to cost, but found it was a depository for items you didn’t want to carry around with you, rather than a place to exchange dollars for credits and visa-versa.

I turned and headed for the clothing store  and again loss the server.  When I tried to get back into Kaneva I received an error message…. basically showing me the servers were down.

I can only assume that the good folks at Kaneva are pulling their hair out about now… trying to work out their “bugs”.  I will make an attempt here in a little while to go back into Kaneva and see what has changed, and try to buy some clothes with these worthless reward credits I have.

In any case, so as you can see… there’s some gestures trying to load. No clue what it is or what the deal is with it. There’s no way to actually kill them or disable those particular gestures either.

So after about five to ten minutes, your client blows up. Just dies. Kaput. Blam. Pop. Boom. nyah, nyah nyah nyah….. Batman! Oh wait.

Reproducible? Definitely. Just take a look at what happens right before it dies. What the heck is this?

And I seriously doubt that these two fixes should have messed with gestures:

• VWR-830 Muting Residents and\or Objects does not work reliably
  
• MISC-157 Searching for groups fails with certain keywords

I mean, check those clouds out.

Linden Lab, you really came through when it comes to making the environments a joy to be in and to not produce the snowglobe effect. I seriously thought that this implementation would have taken a lot longer due to the acquisition of Windward Mark Interactive happening only last week, but it seems that there were already plans in the works.

Congratulations on your fine work in the First Look viewer (Mac version seen here on your left). But don’t get too comfortable. I’m still ready to rock’n'roll on some of those bugs that are still out there and there’s still a lot of refining work along with bug fixes that need to happen before you convince this guy that you’re game to play in the big leagues. But be assured that this was a huge step in the right direction. Huge. Enormous. Gigantic. Gi-normous!

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled programming while I stare at the sky for a while, and watch all of the flags that I see blow in different directions.