Amazin' 3D

Even as busy with building as I've been (my apologies for the dearth of recent posts) I still try to keep up with news, with particular attention to Apple products. Most newsworthy of late is the Safari 4 Web browser βeta (Web) and the interesting technologies that I really hope Linden Labs^® (SL) sees. A number of features Wowed me and have already made Web surfing a better experience but what really impressed me with respect to my virtual life is this 3D on 2D Canvas demo (Web). This makes the Second Life^® "flexi" feature seem like late 20^th Century kludge.

Generally I'm pleased with the flexi feature in SL though I hardly use it. Having something like this feature would certainly encourage me to explore using flexi in more of my builds. I bet clothing designers would kill to have this feature and simultaneously kill themselves at the prospect of rebuilding their entire lines.

A better flexi option would likely have helped some of my recent builds, but the thought of active shadows based on light sources in a build -- Dynamic Shadows -- kept coming to me while I was working. I've had to use more prims to re-create shadows than I would have liked and to have given everything a shadow would have used an enormous number of prims. In addition to the shadow option, I'd like to see Environmentally Conditional Volumes (ECV).

ECV would allow a region owner or manager to define a space then fully control all of it's environmental aspects, such as time of day, sun position, sea level, gravity, etc. Sort of a region within a region. Except for gravity, all these settings can be changed on a region-wide basis. But ECV would enable a portion of the space within a region to act like a separate region. Thus a "skybox" could be created with genuine Linden water and a fixed sun to simulate land at twilight, for example, without effecting the environment in the rest of the main region. Combine this with Dynamic Shadows and imagine the possibilities.

Mainland Life

Part of me misses living on the mainland. When I joined the main grid, my brother owned a good chunk of the mainland region Nangrim. Eventually we jointly owned about three-quarters of it, but not in a contiguous group. Our lots were broken up by homes and small businesses and bits of natural land owned by others. It was rather charming in some ways. Unlike many mainland regions we had neighbors that kept their land attractive and in relative harmony with the lots around them.

Oh, I loved living in Whispering Big Pines with my sister. And having a whole sim (SLurl) with my wife is wonderful, but part of the charm is missing. I was flying at ground level below the Primalot store in Blackmount (SLurl) and saw this buildscape (my word .. I own it .. please use it) and felt a bit of nostalgia. Sure, a casino opened in Nangrim and kept the sim full so I couldn't enter my house so I eventually sold everything, but I'm sure that is a rarity. It was still a nice place to live. Maybe the Memorial Park that I own in Shouldice (SLurl) will turn out to be much the same once the land cutters (Web) are done playing.

Recent Projects

Building things has occupied much of my time of late. Good thing I really enjoy it. Right now I'm working on fountain designs, looking for one to use as a prize for an up-coming grid-wide prize hunt. It has to be something I don't normally sell in my store but I'll probably list it after the hunt. This one needs a topper of some sort or some other "finishing" touch and I'll probably toss on some pillows after I decide on a cushion texture. I'm using a sculpted boulder shape rather than the usual geometrically-regular prims in typical fountains. I wish that the great single-prim plants in our basic Inventories were linkable. A fern would look very nice. Then a couple poses and :::bam::: it's done. And then onto another design. I figure some four or five tries and I'll have one that is right.

My first try became the Venus Love Fountain. As much as I like the final design, it didn't strike me as something that would have mass appeal for the prize hunt. With as much as men seem to like lesbians, for example, it's not likely that many would place this fountain in their yards. This is another example of the need to link Linden plants. Still, if I sell it the owner can add plants or other decorations of their choice. The instructions on how to add the plants would likely be simple. There is a very good chance this will eventually show up on the Isle of Lesbos. While working on Venus several ideas for a new entrance park started forming. Like many things I build, though, it may never be used. My inventory is filled with builds that others haven't even seen.

Such are the other projects now occupying my time: proposed club designs for the Isle of Lesbos. No one asked me to do them, but I was inspired. Odds are they won't work out, but it's a nice exercise and it keeps me off the streets. The Faces club here resurrects a previously used DJ booth and a light grid used in another current project for use with fresh graphics and a design not exactly typical for me. With no way to get inside the club (the walls are solid, bowing to the design needs rather than practicality) the build is more speculation than anything functional.

Back to more building, then. I need to learn to make plants.

Premium Account Suspended?

Recently I convinced Second Life^® entrepreneur Peter Stindberg (Web) to convert his free resident account to a premium account with the argument that such a move would provide more paths for recourse if the account was suspended by the Governance Team (AKA GTeam; Web). So I was rather surprised to see Luc Aubret, Creative Director aubreTEC Labs (SLurl), Tweet that his account was suspended without any contact from the Lab for allegedly impersonating a Linden. "I was never contacted in any way and asked about the infraction," he blogged (Web), and added that "If you’re going to issue a warning, fine, but suspension or banning without so much as providing the accused with an opportunity to speak in their defense."

Luc is listed as the owner of the group that has the deed to his land in Everlite and his profile shows Payment Information on File, so I imagine he has a Premium account. That leaves the question as to why he was not contacted but I believe it shows that his status as a Premium member prevented may have protected him from an outright cancellation. I'm not sure if that would have been the punishment for his alleged crime so I could be wrong about the protection.

But back to the question and adding to it ... Luc is a prominent member of the business community, well-known by those in the virtual armaments and gadgets trade, so wouldn't a courtesy be a consideration in this instance? Or added detailed notes on his account so the Help Team could actually help when he contacted them? The lack of contact leads me to assume that either the GTeam rushed this one or they have the ability to check any and all chat/IM records grid-wide to investigate issues. If the former assumption is true, then shame on the process and the infrastructure behind it. Such a thing should not happen. Conversely, if we the latter assumption is correct then contact should have been made or records should be available to the Help Team. I have seen or used several different customer account management products and such ability to manage accounts is available.

As Linden Labs^® becomes more old-school business and less cutting edge upstart perhaps it needs to learn some lessons about customer service. Or better yet, blaze a trail to improve on customer service. My dealings with the Lab have always been quick, efficient, and have left me with a good feeling, contrary to the frequent reports I hear of residents in Luc's situation. Let's hope this is really just an aberration.

Land Cutting in my 'hood

On 28 January 2009, Linden Labs published a blog post about Land Cutting (AKA, Micro Parcels) (see Web; with an update on 12 February Web) a process in which land is cut into tiny lots, once popular for Ad Farms (Web). Prior to that I bought a 512m² parcel in Shouldice for just over L$2,000 and thought about a slightly smaller connected piece for nearly the same cost per square meter. I wish I had bought it then, or better yet, at the deeply discounted price it eventually fell to a few days later.

Instead, it was bought by someone that also acquired other lots in the area and started to make micro parcels (click picture at left for larger image) as did other area land owners. My thought is that this practice effectively reduces the value of my land because who really wants to own next to micro parcels? Fortunately, I'm not about to sell. My land isn't really residential, the airship there is mostly for use by friends and it mostly serves as a memorial (Web) And I might simply turn it into a warehouse for inventory.

Not entirely sure my point behind this post, but I find the sudden appearance of all these property line patterns rather amusing. Maybe the Lab will give me 256m² from these 'land barons' gratis for being so nice :::smiles angelically:::