software

Since Linden Lab released the source code to the Second Life viewer, many people have been working through it looking for ways to make things better. In addition to helping the company troubleshoot a great many bugs, coders have been creating customized versions of the viewer for some time now. While there has been a fear that people are creating viewers that facilitate griefing, there are at least three alternative viewers that can help the average Second Life resident get work done more efficiently.

Able Edition

• Author: Able Whitman
• Website: http://ablewhitman.org/blog/"
• Downloads: Viewer, Source Code
• Main Feature: Visual muting

The Able Edition works just like the main viewer but with one important extra: visual muting. You can right-click on a parcel or an object and the extra option of "Mute Visibility" will be available in the pie-menu. Select it and the object will be invisible to you, allowing you to photograph a scene without spinning "For Sale" signs ruining the view.

Dale Glass Edition

• Author: Dale Glass
• Website: http://sl.daleglass.net/"
• Downloads: Viewer, Source Code
• Main Feature: Scanning, Event Logging

Dale Glass has worked a proximity detector into the client, allowing people to see the names of the avatars that are in the area, how old the avatar is, and whether or not they've registered payment information with Linden Lab. Additional experimental features he is including involve detecting the source of particles and sounds. This is the preferred version for dealing with griefers.

Nicholaz Edition

• Author: Nicholaz Beresford
• Website: http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/"
• Downloads: Viewer, Source Code
• Main Feature: Faster

While there are no new features to speak of here, I notice a slight increase in stability, fewer memory leaks, and a big increase in framerate when using the Nicholaz Edition. This is probably the easiest one to install as well: just put the files in your Second Life folder and run it. If you're not looking to do anything special and just want the graphics to run a little smoother, this is the client for you.

These three clients won't be the last of their kind. Other small-scale clients for accessing Second Life have been around for awhile, such as the browser-based Ajaxlife and the cellphone software by Comverse. Open-sourcing the Second Life viewer has created dozens of as-yet untapped possibilites for the future, and it's only a matter of time before a custom client emerges that's regarded as even more popular than the official release.

The Windlight technology, that came as part of Linden Lab's purchase of lighting effects company Windward Mark back in May, and that was subsequently rolled out in the First Look viewer for Second Life, has been shelved. The early test was hardly a roaring success, and for now, Linden have simply decided to work on it some more. For those that just can't live without that gawdawful turquoise blob sun however, you can find the code under public version control courtesty of Zen Linden, who we assume is one of the Windward Mark guys with Linden sponsored false mustache and glasses.

The long awaited roll out of voice onto the main Second Life grid has now begun with the release of a "first look" viewer for Windows and Mac. Linux users however, are shit out of luck. The first look viewer, which can be downloaded here is "rolling beta code" if you will, a live opt-in beta test of experimental software available for those that want to try voice, knowing that the system may well still be buggy.

Fortunately, my new Mac is only days away now...

Many developers have been eagerly awaiting Linden Lab to make good on their stated intention to release the Second Life server code to the Open Source community for some time now. According to Ginsu Yoon, Linden Lab's VP business affairs however, the virtual world building company are "in the speculative stages" of the process as of yet. He also conceeds that "it sometimes takes us quite a while to deliver on our ambitions" in an interview with Ugotrade.

The client code, the software used to access Second Life has been open source for some months, and already ambitious projects using the freely modifiable code have sprung up. There's even a project to reverse engineer the Linden Server architecture called Open Grid.

The general feeling was that we may see the code go Open Source this year, but in light of Ginsu Yoons statements, that now seems unlikely.

Just a scant week after aquiring atmospheric rendering firm Windward Mark, Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, have released a "First Look" at the newly integrated code that promises to make the virtual world a prettier, more immersive experience. At the time of writing, it's a perfect clear sky above me, so it's hard to see a difference but from the image posted on the right here, I'd say it looks promising.

Tells us about your experiences with the new viewer, I'd love to hear what you think...

Linden Lab, makers of 3D virtual world Second Life, are to aquire Windward Mark Interactive, a 3D visuals company specializing in natural light effects. Windward's main products include Windlight, a lighting technology that simulates more natural light patterns in 3D environments, and Nimble, which simulates photo realistic 3D clouds.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed according to the Boston Globe, but Windmark president Asi Lang says that the team is already working on Second Life, and that residents should see a "major improvement in visual quality" within several weeks.

Windmark will join Linden Lab's Cambridge facility by the end of the year.

I'm pretty certain that Squawk's inclusion of support for Jaiku, a mobile presence app similar (and really, better, though less popular) to Twitter, is the first instance of Jaiku support within Second Life. Twitter, (see my account here and Metaversed post updates here) has a half dozen decent SL clients, including Twitterbox, SLTweets and Squawk (Metaversed profile here), but until now, Jaiku hasn't had a look in.

I've not tested it yet, but i'll be doing so later, as well as updating my Jaiku account to pull Metaversed feeds into (it already pulls in my Twitter tweets). - Details on how to get hold of Squawk for Jaiku users on the Squawk site.

Guus Van en Brekel has released this rather natty Firefox toolbar that includes ways to search tons of blogs, wiki's, exchange engines, feeds, podcasts, videos and images -- A kind of swiss army knife for searching the web for SL info. It's pretty good, but doesn't include Metaversed, so is fatally flawed, clearly...

You can download it here. If you use Firefox and have need to search for SL related info on the web it's a pretty neat bit of kit!

Search in Second Life sucks. The current system relies on residents to list items with a title, category and description much like an old fashioned web directory. For places, shops, events, and land in general, the built in Search can and is, easily gamed. For products, it boils down to simple keyword Search on paid classifieds. Will this all change with the introduction of the Electric Sheep Company's search.sheeplabs.com? Almost certainly not, not in the short to medium term anyway but, the fledgling virtual Search engine is interesting, and may indeed produce useful results as time goes by and improvements are made.

How search.sheeplabs.com works

If you can get passed the fact that the Sheep decided not to give their beta Search engine it's own domain, making it look like a rather cheap, throwaway kind of venture, it's a pretty interesting project. It may even help take Search in the Metaverse to the next level.

A robot "crawls" non-private land , much as Googlebot crawls publicly accessible web pages, looking for objects marked "for sale", which means residents don't have to go submit their products to be included. The engine is Opt-Out, which means residents don't get a choice by default as to whether their products are listed, and have to go to quite some length to exlude themselves. It seems a Metaversal equivalent of the robots exclusion protocol. would be in order..

Search results are grouped by parcel (plot of land) and come complete with price, teleport link, creator and owner information. They do not appear to be ranked in any way, and at the time of writing I can't find any information on ranking so can only assume that there is none. More on that below.

The Problem with Search

Here's the deal. With the current system you can game land search by having people stay on your land "dancing". It's how land is ranked, by the traffic. It's a simple enough thing to do, and it's pretty much the norm. This means that the land search for certain categories is worse than useless, as you just can't trust the results to rank the best record, or even a mildly good one, first.

Will automated crawling make Search in Second Life any better? I can't see how. There appears to be no ranking variables involved in the engine, though even if there are any they'd not be any different to the very basic, easily gamed traffic stats residents see inworld using the default Search engine. Perhaps giving users the ability to order the results by price would prove interesting, at least untill some enterprising soul works out how to list something at $L1 and link it, or bait and switch it with a more expensive version. Possibly keyword density in descriptions and titles (if they use anything at all, it's this) would work? Well sure, but we've been there with the web right? All that happened was people started stuffing their pages , descriptions and titles with keywords. In fact, some morons still do this, really.

So where can it go? Is search.sheeplabs.com doomed to a bit of enthusiastic press and blog coverage and then a swift death through moronic keyword stuffing techniques last seen en masse in 1999? I don't think so. I think there's potential here, but ESC need to find a way to rank items that residents have less influence over, or perhaps allow residents to vote on the automated results, giving a human touch to the listings, moderated by the community. Perhaps inworld voting could used? Think Google Toolbar if you need a 2D reference.

Nothing is certain, but it WILL be interesting, and there is certainly the potential to take those raw results and turn them into something useful for everyone.

Via Mark Wallace

TD Goodliffe did a little investigation into Yahoo! Widgets and found a whole bunch of virtual world related gadgety goodness including these three for Second Life:

1. Second Life Status to see if the grid is up or not
2. Second Life Exchange for product searches on SLExcchange and
3. SLQuery for searching the SLQuery database

Now, if Yahoo! could only see their way clear to making Y!Widgets available on Linux I'd be all over that SLExchange one, but alas I must enjoy them vicariously through you dear reader.

If you're code inclined, or have some geeky bods in your firm that are, take a butchers at IBM's new series on Hacking Second Life by Peter Seebach. I'll be digging into that for sure, though im not certain my modest programming skills are entirely up to the task!

Durosport Electronics are to release what they say will be "the biggest media player in Second Life", whatever that means, at the weekend. They have not enjoyed glowing reviews in the past and even have their own Durosport Sucks site, published by an "angry Durosport prism owner". I post this story only so that on Saturday, when they launch (no word of how to find them..) we can all go and have a look and see for real whether it really does suck ass or not.