Tag Archives: ZoHa Islands

Updates to Section 2.3 of the Terms of Service

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Recently there was a change in Second 2.3 of the Terms of Service (TOS) that had many content creators and artists in SL quite alarmed, sending some running for the hills. I also manage a club in Second Life (because apparently I don’t have enough to do! hehe) and he lost his Estate Manager for his sim (he runs an artistic community sim besides the club) because she is an artist that is leaving SL. She did not want to take the chance that anything she created in Second Life would be appropriated by Linden Lab.

Recently, Linden Lab posted the following blog post in response to the general concern (read: freak out) by many in Second Life:

“When we updated our Terms of Service in August 2013, the revised language of Section 2.3, the “Service Content License,” caused concern among certain Second Life creators. The revision to this section was worded in such a way that these creators expressed concern that we intended to appropriate their original creations and sell or license such creations without their permission. As our historical practice demonstrates and as we have since tried to clarify, this was absolutely not our intent. Creators are the lifeblood of Second Life. It is you who have populated Second Life with a petabyte worth of unique content and experiences, and it is important for our collective and continued success that you remain confident in continuing to create in our world. To be clear: Linden Lab respects the proprietary rights of Second Life’s content creators and prides itself in its success in providing platforms on which users can create original content and profit from their creations.

“As part of an update to our Terms of Service today, we have made a modification to further clarify Section 2.3. The updated section still provides Linden Lab with the rights that we need in order to operate and promote Second Life, so you will see that we have retained much of the language as the previous version. However, the updated section now also includes limits that better match our intended meaning, and we hope will assuage some of the concerns we heard about the previous version.

“First, the modified version limits our rights with respect to user-created content in Second Life by restricting our use ‘inworld or otherwise on the Service.’ Additionally, it limits our right to ‘sell, re-sell or sublicense (through multiple levels)’ your Second Life creations by requiring some affirmative action on your part in order for us to do so. This language mirrors the corresponding User Content License currently in Section 2.4, which has been part of the Terms of Service for years.

“We know that the legal language of documents such as the Terms of Service can seem daunting, and we expect that some creators may continue to have concerns about particular elements of the updated agreement. Today’s revision to this section of the Terms of Service more closely expresses our intent – that we do not intend to appropriate or sell your content outside of our Service – and our hope is that the limitations clarified in the updated language of this section will support creators’ confidence in our platform.

“As with any document like this, it’s important to read the whole Terms of Service before agreeing to it. Section 2.3 isn’t the only thing that’s changed – we’ve also added the updated policy for skill gaming, which we blogged about here – but we wanted to blog about this update to be clear about what’s different in this section, what it means, and why we made the change.”

Content creators and artists: If you continue to be concerned about not being allowed to bring your creations out of SL, please consider having that section of the TOS reviewed by a RL attorney before deciding to bolt out of SL. We residents of SL really enjoy and need your beautiful content contributions to this amazing world.

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers
ZoHa Islands Social Media Manager

Linden Lab Plans SL Improvements

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In a recent article in the Second Life blog, Linden Labs announces upcoming planned improvements to the Second Life platform. As promised in a recent video interview given after Linden Lab dropped the bombshell that a new virtual world was being developed, Linden Lab continues to dedicate resources to improving the current Second Life platform.

From a long list of improvements and enhancements that LL plans to bring to Second Life, they weighed priorities and scoped out a list of important projects for the next few months. They shared a few highlights from the list of projects LL will be working on so that residents are aware of what improvements to expect in the coming months. This isn’t an exhaustive list, of course, but here are a few of the initiatives LL thinks will have a big impact on improving all of our Second Life experiences.

One of those developments and improvements is Experience Keys, that I blogged about earlier.

Linden Lab posted this about Experience Keys:

Releasing Experience Keys
We recently put out a call for creators to join a limited beta for Experience Keys – new LSL functions and calls that make it possible to bypass the multiple permissions dialogs that you encounter with scripted objects today. Thanks to the applications we received, we now have enough creators to move ahead with the beta, and we’ve begun giving these beta users access the keys. The feedback we get from beta participants will help determine our next steps for making Experience Keys available to everyone, and we may start by expanding the beta group with a second group of creators.

In the meantime, though, everyone can get a sense for what’s possible with Experience Keys by downloading the Project Viewer and checking out The Cornfield game.

Improving Group Chat Performance

One of the most frustrating experiences in SL is group chat. As most of you know, group chat is notoriously laggy, resulting in either serious chat lag that makes a connected conversation impossible, or the fact that group chat just flat out refuses to open at all. I know that when I do large weddings, it is extremely helpful in trying to organize everyone that we all get into a group chat, and nine times out of ten, it just doesn’t work. It is incredibly frustrating.

Linden Lab states: “We’re carefully monitoring the effects of the changes we make to improve group chat performance, and so far, the results of efforts like upgrading the servers that host chat have been positive. We anticipate that the work to improve group chat performance will continue for some time as we identify the underlying causes of the issues, experiment with different fixes, and analyze results.”

Implementing the Chrome Embedded Framework

Linden Lab is working to upgrade the component of the viewer that is responsible for rendering web content, including the viewer splash screen (displayed before login), the content of a number of floaters, and inworld media-on-a-prim. This is important because it will fix a number of bugs (especially related to streaming media) that currently affect many Second Life users, and it will also make available many modern web features that aren’t possible with the current viewer.

Linden Lab states: “We’re making good progress on this initiative already, and expect to have an experimental Project Viewer ready for testing soon.”

More Texture and Mesh Loading Improvements

Building upon the performance enhancements made with Project Shining, LL is continuing to make improvements to how the viewer retrieves texture and mesh data from the servers. Linden Lab indiates that the next round of improvements will reduce the number of connections the viewer needs to get this data (making it easier on your router and network), while also using each connection to retrieve more data more quickly (for the technically inclined, this means that among other things we will add support for HTTP pipelining).

These improvements will mean that as you explore Second Life, objects will appear more quickly and reliably, especially for users who have longer latency connections (higher “ping times”), such as those who live outside the US.

Linden Lab states: “We have begun doing small scale testing with a selected group of users, and the early results have been great from a performance point of view. Unfortunately, we’ve also encountered a bug that we need to tackle before we can move on to releasing a project Viewer. We’re eager to move ahead as quickly as we can, and will … announce that project Viewer as soon as it’s available.”

Again, these certainly aren’t the only things LL is working on as they continue to improve Second Life, but they’re among their priority initiatives in the coming months.

It is certainly good to know that Linden Lab is clearly putting time and effort into the Second Life platform. Stay tuned here, as I will report changes and improvements as quickly as Linden Lab publishes them. Meanwhile, visit The Cornfield and check out the benefit of the Experience Keys improvements. I haven’t had time to visit it yet, but I plan to this weekend. My only concern is getting chased by someone with a chain saw! Horror flicks are not my thing!!

Have a wonderful weekend, and don’t forget to click over and check out our available land! This is a great weekend to stay indoors, keep cool and shop for your upgrade or new home today!

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers
ZoHa Islands Social Media Manager

Reducing Viewer Crashes

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Firestorm viewer smallestIt’s the bane of everyone’s existence in Second Life… the dreaded viewer crash. Naturally, viewers don’t crash at opportune times; they wait until you’re getting busy with someone, or in a wedding, or doing a crucial final touches on a build you hadn’t saved. Sometimes they crash and all of a sudden the viewer just disappears. Most times, however, you suddenly can’t move, then all sound disappears and then the screen dims, accompanied by the endlessly rotating circle, and the dreaded words “Not responding” appear at the top of your screen. Since oftentimes people use the excuse “Oh, I crashed!” when trying to get out of an uncomfortable circumstance, it never fails that the viewer will crash during something critical, like your partner telling you they love you for the first time, or something equally important, and that inopportune crash looks suspicious.

The causes for these crashes vary. Sometimes if you simply cam around too much, it causes the crash. Sometimes the sim is too full, a griefer is on the sim and unleashes a graphics crasher, or computer system is out of date and doesn’t have the resources necessary to run Second Life smoothly.

Click to make larger

Click to enlarge picture

I use the Firestorm viewer, and it asks to collect crash data each time you crash. You can either choose to do this manually, or changes the settings in preferences to allow the viewer to send crash reports automatically.

Click to enlarge picture

Click to enlarge picture

So you think to yourself, why should I do that? All I want to do is get back in-world to try and repair the possibly broken relationship, broken build or continue on with what you were doing, so taking the time to send crash data just adds to the frustration of trying to get in-world. However, what you don’t realize is that the people at Linden Labs and the people at Firestorm (or whatever viewer you use) take the crash data collected, and use it to create the fixes that help reduce crashing. This means that you are helping improve things by allowing your viewer’s creators to collect the crash data. I have set mine to automatic, and it only takes a few seconds for it to collect the crash data on the next start up, and doesn’t cause any serious delays.

So that begs the question: What can we do? Many users can greatly reduce their risk of Viewer crashes by taking a few steps to update their software outside of Second Life.

Oz Linden posted in the Tools and Technology blog, offering these tips to residents some steps they can take to help reduce viewer crashes.

“The nature of Second Life as a platform for user creativity means that the Viewer faces different challenges than client software for an online game, for example, which would just need to handle the limited and carefully optimized content created by the game’s developer. This can make Second Life a demanding application for your computer and can mean that if your operating system is out of date, your Viewer is more likely to crash.

The good news is you can take steps today to help this! Here are a couple of tips:

1. Upgrade your Operating System
There is a very clear pattern in our statistics – the more up to date your operating system is, the less likely your Viewer is to crash. This applies on both Windows and Macintosh (Linux is a little harder to judge, since “up to date” has a more fluid meaning there, and the sample sizes are small). Some examples:

• Windows 8.1 reports crashes only half as often as Windows 8.0
Those of you who stuck with Windows 7 (roughly 40% of users of our Viewer right now) rather than upgrade to 8.0 made a good choice at the time; version 7 still has a much better crash rate than 8.0, but not quite as good as 8.1 (now about 15% of users), so waiting is no longer the best approach.

• Mac OSX 10.9.3 reports crashes a third less than 10.7.5
OSX rates do not have as much variation as Windows versions do, but newer is still better, and there are other non-crash reasons to be on the up to date version, including rendering improvements.

Upgrading will probably also better protect you from security problems, so it’s a good idea even aside from allowing you to spend more time in Second Life.

2, Use the 64 bit version of Windows if you can
For each version of Windows for the last several years, you have had a choice between 32 bit and 64 bit variants; if your system can run the 64 bit variant, then you will probably crash much less frequently by changing to it. While we don’t have a fully 64 bit version of the Viewer yet, you can run it on 64 bit Windows, and statistically you’ll be much better off if you do.

• Generally speaking the 64 bit Windows versions report crashes half as often as the 32 bit versions.
According to the data we collect, a little more than 20% of users are running 32 bit Windows versions; most of you can probably upgrade and would benefit by it.

If you bought your computer any time in the last 5 years, chances are very good that it can run the 64 bit version of Windows (as will some systems that are even older). Microsoft has a FAQ page on this topic; go there and read the answer to the question “How do I tell if my computer can run a 64-bit version of Windows?”. That page also explains how to do the upgrade and other useful information.

We’ll of course continue working hard to find and fix things that lead to Viewer crashes. Even as we do that, though, you can decrease your chances of crashing today by taking the steps above.”

I hope this helps with some of your viewer crashing problems. I’m sure it will probably never go away, but please help by sending your crash data to the viewer’s creators when asked. This will help all of us improve our experience.

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers
ZoHa Islands Social Media Manager

Skill Gaming Regions in SL

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New regulations are afoot for skill gaming in Second Life. According to the new blog post, Linden Lab is revising its gaming policy. Gambling has always been, and will continue to be strictly prohibited by the TOS (Terms Of Service). Gambling is considered to be operating, or participating in, a game of chance that provides a Linden Dollar payout. However, there are many jurisdictions in SL where games of skill are legally permitted, and result in a payout of Linden Dollars. The difference being one is a game of chance (gambling) and a game of skill (winning Lindens for achievements).

Since the games of skill are becoming increasingly popular, Linden Lab has decided to update it’s TOS. Skill games that offer Linden Dollar payouts will still be allowed; however the new TOS dictate that these games will be limited to a specific Skill Gaming Regions only. Beginning August 1, 2014, this new region designation will be available for those SL residents wishing to convert their regions to Skill Gaming Regions.

Second Life residents who wish to convert their regions to Skill Gaming Regions can do so by contacting Linden Lab in accordance with Linden Lab’s Land Policy. Linden Lab states that “Due to the additional administrative and compliance-related costs associated with these regions, the monthly maintenance fees will be greater than those for regular regions in Second Life. We will include Skill Gaming Regions as a new category in our Destination Guide (unless the owner requests its removal). As a resident, you will be able to check the setting of each region to verify that it has been recognized by Linden Lab for the placement, operation, and use of approved Skill Games.”

Those wishing to become approved operators can apply now. Due to processing and compliance-related costs associated with maintaining this program, there is a one-time nonrefundable application fee as well as a quarterly license fee (waived through December 31, 2014, upon approval of an application) for those designated as approved operators. Linden Lab will maintain a public wiki page of operators.

Creators of skill games can apply to become an approved creator and to have their games approved beginning immediately. Due to processing and compliance-related costs associated with maintaining this program, there is a one-time nonrefundable application fee as well as a quarterly license fee (waived through December 31, 2014, upon approval of an application) for those designated as approved creators. Linden Lab will maintain a public wiki page of approved creators and their approved games of skill.

Residents need to meet relevant age requirements in order to access these new regions. If you are not eligible, you will receive an error message. However, you are responsible for knowing which jurisdictions are prohibited and the requisite ages of participation and not attempting to access a Skill Gaming Region if you do not qualify. Attempts to circumvent the controls will constitute a violation of the Skill Gaming Policy and Terms of Service.

The details of the revised policy can be found here, and this is a summary of how it will work:

• Skill games that offer Linden Dollar payouts will be allowed in Skill Gaming Regions only.

• Only operators approved by Linden Lab will be allowed to run skill games that offer Linden Dollar payouts on Skill Gaming Regions.

• Creators of skill games that wish to make them available in Second Life may do so only through Skill Gaming Regions and only after the games have been approved by Linden Lab.

• Access to Skill Gaming Regions will be restricted to Second Life users who are of sufficient age and are located in a jurisdiction that Linden Lab permits for this kind of online gaming activity.

In summary, skill games that offer Linden Dollar payouts will be allowed in Second Life, but each game, its creator, its operator, and the region on which it is operated must be approved by Linden Lab.

These changes are effective as of August 1, 2014, and applications for approved creators and approved operators are now being accepted at Echosign.

If you live in a jurisdiction where gaming is permitted and you plan on playing these games in Skill Gaming Regions in Second Life, you should not need to do anything differently. However, adding payment information on file now is a good way to ensure you’re able to play as soon as Skill Gaming Regions are live.

Linden Lab has created an FAQ page to address what are likely to be the most common questions at this point. They plan to update that as needed and will keep an eye on the forums and other community discussion channels so that LL can help clarify anything that might seem confusing as this update goes into effect.

Basically you need to comply with the age requirement, have payment on file in order to play the games, and ensure that the region and the games you are playing are authorized by Linden Lab.

ZoHa Islands has a strict policy against third party sims. We will not be applying for any of our sims to be authorized Skill Gamging sims because of the tight regulations, increased costs and there are many legal reasons that come into play. Thus if you currently are using any of ZoHa Islands land for skill gaming, they will have to be removed no later than August 1, 2014. Please see ZoHa Island management for further clarification.

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers
ZoHa Islands Social Media manager

Content Creators Wanted: Experience Keys Beta

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Linden Lab is looking for creators to beta test a new way of interacting with items in Second LIfe without having to constantly give permissions.

The Tools and Technology blog posted about this early in July, so if you’re a creator and you want to get in on the beta testing of Experience Keys, sign up right away!

This is taken directly from the Tools and Technology Blog:

“We’re ready to start a limited beta test of an exciting new tool for creators: Experience Keys. These are new LSL functions and calls that make it possible to bypass the multiple permissions dialogs that you encounter with scripted objects today. Experience Keys will make it possible for users to create more immersive experiences inworld, because those interacting with the experience will be able to grant all the permissions necessary to participate just once, instead of having the experience interrupted by multiple permissions requests. To learn more, check out this brief video.

(Ed. note: I always enjoy Torley vids!)

“We used this technology when creating the Linden Realms game, and we’re now ready to start putting this tool in the talented hands of creators in the Second Life community. Experience Keys is a powerful tool, and we need to be sure we test and roll out the feature carefully, so the first step will be a limited beta, then the viewer and server releases shortly after.

“If you’d like to participate, send an email to slexp_beta@lindenlab.com with “Experience Key Beta” as the subject along with:

• Your experience name.

• What genre does it fit in?

• Give us a brief description of your experience.

• How would your customers benefit from Experience Keys?”

From the end user perspective, it looks like a fabulous way to improve user experiences without all the clicking, but also has the potential to be harmful if someone uses those permissions to do evil things. I hope that our awesome content creators use this opportunity to make Experience Keys into an amazing tool!

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers
ZoHa Islands Social Media Manager

A Brave New World!

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“I feel like we’re in a very good place,” Altberg says. “We are the most experienced when it comes to this stuff. We’re bullish; we’re investing; and all the things that are happening around us with Oculus and the market getting excited about these things again [are] great for us. It’ll make it easier for us to attract talent.”

Now that the big news has broken, and some of the hubbub has died down a bit, more information is beginning to be leaked about the new virtual world platform that Linden Labs is developing.

Based on the information in the interview with Oz Linden and Pete Linden last week, Second Life is not going away. Indeed, Linden Labs is working on a new virtual world, but it will be a additional virtual world focused more on virtual reality, not a replacement to Second Life. They reassured anxious residents that Linden Labs is still putting time and effort into the continued development of Second Life, and that even though the team working on SL is smaller, it is no less focused on fixing what isn’t working and developing and improving the current platform.

According to an article appearing on the website Engadget, the new platform will be more focused on virtual reality in a social networking platform. Basically, this new platform will be Second Life on steroids.

According to the article on Engadget, Linden Labs’s CEO Ebbe Altberg’s vision for this new platform includes making it compatible with just about every device its users could possibly own. “How do people interact with the world from their phone, from their pad, from their PC and from their Oculus? All of that we’re solving from the ground up with this new code base,” Altberg says. “Multi-device from day one.”

Engadget states: “Altberg wants this new platform to be a virtual world that embodies everything Linden Lab got right with Second life, but bigger and more accessible. He also thinks of it as a development platform for new games and virtual reality experiences.”

” ‘It’s a platform,’ Altberg says. ‘In some ways, you could compare it to Unity.’ Altberg wants developers to see both Second Life and its eventual successor as game engines they can build their content on. He tries to paint…a picture: ‘I’m going to build an experience that has virtual capabilities,’ he states. ‘Do I use Second Life? Do I use Unity? Do I use Unreal Engine? Well, if you want to use those [latter two], your technical ability needs to be a lot higher and you have to have a team. In Second Life, you just come in and start building.’ If Linden Lab’s follow-up to Second Life has a good Oculus Rift implementation, he explains, then every experience on that platform can be an Oculus experience. ‘So, the bar of entry for anyone to be able to create an Oculus experience … it’s almost like we have the lowest bar possible,’ he says.” Reference: Engadget

The Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset has been forefront in the news lately, and indeed Second Life has already developed a beta viewer that will accommodate the VR headset. However, users often experience simulator sickness (a form of motion sickness) while using it, which can leave users feeling nauseous, disoriented and uncomfortable. An entire publication on VR Best Practices has been published, and in it are some guidelines for minimum framerates, graphics aliasing and response times, but most of it focuses on creating an experience that feels natural to the user.

“Seemingly simple things, like a player’s walking speed or limitations in camera control, can have a major impact on how uncomfortable a player can feel in a virtual space. The user’s awareness of their own presence in VR is also pretty important. ‘Looking down and having no body is disconcerting,’ the document reads. ‘A full character avatar can do a lot to ground the user in the virtual environment.’ The guide has health warnings too, suggesting that users take 10 to 15 minute breaks for every hour spent in the Oculus Rift and declaring its 3D technology potentially unsafe for children.[credit: Oculus’ Best Practices Explained]

Clearly, Ebbe Alberg’s vision for this new VR world includes attracting as many users as possible — he was talking about Facebook-type numbers — and yet not “dumbing down” the experience and keeping it complex enough so that developers will emigrate away from traditional game-development platforms like Unity and Unreal Engine. He wants the complexity to attract high-end game developers and the gamers that play them, yet make it user friendly enough to attract huge numbers of end users. A bit of hyperbole, perhaps? Since the development of this new platform is in its infancy, it remains to be seen.

At this time, Linden Labs’ stance is that the new virtual reality platform is not going to eclipse Second Life; but rather will be another bright star in the galaxy of Linden Labs’ universe.

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers
ZI Social Media Manager