NexisONLINE Status Blog

QHUD Release Stuff

n3x15 — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 12:31:01 +0000

Darling and I have been working our collective butts off on the QHUD release. I’m not going to say specifically what we’ve added, but you’re all going to love the improvements and new features. Every QHUD user should give Darling props, she’s been working 24/7 on this stuff just to bring you better products and services. Even I’m not that dedicated. Quite proud to be her partner (even if I’m banned).

ShoopedLife New Release!

n3x15 — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 08:58:03 +0000

I don’t care about your pathetic stories about how your e-wife jilted you/some evil property owner talked to the Lindens because you made more money/a child avatar pointed a stick at you and screamed “AVADA KEDAVRA”. I don’t care whether you were a fellow PN, my biggest fan, or a furry. I don’t care whether you were as innocent as an angel, evil as Satan’s hemorrhoids, or neutral.

I stopped developing ShoopedLife several years ago.

I will never restart ShoopedLife development.

Quit sending me emails. Futher sob stories will be forwarded to LL so you get more time on your ban. Why? I’m an asshole.

Deadlycodec Is Dead

n3x15 — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 01:53:32 +0000

Apparently, that long-winded catlady Prokofy Neva has discovered that Deadlycodec died (probably suicide). All I can say is: “Thank God.”

You may call me horrible for this, but having an idiot like that follow you around and try to get your e-autograph all the time before “declaring war” on you kinda gets on your nerves.

My condolences to his family for having to put up with his shit.

New router, expect bumps

n3x15 — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:12:12 +0000

Installing a new router, a little more of a buttpain this time but it supports Reflective NAT this time so I don’t have to fuck with hosts files and weird firewall rules.

Web Services Back Online

n3x15 — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 12:15:29 +0000

Lighttpd is a dick and disabled everything with PHP in the filename since Debian decided to be a troll and disable the PHP module.

All fixed now, also got rid of 80GB of excess SVN cache.

Luna Viewer Disabled

n3x15 — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:02:31 +0000

I’ve “disabled” the Luna viewer (meaning there’s a huge fucking warning on the front page) for now while I clean up the code.

See this post for more details.

Oh, I also fixed the goddamn webserver.

Debian Squeezified

n3x15 — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 06:43:55 +0000

Sorry for the downtime, was upgrading to Debian Squeeze and the PHP backend got all screwed up. Appears to be fixed now.

DownThemAll Add-On Website Infected

n3x15 — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 08:08:35 +0000

Looks like someone broke into and fucked with the DownThemAll website. Avast blocks the website at the moment, citing an iframe in the apparent PHP error message that the site is displaying. In addition, the iframe points to an obfuscated domain, so I have reason to believe the site is malicious.

Announcing MineEdit

n3x15 — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:25:16 +0000

Since notch is being a dick and declining to make a converter, I’m working on a converter from infdev rev1 saves to infdev rev2 as part of my MineEdit map and inventory editor.

Current Features:

Editing of infdev levels (browse to level.dat instead of selecting World #)
Edit inventory and maps.
MDI interface for editing multiple maps at once.
Converter between different level types.
Level repairer (for corrupt infdev chunks)
Chunk locations and dimensions
Zoom
Go to coordinates
Slice alignments (top-down view, slice E-W, slice N-S)
Grid lines

Coming features:

Creative map importer
indev map plugin
Tree creator
Entity editor
Chest inventory editing
Day length/environment editing

SL Postmortem: A Look Back

n3x15 — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 01:03:26 +0000

As Linden Lab is now restructuring and firing 30% of their employees (Cyn, Blue, and George are confirmed gone, Torley is still there), not to mention recoding the viewer in a browser-based language (source), I think it’s time to conduct a post-mortem analysis of Second Life and Linden Lab since users are jumping ship faster than rats from the Titanic. So, what went right? What went wrong?

What Went Right

User-Generated Content
Linden Lab chose to ignore the industry standard of not allowing users to provide their own assets. Instead, they came up with the novel and original idea of User Generated Content. By doing this, they opened up a vast new economy of buying and selling objects, clothing, and scripts. Although this came to be challenged later on due to rampant copybotting, it’s still a powerful choice that allowed Linden Lab to succeed over all others. Up until now, anyway.
The Grid
The Second Life Grid was an amazing idea that was probably ahead of its time (I think cloud-based computing was still a while off). Being able to literally walk or fly from one server to the other without a loading screen (until the failure of mono) was an astounding technological advancement in 2001. Although region crossings eventually became too burdened by serialization lag (primarily due to a bug in Mono), the concept itself was amazing to behold.
Land/Estate Sales
In most other games, you cannot lease or buy a server to be integrated seamlessly into the game environment as part of the in-game universe. Even fewer games offer you the ability to buy just a slice of a server, and the ability to rent out sections of a server or parcel you own, as far as I know, is unique to Second Life-based grids.
Scripting
The concept of allowing users to run even simplified and limited scripts would scare most other companies completely shitless. Someone at LL was drunk enough to do it successfully, although the language itself eventually revealed many deep flaws.

What Went Wrong

Support
Taking two weeks to respond to tickets is simply wrong, and LL is notorious for having piss-poor support. Oftentimes, one support person will direct you to one department, who will redirect you to the first department, all over the span of a month. Other times (and frighteningly frequently), the team that handles banning bad users will ban the wrong person (and I’m not talking about myself) and force the user to go through a drawn-out appeals process that is frequently ineffective.
Stability/Maintenance
Linden Lab chose to direct most of their efforts into adding features (of varying levels of uselessness) to the viewer and servers rather than fixing the multitude of bugs each subsystem had. The first I remember was voice, then Windlight, then sculpties, and now UI changes and meshes. On the other hand, group chats have been crippled since 2007 and have been steadily becoming worse. Several third-party viewers can now route group chat through XMPP or IRC protocols, a feature LL has not implemented yet.
Business Direction
Seemingly oblivious to the community they have cultivated, Linden Lab began introducing policy changes (starting around late 2008) that tried to bring corporate users into Second Life. Linden Lab either ignored or was ignorant of the significant adult industry presence on their grid and only ended up driving their corporate users away. In the ultimate shoot-self-in-foot move, they reacted by segregating the adult industry to their own in-world continent, forcing them to move and lose valuable landmark links from their customers, and this happened far too late to halt the tide of corporate customers leaving SL. This ended in a large amount of adult industry users simply closing their doors, dropping the amount of income Linden Lab could “tax”. A smart company would have embraced each sector instead of betting all their chips on one. Second Life mostly drew in private users anyway.