New Version of Radegast Viewer Available

 

It was announced in the Blind Users Support Group (and Virtual Ability) yesterday that there was a new version of the Radegast Viewer, version 2.40, available for download and use.

I am proud to release Radegast 2.40 the first major update in quite some time. Containing up-to-date LibreMetaverse, the HTTP client has been fundamentally rewritten for speed and better resource management. You may notice things like Inventory and Map Tiles downloading much faster than they have in the past. Radgast now is built against .NET Framework 4.8, the final version of .NET Framework which is the best I can do for now to keep Linux and Mac support, such as it is, until a complete UI rewrite.

 It was also announced that the website had been down for a while, partially due to the datacenter being in the Ukraine and not having power for months. But they were back.

 Radegast is a text-base viewer that has gotten a following among blind and visually-impared users of Second Life. One can read Mermaid Celine Highwater's article from 2014 about it (here). 

Bixyl Shuftan

Premium Plus Now Available

 *

On early Thursday afternoon, Linden Lab made the Premium Plus option for accounts available. This was two days after Patch Linden gave details at the Second Life Birthday.

 We are so excited to be officially launching our Second Life Premium Plus offerings today! The Premium Plus membership level is designed for the most dedicated Second Life Residents with more weekly stipends, more groups, more mainland, and even more of all the things you love!  There’s only one thing there’s less of - fees. Premium Plus subscribers get free uploads for sounds, textures, and animations, free recurring events, lower group fees, and did we mention - $15 Name Changes?!

The all-new Premium Plus is available for $29.99 per month and $249 per year with a special limited time promotional price of $24.99 per month. Not ready for Premium Plus? You can still continue to enjoy our existing Premium offering, which is available for $11.99 per month and $99 per year.  
 

It's interesting to note that the Lab is listing a cash value next to the weekly stipend and free mainland, $11 USD and $13 USD respectively, so it can say one gets $24 USD worth of freebies for the $29.99 monthly price.

So far, there's been plenty of talk about Premium Plus, including a thread in the forums. On the whole, the response seems to be skepticism. Many stated they don't feel the extra bennefits are worth the price. Still, some did say they were interested, one saying, "I can run up 249 dollars worth of texture uploads a year pretty quickly if given enough time and space." "I ran the numbers for my account and I'd save about $6 a year." There were comments that one or two more things thrown in, such as free mesh uploads and name changes, might make then interested.

Some people will be signing up for Premium Plus. How many, well, we'll see.

To read the blog post, Click Here. 

Addition: Near the end of today's "Meet the Lindens," Grumpity announced they had over 700 Premium Plus accounts. So with this many in just a few hours, it seems they've had a successful start.

Bixyl Shuftan
 

New Linden Homes Now Available

 

A few days ago on Thursday March 3, the latest style of Linden Home, the modern-looking Newbrooke, was declared open for residents to get. Patch Linden announced the news in a thread the forums late in the day.

Today, we are pleased to release our latest Linden Home theme, Newbrooke!

 Our concept of a modern container home community is stylish, warm, and inviting, while being nestled in a contemporary setting of rolling hills peppered with small lakes, ponds, and public pools.

All of the Newbrooke regions are offered in both 1024sqm and 512sqm sized parcels.   In total, there are 8 stylish house models to choose from, and the smaller 512sqm parcel homes can also be placed on a 1024sqm parcel, giving you a larger outdoor area.

As always, there is a theme-specific content pack available from the house controller, enabling you to match the style and theme with any modifications you wish to do. (Please refer to the covenant rules).

Also for this theme we have a brand new community region, “Newbank,“ for residents to enjoy and hang out with their neighbors.

We hope everyone enjoys the latest additions to the Belliseria continent and community!

The Newbrooke sims, are in a group numbering forty-eight, connected to the Chalet Bellisseria area by a single sim (Josie Banks). Like some other Bellisserian sims, they often have amusing names such as Seldome Scene, Two Wrights, Tickled Pink, Sheep Date, and others. One can walk down the streets, or drive a car that can be dropped onto various vehicle rezz spots. Already, many have been claimed and the new owners decorating. But there are also many just walking around and exploring around. Of the roads, there are bridges, both over water and over other roads. For more on the Newbrooke homes themselves, check out our article on the eight styles (here).

And like the past couple groups of Linden Home sims, there is a community center. It is located in the sim of Newbank. The center is on an island in the middle of the sim conencted to land by three bridges. The style of the place did remind me a little of the new Welcome Island that went up last year. But the various food courts were a nice touch.

The community center is at https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Newbank/133/147/21/

Bixyl Shuftan
 

Sansar Now Available On Steam

About a month ago, Linden Lab announced that it's next-generation virtual world, Sansar, would soon be available on Steam. Yesterday, it was announced that Sansar was up and available there.

As of today, December 5th, we are officially live on Steam!

We wanted to give a huge thank you to our current community who have been so supportive, and to extend a warm “Welcome” to all our new community members joining us from Steam!

You can find us on Steam as an Early Access Game, where we’re free to download. Even better, you’ll get to enjoy all the benefits of Steam as a social platform for gamers including full access to our Steam Community Hub!

Sansar is one out of two products by Linden Lab available on Steam, the other being Blocksworld, which has been there since September 2017. Both are listed as "early access" platforms, "We plan on staying in Early Access until Sansar is the very best it can be." So far, there are a handful of reviews, which are mostly positive.

In it's move to Steam, Linden Lab did away with the SandeX, which was where Sansar users could buy and sell the virtual world's currency. There's no threads in the official forums about Sansar now being on Steam, though there is one in Virtualverse. Second Life had been available on Steam in 2012, but wasn't there for very long.

Ryan Schultz stated in his blog that why he hoped Sansar's move to steam was successful, he wasn't sure it would be, noting that High Fidelity doing the same didn't change it's numbers much. He did worry about Steam users being "brutal" with their reviews, though as mentioned earlier they are mostly positive so far. But he did say that two games in Sansar that had been getting attention, Hoverderby and Combat Zone, had been closed by the developers. If so, fewer available activities could make it harder for the next-generation virtual world to retain users.

Hat tip: Daniel Voyager

Bixyl Shuftan

Sansar Going To Steam, SandeX To Close

On Wednesday October 31, Linden Lab's Sansar team made a major announcement. The first part was that Sansar would soon be available on Steam.


Sansar has come a long way since we started the project. In 2018 we have devoted an enormous amount of effort to improving the end-user experience, and will continue to do so.

Given those improvements, we believe we are quickly approaching the point where we want to start bringing a large number of users onto the platform. This is an important milestone for us and especially our creators. One of the foundational principles of Sansar is that creators must be able to profit from their creations. For us to make that a reality, we need to give our creators a large audience of customers.

The cornerstone of our growth effort will be to put Sansar on Steam. Steam is where more than half of the VR market goes to find software. It also is a huge pool of users who are interested in our space and are likely to have the hardware required to run Sansar. We anticipate being able to get onto Steam by the end of this year. This is a huge step for us and we’re excited to be able introduce Sansar to an even wider audience.


Steam is a platform highly popular with gamers where people can buy games, expansions, and apps. According to the Wikipedia entry, Steam has over 150 million registered users. Linden Lab would have Second Life available on it in 2012. 

The second part of the announcement was that Linden Lab would be shutting down the SandeX, which is where users of Sansar currently buy and sell the virtual world's currency.


In order to do this, we are obligated to make significant changes to how Sansar works, especially in how the Sansar Dollar and process credit system work. These changes, will also make the credit process for Creators far more consistent and predictable. The first change is that we will be discontinuing the Sandex as of December 4, 2018.

After that date, we will be moving to a fixed conversion rate model. Creators will continue to be able to sell their work for Sansar Dollars on the Store (and soon in experiences!). Eligible creators may convert some or all of their earned Sansar Dollar balance to US dollars at a rate of S$250 to $1, and then request a USD credit to be processed in 30 days. This matches Steam’s payment timeline.

We understand that this may have an impact on the amount of revenue returned to creators compared to the Sandex. However, we believe that in the long run our creators will significantly benefit from having access to the larger Steam user base. In addition, anyone who has created their Sansar account before December 31, 2018 will receive a legacy conversion rate of S$143 to $1 until December 31, 2019, after which the conversion rate for all accounts will be S$250 to $1.

Our automated Sansar Dollar Conversion page will not be available until January 2019. In the interim, we are committed to working with our Creators to manually process credit requests of Sansar Dollars through an email process, the details of which will soon follow.


Ryan Schultz, who started his blog as focused on Sansar, remarked, "... Linden Lab is betting the farm that putting Sansar on Steam will lead to an influx of new users with cash to spend. They’ve weighed the pros and cons and they’re willing to put up with the fees that Steam will charge, in exchange for a wider audience.I simply cannot overstate what a major change in strategy this is." Schultz would also state that Linden Lab did answer a few questions in Sansar's Discord channel. Of the thirty day delay in processing credit, the answer was, "The problem is that Steam operates on a 30-60 day window. If we keep it at a few days, we will be floating credit for 1-2 months. That’s an uncomfortable financial situation to be in."

Daniel Voyager would remind his readers that, "Second Life didn’t work out very well on Steam back in 2012. It’s going to be interesting to see what impact this will have on Sansar’s user usage and revenue during 2019. The lab are gambling on a huge influx of new users with cash to spend to make Sansar more successful in the years ahead." On the Virtualverse forum (the successor to SL Universe), a couple posters were hopeful. But others were skeptical, one remarking, "the breathtaking potential that SL had in the early days is just not there."



Sources: Sansar, Ryan Scultz, Daniel Voyager, Virtualverse

Bixyl Shuftan