Category: Read me

Opinions and views regarding diverse topics and happenings in Second Life and its community of netizens, bystanders and passersby

burt artis compass

Fun facts

While waiting for tropical storm Erika to hit my area later tonight (the center of the storm is expected to make landfall after 9:00 p.m.), I decided to try burt Artis’ Compass with (WWC) wind indicator (available on the marketplace) on one of my sailboats. To my surprise, I also found it works for regular avatar movements too. So here are some curious results of that alternate experiment.

  • On average, an avatar walk at a speed of 6.2 to 6.4 kts, if done on an almost flat surface.
  • An avatar can reach a speed of 9.6 to 9.9 kts when running on said flat surface (on my test I reached an average of 10.4 kts going downhill).
  • An avatar flies at 31.1 kts on a horizontal direction.
  • Free fall speed seems to max out at 99.9 kts (if you don’t hit an unforeseen sky platform on your way down first). It could well have been that the instrument can’t measure faster speeds, I don’t know.

About to hit the ground

According to Wikipedia, a knot is “a unit of speed equal to one nautical mile (1.852 km) per hour, approximately 1.151 mph.” Later on, it points out that:

The speeds of vessels relative to the fluids in which they travel (boat speeds and air speeds) are measured in knots. For consistency, the speeds of navigational fluids (tidal streams, river currents and wind speeds) are also measured in knots. Thus, speed over the ground (SOG) (ground speed (GS) in aircraft) and rate of progress towards a distant point (“velocity made good”, VMG) are also given in knots.

A person’s walking or running speed is not measured in knots, by the way (I’m sure you knew that already). I’m just giving these fun facts because they were the measures given by the thingy I was testing, and because it was also interesting to compare it to the speed of the sailboat I was trying out (which speed at 15 kts winds tended to average 6 to 10 kts, depending on the direction of sail).

Two months

I’ve been –mostly– away for two months, and that’s the time it has taken the airfield of which I raved about (roll eyes) in my previous post to shrink. Yes, it didn’t even survive the summer in all its original “spreador”. After all the effort its owners put forth in building this now failed two-sims attempt of yet another huge airport in SL, half the land sits, once again, desolated and empty as it was before. For aesthetic reasons, I’m delighted it’s partially gone, but when you honestly think about the cost of acquiring all that land in the first place and then the investment –in the broadest sense of the word– its founders obviously “wasted” in –poorly– planning an infrastructure for the good of all the aviation community in SL (even though it seems it didn’t have a real significant appeal for that target audience) must be terribly frustrating.

It is popularly said that in Second Life you can pursuit (and build) whatever you dream, no matter what that might be, but beware: SL dreams demand a –high– monthly maintenance cost that, for the most part, must be covered with funds from sources beyond this fantastical realm: it requires –oftentimes a lot of– RL money.

The moral of this “experiment”? Obviously, it isn’t safe to merely rely on people’s –suspected– attention or –apparent– needs. If you’re building for your own use, calculate the cost and keep a –wise– balance between personal satisfaction and real life economy. Staying small is always safe, a two-sim project is not necessarily so. If you’re going big though, why not do some marketing beforehand to, at least, secure the patronage of the community you intend to serve? At least you can extend the life of your illusion a couple of months longer (more if it’s kind of unique or not that common).

Before
Before
After
After

From my point of view, this airport’s biggest “accomplishment”, considering the available hangars didn’t rent and I never saw a single plane taking flight from there, was to disrupt and disband a long established community that, in the best-case scenario, will have –to try– to reinvent itself. But that’s something that rarely happens in SL. Once residents are gone and luckily established somewhere else (if at all), they usually never look back. Gone. Bye.

airfield

Derender the beast

For almost six years straight you’ve been the owner of an “idyllic” coastal area in SL, surrounded by water, sand, and friendly neighbors, none of which have ever ruined you a beach party. Not even that renter over there, whose tenants have always kept the same fitting vibe. They’re so sympathetic that they even let you rezz your boat on their side of the world whenever your plot is –as per usual– lacking resources.

There couldn’t be a better place than this.

All that inconceivable harmony existed until this week, though, when an outsider bought the last spot that became available one night, and unexpectedly also claimed all the abandoned land in two adjoining sims. Yes, the lots that have been empty for four years now house an immeasurable airfield complex that stretches two sims and violently corrupts your countryside. Now, from its origin as a tranquil community, the neighborhood has turned to a grey mass of humongous walls on top of which sits a collection of “brick and mortar” hangars for rent.

Airfield

There’s nothing you can do about it, I’m afraid. This is mainland, and on that mass of land controlled by the linden$, you, and your neighbors, can build whatever you want. It’s always been like that. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been living in the same spot for six years, nobody cares if you and your friends have kept some outstanding living standards way above the norm. Whoever comes after and pays the land can do whatever they please, even if it kills your vicinity and devalues your property –especially when the newcomer holds more land than you do. The Lindens don’t care that your piece of virtual real estate represents an investment to you, that you paid for it with real money, and least of all that you may have created an emotional attachment, have given it a meaning even when it’s not a tangible thing. None of that matters at all.

Now you’re hearing in your mind that classic mantra repeating on and on: your rights end where mine begin. Yes, in SL your rights end at your parcel limits. As in RL actually, only that in RL there’s usually something called zoning, a planning strategy that, when implemented, tries to keep a balance between different land uses.

Surrounded by an airfield

Most, if not all, private estates in SL, regardless of their size, put into practice some sort of zoning to keep their clients and the overall environment functioning in an attractive way. Attractive here means not only good-looking, but alluring, able to capture the attention of potential customers and retaining existing tenants in good terms. Retention is not achieved by instituting maturity ratings that only serve, according to SL’s Knowledge Base, to “designate the type of content and behavior allowed in a region.” That may help to control access to certain places in an optative way, but in more successful estates, this kind of division is, at best, secondary.

In the beginning, when all that mattered was to attract hordes of people to SL, zoning may have been fatal to mainland. In time, even the Lindens saw the reigning chaos was discouraging and created Linden Homes, themed residential communities that everybody seems to praise a lot. That undoubtedly proved to be a success.

Today, when SL growth is on a standstill (for most residents it’s clearly declining),  retaining users should be a better choice. In this case, zoning may help maintain long standing communities healthy, though it may probably be too late: working on an already developed region would indeed be a difficult task. That may have been the reason why previous propositions never prospered, and why there’s now a huge airfield where once there was a homey countryside.

Airfield

Back in February, I put a 512 sq.m. plot in that sim up for sale. At 3500L, it may have been a bargain since it sold within an hour. Today, the guy who bought the land is trying to sell a parcel twice that size for 1200L. The reason? To escape the airfield. Will he look for a place somewhere else? I really don’t know. For what I can tell right now LL is losing a client that has been paying his rights since 2009 (and may well be paying still for the foreseeable future), in exchange of someone who may only survive the summer. Today, that’s usually the case with most large-scale projects in the mainland: a season at best.

Thanks to programmers, there’s Derender + Blacklist to deal with this mess. At least, it’s an effective way to recover the lost horizon and the fake sea waves.