Archive for the 'Web Development' Category
Hi all!
For those wondering generally what I’ve been up to, I said in earlier transition announcements from CEO to Chairman that I wanted to get back into engineering and the design of Second Life in a more hands-on way. So I am now working with two other great engineers as one of Linden Lab’s technical teams. In early December we decided that a good first project to work together on would be improving the performance and experience of using the web-based SL map, and also changing the architecture to be able to handle a much larger number of sims/servers. And, I have to say I’m having a great time getting back into development.
Hopefully, the general direction we are going with the map can help to make place and proximity more meaningful in SL. It should be fun to explore the map: to look at what is near your home, to drill down for more detail, to randomly surf around and jump to places that look interesting from the air. We always felt that this would be a big part of the appeal of SL, but the practical challenge of rendering things far away combined with the weaknesses of the existing web and in-world maps have made this more an aspiration than a reality.
More specifically, we’ve just released some improvements to the SL web-based map (http://www.slurl.com) that should be immediately noticeable. First, the map should load faster and be smoother when you use it. Secondly, you can now single-click on any location on the map and teleport directly there. The map is also accurately updated much more rapidly then the former map – so changes to the Second Life Grid or content should now be visible within about 2 days. Finally, the map images themselves look smoother and are more accurate when compared to the actual in-world content, and you can now zoom out and see how big SL has really become!
We’re not done with this project! We also intend to update the SL viewer to read its map tiles in the same way as the web map, meaning that you will be able to zoom and move around on the in-world map in a manner similar to the webmap, with much better performance than before. Look for a viewer release candidate next with those changes.
For SL developers, and the more technically interested: We are now serving map tiles directly from Amazon S3, and have changed the file naming convention to hopefully make it much easier to develop other 3rd party maps based on the tiles we are generating. More documentation on using the webmap API is available on our wiki. The map generation process is much more scalable than before, and is able to image the entire SL grid of about 30K regions in less than 2 days with just 4 dedicated machines. In general, the architecture approach of generating tiled images on sims into a public repository like S3 seems like the right approach for both performance and openness – it anticipates the ability for individual sim owners/operators in the future to create their own maps (or not make them at all!) and upload them to a common shared filespace on which multiple mapping systems can then depend.
Note: If you have built a map that depends on the old mapping API, we will leave the old tiles accessible for another few weeks, but will not be updating them in the future. You will need to switch to reading tiles directly from S3. We will post more information about this changeover on the wiki.
Also, here is a link to the forum for more discussion or any questions.
As you may have read on the blog last week, we’ve been testing a redesigned home page for new visitors, those who have never logged in to Second Life. The goal of the new homepage is to show off the breadth and richness of the Second Life experience. Test results show the new page performed well, so we’re going live this week. For Second Life Residents, the current homepage will remain the same for now.
Over the past week we’ve been comparing the core metrics (traffic, registrations, logins, economic and inworld activity) of the new page with our existing new user home page. The data is encouraging: the new design performed better in almost all aspects, so we are moving full steam ahead with launching the redesigned page.
 Redesigned Homepage for Non-Registered, New Visitors We’ve been paying attention to the conversations on this topic in the forums, and we’d like to address some of the great questions Residents have posed:
Ongoing improvements and considerations include:
- Flash – a very small number of people who come through the new user home page either have flash disabled or not installed, so we have provided an alternate, non-Flash experience for them.
- Accessibility – the header and footer are CSS/HTML, so the global navigation will quickly get folks with screen readers to the content they need.
- Business friendliness – this iteration of the new user home page has two pods dedicated to education and virtual meetings, but our next task will be to make sure that people who are focused on the business uses of Second Life can find the information they need rapidly.
In the next two weeks, we will keep a close eye on the metrics to make sure that the page is performing as we expect. As we noted in the last post, this is just the first of several changes that we will be rolling out to improve the new user experience and to increase registrations.
Thank you to all the Residents who have contributed great feedback and ideas. When the page is live, let us know your thoughts in the forums.
Please stay tuned for future developments!
Over the course of next week, we will be testing a new design for the secondlife.com home page. The page really showcases the richness and breadth of the wonderful creativity and possibility of Second Life and is a small first step towards a larger redesign of the Second Life experience.
 Testing New SL Homepage by Big Spaceship Dec 16, 2008 This homepage project is an example of the kinds of projects (small in scope, new user friendly, utilizing outside design resources from Big Spaceship) which we will be doing more of in the future to bring more Residents into Second Life.
The design is optimized for the new user coming to secondlife.com for the first time and not logged in. The logged in homepage (which is what most Residents, as opposed to potential Residents see) will not be changing.
Here are the goals for the design:
- Express the richness and breadth of Second Life
- Allow us to address a wide range of potential Residents
- Set context for what a potential Resident might do in Second Life
The team produced a gorgeous design that uses Flash. In order to test the new design, we’ll be pushing this new page live for a few hours next week, so we can evaluate the impact to traffic. Since Residents that log in get cookied (and directed to the “logged in” home page), the impact to Residents as we run our test should be limited.
You might see it as we run our tests. But we don’t want to skew the results of the test, and we won’t be pushing it out to a broader audience until we have data.
Pods and Verbs
The core of the design is a nine-pod layout and a carousel of pods that can be “flicked” from left to right to reveal additional pods. This allows a potential Resident to see a wide range of experiences available to them.
Each pod has a beautiful visual from inworld or text that serves as a small billboard. It’s exciting to be able to show the amazing creativity and beautiful avatars Residents have created.
Some of the pods include “verbs” – the things you can do in Second Life – like shop, build, play, flirt, learn. Verb pods expand to play a short animated Flash clip that shows the Second Life experience in motion.
Flash is great for these kinds of interactive and animated experiences and will help us to provide great windows into the world of Second Life. But we recognize there is a tradeoff between accessibility and the richness of the experience, so we will have an alternate page with static graphics.
What’s coming?
The rest of secondlife.com has not been refreshed, so we expect elements of this look to make its way into the rest of the registration flow and elsewhere on the site.
In addition to the homepage, we’ve been working to improve the registration experience for the new user. In the coming weeks, we’ll be introducing localized registration for all new users, including the option for new sign-ups to select a first landing location in their language- thanks to the Community Gateway Program.
We plan to continue improvements to increase the numbers of new Residents, so stay tuned.
Let us know your feedback!
We would love to hear your feedback, get suggestions for pods and verbs, and hear your suggestions. Let us know in the forum. We won’t be able to get to it until tomorrow morning (Dec. 16th, pacific time) so please be patient. We look forward to reading and responding to your comments then.
Note: Revised to add screenshot of the new home page design being tested. You can see a larger version of the image here.
So, you know a lot about Second Life, right? You’ve got ideas, big ideas, and are tired of waiting around for Linden Lab to make it just so. The challenge of stabilizing, maintaining, and extending the Second Life Grid, and the dozens of services and thousands of machines it entails, excites you. If this describes you, you should check out our job listings!
Three of the prioritized positions are web developers, production operations engineers, and production operations developers, but many other openings are currently available.
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4:49 PM PST Our support portal is available once again.
One of our web servers is currently having technical problems. If you need to view knowledge base articles, please log in as a guest. If you need to submit a ticket, please try reloading the page or retry access when the problem is fixed. Our web engineers are banging on it now.
I know that many of you have been anxiously awaiting the return of the Friends Online functionality. I am happy to announce that the issues with this service have now been resolved and it is now back online. Thanks for your patience while we hammered this service back into shape.
[Update 4:40PM PST 10/19/07]
We apologize for not providing updates on this the last few days. This issue is still ongoing and we are still working to resolve it. Again, if you are having difficulties with your password in the meantime, please visit the support portal at http://secondlife.com/support.
[Update 5:45 PM PST 10/16/07]
Most of the web team was focused on Friends Online today and did not have a chance to address this issue. However, they will be picking it back up tomorrow and we hope to have a solution for you soon. Thanks for your patience and have a great night.
The password reset tool (http://secondlife.com/password) has been having intermittent failures the last two days. In some cases, the tool will send you the confirmation email and allow you to answer your security question, but then it re-directs you back to the Second Life homepage.
Our web team is aware of this issue and we are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. In the meantime, if you are having difficulties with your password, please visit our support portal at http://secondlife.com/support. We apologize for the inconvenience.
As many of you are aware our CAPTCHA system was less than ideal. It was often hard to read and you never knew if the space was required, etc…
Thanks to help from the folks at Carnegie Mellon University we have been able to replace our old system with reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA not only helps to prevent spam and other abuses but also helps improves the process of digitizing books.
Most of the time you shouldn’t even see reCAPTCHA. Only if you enter a bad password on the login and support pages will you see reCAPTCHA.
Thanks!
-Durl
Early this year, Linden Lab released the source for the Second Life
viewer. Programmers can download the source, make changes, and even add features and improvements by submitting changes that we incorporate in the main viewer. By the time we release our next viewer, we’ll have enjoyed hundreds of submissions from over fifty contributors, and we couldn’t be more thankful. (Thank you!)
This success has been encouraging, and we’re now opening the source of two key components in our web services infrastructure: Eventlet, and Mulib.
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I’m currently recovering from a very intense, but enjoyable weekend at Hack Day London which Christopher Linden and I attended to help hackers mashup Second Life.
Paul Johnston and Nigel Crawley had brought a webcam, markers and reactivision software they were looking to put to use, so, as we were playing IceTowers with IBM at the time, we thought it might be fun to build a mixed reality version of the IceHouse game Torpedo.
It turns out that Torpedo is particularly well suited to a reactivision implementation as it relies on the position and orientation of pieces placed freely on a playing field, but judging torpedo hits in real life is difficult. It’s also a very simple game, so there was a slim chance that we could build it in 24 hours.
Our plan was to play the game in real life then publish the position and orientation data from reactivision to the web, then use LSL to pull the data in to SL where we could rez the pieces, launch the torpedoes and calculate the results. At the same time a second web cam would stream video of the board in to SL, so that we could watch the game play out in RL then see the results calculated in SL.
Working on the hack was loads of fun and team Supernova did a great job with help from Timeless Prototype in world. The software came together amazingly well but it wasn’t until we started running around scavenging tripods, glue guns, gaffer tape and white boards to nail together the hardware side that we started getting lots of interest from the other hackers.
In the end the lightning strikes, storms, leaks and lack of wifi meant that we didn’t complete all of the gameplay, but we managed to demo all of the technical aspects of the hack live in our 90 second presentation.
Everything we used was open source, so anyone will be able to finish off our work or build some other interesting computer vision application in SL. Nigel thought mixed reality spin the bottle would be good fun. Andy Piper has another SLorpedo write up here and a selection of pictures here. Chris took a video of the presentation, so hopefully we’ll be able to make that available soon too.
I’m already back working on the SL infrastructure, but it’s great to be able to hack on interesting SL applications once in a while and hopefully we’ll see some of the hackers at Linden Lab Brighton in the near future.
UPDATE: Team Supernova finished the game last week and ran it at SL.UK on Saturday, some SL footage of the finished game here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd-MoN9d_Nw
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