happy birthday second life: 12 years old & counting while old vw rivals are littering the side of the road.
but it is a new day with new competition [and a next gen vw in the works] so we have danger linden, senior director of product & troy linden, senior producer on the show to talk about that [and a bit of this as well of course].
taped yesterday as part of the “meet the lindens” series at sl12b, co-hosted with saffia widdershins. enjoy: and now that you have listened, please go forth and enjoy the b-day festivities:
– full schedule including sl12b music fest
– taken yesterday: drax looking out into the crowd at the live show, a second before crashing
– danger linden loves hawaiian shirts in both lives:
![danger linden [all senior level staff must wear tommy bahama to work!]](https://draxfiles.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/2014-04-18-16-36-47.jpg)
– our sponsor bright canopy – visit them & give it a try!
the drax files radio hour [with jo yardley] is a weekly production of basicdrax entertainment.
the show is supported by leap motion, stitcher, fatewear by damien fate, gizza creations, feroshSL, bright canopy, dwarfins, dutchie, KONA stream, aeros avatars, maven homes, madpea productions, botgirl’s identity circus, ison, kahruvel design, vika creations, humanoid animations, loki eliot, botanical, death row designs, fallen gods incorporated, {what’s next}, abranimations, blue moon enterprises, avacon and landscapes unlimited!
music by bd.
contact the show via skype draxfiles, avatar draxfiles or email radio@draxfiles.com.
the drax files radio hour 
Should have mentioned: the fabulous Michael Linden gave me the SL cube pictured above. I am so psyched about this still. I do not know how to ever reciprocate….
I can’t resist making 1 last plea for the Blender community. LL has admitted that their test group for creators is limited, as I expected. In my eyes, this is not good. Personally, I started out as a 3Ds Max user, that was looking to upgrade to something better. I looked at both Maya and Blender. With my work, I deal with numerous platforms, and I need something flexible, with a large community that supports each other. Of course, it has to be bleeding edge, and top of the line. I’ve watched Blender over the years, and today, as a very active Blender user, that it is truly the best 3D software available. It’s a full suite. There’s nothing you can’t do with it. Blender makes Maya look 1 dimensional. Many of the ways things are done in Blender are ground breaking, and there are many more coders working on Blender than there is for any software out there. If your software is not fully compatible, someone in the community will make an Addon. Unity3D is fully supported by Blender. Unreal has their own Addons.
By being Maya centric, I feel LL is creating their own problems. I’ve created for every virtual world out there that has allowed residents to create for it. 1 of the main reasons SL became so popular, is because it brought in thousands of creative people that didn’t have 3D experience. SL had a community tho, that created their own tools to create, that were simplified for none 3D users. Every virtual world venture that has failed, failed because they could not get enough creators to create for them. Not just to sell, but to work out good solutions for the unique issues of virtual world content. Blue Mars was very 3ds Max centric, and they were lucky to have a few dozens serious creators. They failed. THERE had similar issues. IMVU is the only stand out, and they have always had files for Max, Maya, and Blender. Cloud Party was very Maya centric, and they had very few people actually making things. There was a big issue with the compatibility with the Maya rig, and CP ignored it until the very end. We could easily get NPC rigs to work perfectly out of Blender, but their avatar rig was a mess. This resulted in only 1 SL animator creating for CP, until CP closed. I heard High Fidelity had a similar issue with their Maya rig.
To me, this looks like a train wreck waiting to happen, and I don’t understand why LL can’t also deal with Blender users at the same time? The fewer creators LL gets, the more narrow minded the creation system will be, if it will even work. The avatar rig is probably the most important feature a virtual world has, and the bug in that rig need to be worked out as early as possible. When there are known compatibility issues with Maya rigs versus Blender rigs, I’d think this would be a key issues that could be lead to a total lack of content for everyone. You get a huge community of thousands and thousands of Blender users, and developers. Plus, Blender is amazing software! LL could learn a crap load form how it accomplishes things, and even in UI design, an ease of use. I chose Blender, not just because it is BLEEDING EDGE, but because when I use it, I feel like I have total and complete control, like I would sculpting a clay model in real life, or even better.
IMHO, today, Blender is far superior to Maya.
I used to be excited about Sansar, but if they do not support Linux, then I am out and done. Countries like Russia, China and Brasil are currently massivly pushing away from Windows and might eventually ban it completely, because of the NSA backdoors and Microsofts close colaboration with the US government. If the Lindens really want to build the next big thing it would be stupid to not support Linux.
We interviewed Ebbe and he mentioned a few interesting things, best one being that he agreed to my idea of a regular Linden Question Time!
https://joyardley.wordpress.com/2015/06/27/ebbe-talks-there-is-going-to-be-a-monthly-question-time-for-lindens-with-video/