Second Life 2 going alpha

Sign up to test the new world.

Picked up from New World Notes just now, Philip Rosedale's new virtual world project has started looking for alpha testers.  Funny this should happen now, because I was only wondering about it the other day.

The new world is the product of 'High Fidelity', Rosedale's latest startup, and promises an altogether much more hi-tech virtual world experience than the ten year old SL is able to offer, even with all its recent shiny additions.  Take a look at the development blog and you'll see posts about such topics as incorporating RL touch and how to integrate Google glass.

At New World Notes, Wagner James Au has been talking about 2014 being a big year for virtual reality.  With the consumer launch of the increasingly talked about Oculus Rift hanging tantalisingly towards the end of the next twelve months, the new virtual world might just be able to pull off something SL sadly never really managed: get its timing right.

UPDATE 24 June 2014: This little post seems to have been getting a lot of hits this week, presumably people looking for news about Linden's announcement about a successor to SL.  You can see my thoughts on that development here.

AFK, Indefinitely: cover art

UPDATE: After another fiddle, a 'wraparound' design:

Which do you prefer?

2014 and all that

Happy New Year!  Last night - 1 January - I finished the first draft of my latest novel, 'AFK, Indefinitely'. The third installment of the AFK series ended up weighing in at an ounce over 60,000 words, making it the longest entry so far.  My editing process now will consist of going through the novel once in Word document format and then again in a draft printed version.  I also have to design a cover.  I'm currently aiming for all this to be done by the end of January, with a paperback, Kindle and Issuu release (the latter will be free) some time in February.

2014 should be a busy year.  I'm also hoping to release a new 'Huckleberry H Hax' novella (anything released under my name with the extra middle H means its not a NaNoWriMo project and significantly more time has been put into it) that I've been working on for a couple of years now.  'SIM' is nearly complete and I hope to release it Spring/Summer this year.  It's quite unlike anything I've written before, so it will be interesting to see what reaction (if any) it gets.

I've also been working on a collection of my various articles on Second Life over the last few years, most of them AVENUE articles.  I'm uncertain when this will be released at this moment, but hopefully something will turn up before the year is out.

I also have plenty of work to do in bringing all my books up to date in ePub and Kindle versions, and producing hardback versions of my latest three novels.  I know hardly anyone purchases the hardback versions of my novels, but they do look superb on my own bookshelf!

I've also been putting in a bit of work over Christmas on my 'HHax' Second Life furniture range.  Having purchased an inworld HUD recently that enables prim to mesh conversion I've been able to produce versions of my builds that look identical to the original prim-based products, but which take up a fraction of the land impact, making them much more attractive to the modern discerning SL home-owner.  I'll be uploading these to the Marketplace over the next few weeks and I might also publish an HHax dedicated website I've been working on over the last few months.

A lot of long-term projects coming together in 2014, then.  I'm looking forward to sharing them with you all!