- Three new Pandaire coats: Grizzly, Polar, and Sunny!
- Spawn rates are changing for a colder season!
- Krafties is now more welcoming than ever! The New Player Experience has been modernized! Group Charters are changing to allow crafting requests and urls in Krafties Official group chat. And more!
- Website upgrades!
- A new Dev Note on the state of Krafties and Second Life!
No rest for the wickedly cute this year!
Spawn rates are changing for a colder season, and with that comes three new coats: Grizzly, Polar, and Sunny!
Three new Pandaire coats are spawning, alongside a flurry of returning favorites joining us for the colder weather! This winter season Grizzly, Polar, and Sunny coats have been spotted spawning from temples. Join in on the hunt to complete your collection before they return back to the Krafties Kingdom! The next winter-themed coat, releasing “soon”, will dramatically lower the spawn chances of these new bears, making them quite rare until their next spawning event.
Krafties Is Now More Welcoming Than Ever!
With an eye on a potential push for expansion within Second Life, a few changes have been made in preparation! These are only the tip of the iceberg, but are important to note so that existing players are still able to help new players get started. The New Player Experience has been modernized! We’ve completely removed the “Start App”, and now when a new player wears their Necessity Pack for the first time their starter creature will automatically load, they’ll be sent a Starter Pack, and be able to participate in the game without any delay. This will be even more important when our upcoming sim redesign is installed, but for now please let us know if you, or any newer players you’re helping, are running into problems.
Along with that bit of cleanup, there are a few other notable changes. Some are quality-of-life improvements, and some are preparing for future moves. In no particular order:
- Script time limits are removed from the sim. Visitors will no longer get pesky messages and ejections based on their script usage.
- Group Charters are changing to allow crafting requests and Krafties-related URLs in our Official group chat.
- KraftiesMessenger has replaced KraftiesWelcome as our messaging bot! While still warm and welcoming, this new friendly face makes a bit more sense for some new uses of in-world functions that will be rolled out in the future.
Website Upgrades!
To go along with our recent wiki patches, the site now uses HTTPS! Look up at your browser’s address bar and marvel at the shiny new lock. This was a large lift for our old website, and not all pages are fully secured yet (like the apps), but it’s a step in the right direction! The “not secure” notification sure was an eyesore, wasn’t it? I wonder what else might be in store for this dusty old site…
That’s all! Thanks for reading, and as always have fun! Unless you might be interested in… this old thing…
A Note From The Developer On The State Of Krafties And Second Life
Hey all, Kris here coming at you hot with more fiery dev notes. I think this is a pretty good one. Read on to find out!
As a lot of you know, Krafties has been around for quite a while. In fact, we just celebrated our 10th birthday this year! And boy, a lot tends to happen in 10 years. Krafties, as you probably know if you’re invested enough to read this section, is far from being an isolated island. Instead, it exists in the turbulent seas of a virtual world (metaverse?) alongside countless other creators, all while the captains of the ship make big decisions that impact the virtual world in sometimes unpredictable ways.
For a long while now, this relationship was something that I actively worked against. A large goal of mine with Krafties has always been to “break free” from the walled garden of Second Life. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it for everything it’s allowed me to do with Krafties, but being so dependent on a platform, especially when it makes decisions that I have a hard time aligning with at times, was always troubling. The draw to diversify and taste those greener pastures was too alluring! This culminated in a crescendo when it appeared, to me, that the makers of Second Life, Linden Labs, were going to abandon their original baby and move on to a shiny new project: Sansar.
As a content creator, you have to think long and hard when figuring out the perfect platform to invest your limited time and creative energy into. When it felt like abandonment was imminent, it became very hard for me to justify investing more time and energy into Second Life-related development. For me, that looked like focusing purely on content additions that could be ported when the time came alongside a lot of research and experimentation into other platforms, while still always trying to uphold promises I make to players who have supported the game all this time.
Players that have been around for a while may remember some of these experiments. When I was considering a web game, “Dragon Doorways” appeared and opened apps running a 2D game engine where players could walk around outside of Second Life. The Fishing App is entirely based on this concept as an effort to see how far it could be pushed. This next one’s quite technical, but as I’ve been planning the transition to potentially trade the Second Life client for something we have more control over (like, maybe with Unity) I found it really beneficial to abstract a lot of our game logic out of LSL (Second Life’s scripting language), write an interpreter for a programming language called Lisp, and embed it into all of our in-world game objects. The interpreter could then be re-worked wherever Krafties ended up, and all of our Lisp code would work like magic! Speaking of Unity, did you know that I have a fully networked system written in Unity that allows players to log in, interact in a 3D world, and travel around to randomly generated islands with some suspiciously familiar-looking creatures? I bet you didn’t!
But like I said before, a lot changes in 10 years. Recent developments with Second Life, and the world, have caught my attention. Sansar being sold so Linden Labs can focus on Second Life is a big one. The immense attention “the metaverse” is receiving is another key ingredient. Additionally, changes within Linden Labs as a company, and the addition of some features and functions into Second Life that have been ignored for the past 10 years (or longer) have piqued my interest in a big way. I’ll dive into that last part in a bit, but it’s all to say that the Krafties presence within Second Life is probably about to get a whole lot larger.
The tech I went into detail about above, and so so much more, has all been more or less crafted with the Second Life environment in mind. When I zoom out and look at it, there are some incredibly valuable and well-engineered tools that Krafties has available that give it a huge leg-up over other existing systems on the platform. I never really stopped to think about it this way (cause, you know… I was building an escape pod) but with this tech and our brand re-purposed a bit, aimed directly at an unsuspecting virtual world, I think it could make an impact in a bigger way than we ever have before.
In the interest of making this as long as possible (since it’s already taken me days to sit down and get this all written out), I’ll now talk about a few cool new things LL has/is working on that we’ll see soon!
- The first big one that caught my eye was this: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/492023-linkset-data-is-coming. This one’s a bit geeky, but in one motion LL made scripts orders of magnitude more useful for large projects that require a heavy amount of software development. In other words, this will alleviate (in some ways) “Stack/Heap collision errors” and gives developers access to a lot more memory (like RAM) to work with in much more convenient ways. Is it perfect? Not at all. There are still some much-needed upgrades in that entire area. But I think the lab has shown they’re taking steps to get there.
- This next one is something that I think everyone can enjoy: Physically Based Materials (or PBR for short). Check out this video: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/493264-im-glad-second-life-starting-to-catch-up-graphics-side/. As you can see, LL is currently working on completely revamping the tools creators have available to make Second Life look… modern! Of all the things they could invest in, I really think this one makes a whole lot of sense. They know they have competition in this space now, and first impressions are important when vying for user attention.
Of course, I can’t speak for Linden Labs. I can’t ever truly know their intentions or motivations, but I found a way to get darn close! As of last month, I’ve been taking time every week to attend meetings Linden Labs holds where employees of the company give updates on new developments and get feedback on features and future plans. This has been really helpful in giving me a feel for their direction and velocity, allows me to lobby for additions that will help Krafties, and tangentially provides an excellent networking opportunity. It also gives me a chance better the platform as a whole, which is an opportunity I’m excited to pursue. New-user experience is something that I’ve always got my eye on, and as I explore the virtual world with renewed vigor I’m finding a lot of opportunities to make things better. I’m even considering contributing some open source code to the viewer to fix what I see as issues that stand in the way of adoption. Like… maybe we can stop showing seas of hyper-realistic naked bodies to brand new users every time they teleport to a new location?
So, that’s that. Be ready for change! I’m ready to break everything and rebuild it if needed, though hopefully it doesn’t have to come to that. There are a lot of things happening behind the scenes that I believe will cement the standing of Krafties in Second Life as #1 in both the games and “cute little friends” categories. None of these are guaranteed, but I’ll leave them here and maybe gauge reactions in our channels to see which people are most excited for.
- A long awaited mechanic that will promote co-op play in ways that Krafties has never seen before. It’s big, and it’s coming VERY SOON so I won’t spoil the surprise!
- A new sim design alongside some other changes as a “Second Life Destination”, leading into a new “story arc” with a plethora of content planned alongside it.
- A huge new mechanics update is incoming with a (new HUD) beta test – get ready for first-person gameplay!
- Long awaited: New soul types! Alongside some experimentation with a new type of limited edition content… maybe…
- Creature designs, and potentially the entire aesthetic premise of Krafties as an idea, may change in a big way to take advantage of the new visual features LL is implementing. The plan is to remain competitive in both the games space as well as attached friends!
- More spells for creatures to unlock, and higher-level skill trees
- Everybody has a battle pass these days…
- Big push for marketing and advertising within Second Life, which isn’t something we’ve done in the past. Before this, everything has primarily been done via word of mouth and our invite system!
- A stratetgically crafted, new standalone game experience inside of Second Life which promotes exploration across the grid, fully integrated into the Krafties Economy. This is designed with further acquisition channels for new players and partnerships with brands inside of Second Life in mind.
- More…
But for now that’s all! Stand by, enjoy the new bears, and dream happy dreams about Krafties. Also, you might want to stay tuned for the next update because this holiday season is going to be our most interesting yet.
– <3 Kris
