This Monday morning Second Life Grid Status is reporting a number of regions are being restarted. They say the restarts will take longer than usual. There is no reason given as to why.
LEAP Motion
Google is getting on board LEAP Motion. See: You’ve Got The Whole World In Your Hands As Leap Motion Gains Google Earth Support.
LEAP Motion has great possibilities for Second Life. Combine it with the new Oculus Rift and it could be an amazing interface. People might be able to learn manipulating 3D space in a way more natural to humans.
FMOD EX
This has yet to make it into the Dev Viewer… if I understood correctly. There are some problems that are being cleaned up. But, it is moving toward the Dev and Beta Viewers.
Fantasy Fair
It is open now. People are raving about the builds there and it’s in all the blogs. It is a must see in person event.
Viewer Tid-Bits
The Third Party Viewers are getting Server Side Appearance (SSA – or Avatar Baking) integrated into their viewers. Firestorm is rumored to be releasing their today, we’ll see. I’m seeing fixes hitting version 4.4.0 (33720) in what I think is the main repository. The current version I am using is 4.3.1 (31155) released in December 2012, which is a pretty awesome viewer.
I am speculating, but I expect this to be a Second Life Grid only release with support for Havok’s Pathfinding tools that render the Navmesh and the SSA support. These features are not needed for use on OpenSim grids. – That is right. I did some searching and came up with this page: Firestorm Release Notes 4.4.0 (33720) Server Side Appearance Capable Release. That doesn’t mean this is the one that will make it out, but it has a good chance.
Singularity now has more users than Phoenix. Once SSA is out Phoenix is not going to be able to render avatar system clothes. So, Phoenix users are migrating to Firestorm and Singularity. Rough estimates are Phoenix is now down to the 4th most used viewer in SL.
OpenSim
There are now some alpha versions of the OpenSim software out that support the coming SL Materials. So, OpenSim grids are likely to get Materials Support about the same time Second Life does. I think if the viewers were ready for Materials OpenSim developers would push out a Materials server support.