SL Go 7 Days
This past week the SL blogosphere has been talking about OnLive’s announcement that they now offer a 7 DAY trial period of their SL GO product. If you don’t know what SL Go is, OMG! Well, see #SecondLife Gets a Mobile App (early March 2014). Prior to this the trial period was far too short for anyone to get an idea of whether this was a useful service. This longer trail should allow one to use SL Go long enough to learn the basics and actually use it to gain a sense of what it is like.
The last few days I have been experimenting a bit with viewers, something I used to do frequently in my quest for the best viewer. Those were the days when viewers were each very different and had very different feature sets. To some extent that is still true, but I think much less so than in the past.
What I have found is that where FS and SL Viewer get 6 to 20 FPS in a crowd of avatars SL Go runs a pretty steady 40 to 50 FPS on the desktop and my S4 in the same crowds. Impressive.
You might want to give it a try.
New Second Life Web Site
If you haven’t visited the SecondLife.com site in a while, you’ll find it has changed. I think it shows the effect of recent blogosphere stories about how miss directed the marketing for SL has been, or so current users think.
The bikini babes are gone. But, I still see them in the banner ads.
Not all the advice has been listened to. The new all mesh avatars are featured. Several bloggers thank that is a mistake. I am one of those bloggers. I would bet we will see a higher dropout rate from people adopting the new mesh avatars as their first avatar. Time will tell, but Linden Lab has the numbers. Will they ever tell us or just change things?
When you click on the LEARN MORE for the Oculus you hit will a wall of text. I think that is bad news. Some people will read it. But, my bet is it will stop a significant number of people. For now it may work. Oculus people tend to be the geeks developing software or wanting to be on the cutting edge. They read a lot of tech. But, once the general consumer is using the Rift this wall of text will likely be a big problem.
The video at the bottom of the page will help, if people scroll and don’t just run, click way. It would help if the video were near the top.
Get Started
If you click Get Started, you are mouse-trapped (your back button would let you back up, a rookie mistake in web design that REALLY annoys people. Of course the majority of people probably won’t notice. But, those that do will probably not signup, if they lack a strong motivation. Again only time will tell the extent and severity of the problem and we’ll likely never see those numbers.
You are channeled into a one way signup process. Fortunately at most points the back button works.
Video
There is a great promotional video in the bottom of the page. This is a composite of clips from I think only the various Drax World Maker videos. This is well done. In fact I think it awesome.
The Learn More WATCH button takes one to YouTube and Drax’s full set of World Maker videos.
Overall
While I think there are still some serious problems with the promo this is overall a good presentation of Second Life.
Sponsoring Drax
Yesterday Linden Lab posted an article about the Lab sponsoring the Drax Files: World Makers. That is an awesome move. They open the post saying:
We at Linden Lab love The Drax Files: World Makers video series. Draxtor Despres consistently does a fantastic job presenting the stories of some of the many talented people who are creating incredible things in Second Life.
The Lab is a just sponsor, not a director. So, just as TV ads sponsor shows those sponsors don’t get involved in the shows production. If a show’s sponsor gets upset, they can stop sponsoring. But, that is about it.
In the last Radio Hour of the season Drax and Jo were asking for sponsors. If you want to keep them podcasting and independent, jump over t one of Drax’s sites and sign up. Drax Radio Hour – World Makers
Received Items Problem
I wrote about the Received Items Folder problem Tuesday: Second Life News 2014-23 #2. Inara has done a bang up piece on the same problem. If you have run into the problem check her blog as it is a good compilation of the information available on the problem. See: object detachment and inventory issues.
Unscheduled Restarts
Wednesday about 5PM PDT the Lindens were doing a ‘rolling maintenance’ process. I assume all the main grid regains were being restarted. My home region was restarted about 5:28 PM PDT/SLT. Oddly it was restarted again about 3:36 AM PDT.
See Status: Unscheduled Rolling Maintenance To All Channels.
We may learn a bit more about that at the Beta Server UG today. The Deploys thread had a brief note that an issue was found with all channels and they would be rolled. There was no information as to whether they were being rolled back or what.
Viewer Auto-Updates
Oz Linden gave us a bit more information on how the SL Viewer updates: (Reference)
2014-06-04 10:30 AM
By default, the viewer checks for an update when it is launched (even before you log in), and then once an hour after that.
If you have not logged in yet, it downloads any update as fast as it can… once you’re logged in, it throttles that download so as not to affect your viewer performance. If you disconnect before the download is complete, it will try to resume where it left off. The combination can mean that you can get the update any time during your session (especially if you have a slower net connection).
You should be able to decline to install an update if you’re already logged in… if you do, it will do the update automatically on your next viewer launch.
If you skip an update in session then on your next login you do NOT have a choice. That can be a pain if you forget then are in a hurry at your next login.
I asked for one of Drax’s sponsor signs and congratulated him on the LL sponsorship. he says it really feels like Ebbe is listening to what the creators in the community are saying.
On another point have you tried SL GO at a typical Wireless location e.g. a bar/cafe, which is where I would like to use it? I find it is unusable at low bandwidths, yet the SL viewer works fine.
I haven’t tried it at public AP’s. I have used numerous public AP’s and have found some have had their DNS systems hacked. Those give odd results and are slow.
I use an app named WiFi Analyzer to find strong, consistent signals and then choose a connection. My S4 will only show whatever is strong at the time it looks. Signals vary in strength. You may need to watch for 30 to 60 seconds to decide.