Second Life Bits 2014-39

Tokyo Game Show

Lots of news is coming out of this event. None that I’ve seen is about Second Life 2.0. But, I wonder how much tech used by these other games is making its way into SL2.

For more info see: ‘Bloodborne’ Tokyo Game Show Trailer Shows Multiplayer In Action.

Second Life HD Video System

For some time residents of Second Life™ have suffered from TV’s and related systems failing. A set of problems generally tracked back to WebKit. But, now Marine Kelley has made and released a new HD System for Second Life.

See the details here: New product : HD Video System. L$400 See it in world.

NiranV Appearance Editor

NiranV is working on an improved Appearance Editor User Interface. You can follow development on his blog: NiranV-SL. The prototypes can be seen …or will be able to be seen and used from the Black Dragon Viewer.

High Fidelity Update

The HyFy peeps have published a new blog post updating where they are in their development. See: A Look at Alpha Projects in HiFi.

The HiFi peeps are hot on the LEAP Motion Controller. I had great hopes for it too. I haven’t even gotten mine out of the box since I moved in July. I’m thinking I may sell it. If my SpaceNavigator had a pressure sensitive grip, so I could grasp things, I think it would be an ideal replacement for the mouse and be able to do much of what is hoped for from the LEAP..

The HiFi peeps mention CtrlAltStudio’s viewer and LEAP Motion interface. So, there are possibilities, but I think there are some serious obstacles too. The interfaces to manipulate things and move in a 3D virtual reality have a long way to go. What I’ve seen so far jacks up the learning curve in ways the techy developers are missing. The curve needs to be reduced.

If you are interested in Alpha Testing for High Fidelity fill out the form.

The Beautiful People

The Grand Opening Of Eclipse Club In Second Life was posted to YouTube Sep 17, 2014. Filming was by InWorld Films – Suzie Anderton. You can find the club in Second Life at Magical Bay (region name).

I’ll have to check it out. The video is pretty nice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUZ1aVWpOEI

Check out some of Suzie’s other machinima videos.

Loki Watch

Loki Eliot has posted a follow up article on the grand opening of the Vortex, version 5, night club. He was/is instrumental in its building and has reported on the problems he has run into.

Loki ran into texture thrashing with this build. As he puts it that is when a text renders sharply and is focused, then goes burry, seems to download again and refocus, then go blurry and continue repeating the cycle.

The viewer not downloading the texture as Loki seems to think. But, the video card is reloading the texture from your cache or computer memory. The video card does not have enough memory to hold all the textures it needs. So, it deletes some from its on board memory and then has to reload them to display them, which it does by pulling the image from your cache.

There are pictures on Loki’s site. Putting the Cyber Grunge into the Vortex VR Club. It is an impressive build. I had a horrible time trying to capture a video today. I gave up. I need to experiment to see what was pulling my frame rates down to 1 or 2 FPS for FRAPS after a minute or two of recording.

Server Rolls

Have you noticed that now the Lindens are posting in-the-viewer-notices of when servers will be updated? That helps.

Embedded RL War Photographer

New World Notes’ writer Iris points us to an article in TIME Lightbox: A War Photographer Embeds Himself Inside a Video Game and the images he captured.

The game is a PlayStation 4 game named Last of Us.

If you wonder what makes for striking images that evoke emotions, you’ll probably gain some insight reading the article. I think the story can also suggest to game designers some problems to be overcome in combat games.

How Second Life Operates

Yesterday an unusual post popped up in the SL Blog section Tools and Technology. Landon Linden (Landon McDowell) wrote and interesting article on how the SL Operations Teams handles system failures to keep SL up and running.

See: An Inside Look at How The Ops Team Collaborates.

This is a great article to point know-nothings to when they start bad mouthing Linden Lab’s tech ability. I have a handy bookmark to it for my postings in the SL Forum.

One of the things Landon comments on is the effectiveness of multi-conversations conducted simultaneously in a single chat threat. I know I had to learn to decipher chat conversations and associate which comments made up which thought thread. I’ve also learned how to talk with multiple people in the same chat thread and keep the individual conversations coherent. This is not something I can do in RL voice conversations.

Take the time to read through the post.

Singularity Viewer

A new version of Singularity Viewer is out: 1.8.6 – Release. Lots of changes, features, and fixes.

4 thoughts on “Second Life Bits 2014-39

  1. Looking at the video player– copy/mod– don’t things need to be transfer to use the parcel streams on group land? Marine’s blog doesn’t allow comments so musing here.

    I miss watching youtube in world….

    • AFAIK, they don’t have to be Transfer-OK… but, don’t spend money based on what I remember… O.o

  2. Thanks for enlightening me on how the texture displaying works. When building the new vortex everything loaded fine and stayed clear. Of course it was created in the sky on another region, so the issues with texture thrashing comes after placing on a shared region. Perhaps cache is being filled from other sources on the region.

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