Monthly Archives: October 2014

Second Life News 2014-43 #2

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This Friday was the Third Party Developer’s Meeting. Oz Linden and other Lindens spoke for about 26 minutes telling us what was coming and where things are in the release pipeline.

Don't Panic 2014

Don’t Panic 2014

Viewer

Today the main viewer remains 3.7.18-295539.

RC Viewers

Friday saw the Lindens putting out a new Benchmark and HTTP RC Viewers.

Benchmark Viewer version 3.7.19.295759 – This is the viewer that does away with the GPU Table. Note, Today (10/25) the Alternate Viewers page is showing this as a new RC and an older version as a Project Viewer. Get the newer one. It has all the updates from the default viewer. Continue reading →

Second Life Notes

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I am suddenly swamped with RL things to do. So, not much time for a post. However, a couple of notes…

WARNING: Flashlight Apps

Word is going around about a flashlight apps on smart phones. Seems the ten most downloaded flashlight apps are all spyware. A company named Snoopwall has published a report on these apps and named names. See: Snoopwall (Android App) and get their free app.

Battle for VR

Gwyneth Llewelyn, a writer I enjoy reading, has posted: The battle for the future virtual world environment is on! It is a good analysis of the current VR competition.

She points out an interesting statistic. Goods sales at the peak of the SL Hype Days (2007-9) was in the range of a few million dollars (US) per year. Now goods sales are around 500 million, half a billion. That is growth.

Gwyn sees the VR and virtual world products as only serving a niche market with a small number of users. That is accurate today. But, a lot of people are trying to figure out how to make their new VR products relevant to the masses. Facebook and Google are pouring hundreds of millions into development of VR products. While the dreamers like Zuckerberg, Rosedale, Lucky, and others might just jump and spend money, multi-billion dollar companies tend to analyze market potential and size their investment to the potential return.

Check out Gwyn’s article. See what you think.

Second Life Bits 2014-43 #2

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SL Go on iPad

Drax has a video on using an iPad and the SL Go service. About 5 minutes.

Book Review

Not really my thing… book reviews…. but, this looks like an interesting book for those thinking about what we and others are doing in our lives along with how that effects the next generation. This one is a re-make of the original story first published as: Anda’s Game. It is the story of a young girl learning how to play computer games via a MMORPG. It deals with complex economic and labor issues as well as a romantic interest.  Continue reading →

Magic Leap – Google’s World?

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Magic Leap

Yahooo is working on a virtual reality product. So, it should come as no surprise that Google (et al) is working on one too, or at least investing in one to the tune of half a billion dollars. To get an idea of what the investors are thinking check out this video. In the video below, you never see the scare, just the reactions.

In the video the people know they are in VR. Imagine putting on augmented reality glasses, a Google thing already, and having the scary monster in the room with you…

Cierra Anatine, at SLUniverse, points readers to an article about that project. The article has quotes from people in tech and entertainment. I think they have been reading the comments about Oculus Rift and are subconsciously quoting… all sounds very familiar.  Continue reading →

Second Life News 2014-43

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Group Chat

There are new group chat servers and new code running. Don’t expect a miracle. But, things should be better. The Lindens aren’t saying anything. They are waiting to see if anyone notices the change.

The Trace - Oct 2014

The Trace – Oct 2014

Yesterday the Lindens were updating the chat servers, which are a backend service. People report having gotten odd chat error messages. Hopefully that was during the server change out.

CDN

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) is going to be active on ALL the RC channels as of Wednesday (10/22). Figure that change will be complete by late Wednesday morning. This will put 30±% of the grid on CDN.

It appears it has run well on Blue Steel. So far, no anomalies or problems. If there are no problems in this larger test, I expect this to roll out to the main channel next week. With it we will probably see the HTTP Pipeline Viewer rolling out as the default viewer.  Continue reading →

Photoshop CC 2014

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There are some tutorials coming out from Adobe showing what is new in the latest releases of Photoshop. This one is on the font selection changes made recently. See: Adobe Typekit.

We now have far more ways to find fonts and preview them than we used to have.

There is now an easy way to deal with missing fonts you may find when working with a colleague’s files.

Another new feature is smarter Smart Guides. Scroll down for the tutorial.

There are changes in linking Smart Objects.