Second Life Bits 2014-52

Second Life Experience Keys

In progress for over a year the Experience Tools are nearing a first release. The Lab has now made an announcement: Manage Experiences with a New Release Candidate Viewer.

The video is from 6 months ago. There are live ‘Experiences’ you can visit. (Experiences) The announcement moves thing into the Beta stage.

You need to be able to explain what you plan to do with an Experience Key to get  one.

There is also a Project Viewer that goes along with the Beta: Experience Viewer version 3.7.23.297364. Download

For more information from the user side see Inara’s article: Lab issues Experience Keys release candidate viewer

Interesting Facebook Development

Cory Ondrekja, the vice president of mobile engineering at Facebook Inc. and co-founder of Second Life, will leave Facebook Dec. 22. See: Facebook VP of mobile engineering to leave company next week (12/17).

Many of us thought that Cory would be instrumental in Facebook building a virtual world that would compete with Second Life. What does his leaving signal? I can only speculate and there isn’t enough rumor or leaks to support any of my guesses.

Cory is reported to have said:

“From high-performance javascript through mobile to virtual reality, I could never have predicted a journey quite like this one. I will miss working with everyone, but I am excited about building my next company from scratch.” (Reference)

It is interesting that he will be building a company. But, that doesn’t tell us why he abandoned FB. It may have been as simple as he has an idea he wants to pursue. Or FB may be going a direction he doesn’t like. And there is the possibility that now he has guided the development of FB apps to a more or less completed project he needs a more exciting challenge… he does say they are 1% of the way to where they were going… (Seeannouncement)

Only time is likely to reveal the whys and what is next.

Bitcoin

I don’t follow the Bitcoin world. But, every so often it impinges on Second Life and virtual worlds. Crypto Coin News is reporting that Bitcoin has big plans for virtual worlds. See:Bitcoin Marches To Conquer Virtual Worlds.

Capital Exchange

The 12th of December CE released  an update on their Second Life Gaming Application. See:Another Skill Gaming Application Update. Seems they have 3 issues separating them. They all seem to be resolvable. The CE people hope to have their technical/legalese response back to Linden Lab before Christmas.

About all we can know is that CE is continuing to pursue the application and it is moving forward.

OSGrid Recovering

Months ago (August 2014) OSGrid had a drive failure that scrambled the database. Ever since they have been trying to recover the data and the grid has been offline.

Hypergrid Business has an article up titled: OSgrid recovers data, no date for return. HB’s article is a response to the OSGrid post: Recovery News 2014-12-15.

The take away, the data recovery service has recovered the data BUT is not guaranteeing the usability of the data. The OSGrid people have to get the service paid, receive the data, place it on a test server, and see if they can use the data. Ugh!

So, this is not a clean recovery and may or may not mean the grid will come back as we remember it. We are still some weeks away from OSGrid coming back online.

AvaStar

I’ve been too busy with other RL things to be working with my SL Projects. I did notice that AvaStar updated to version 1.3-3 (Dec 10). This release was to fix a problem with Blender 2.72b and Sparkles. This release fixes the problem.

Install Directions

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