Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Nalates Urriah For years we have in Second Life™ have complained about how poorly Linden Lab communicates with users/customers. Over the last couple of years that has improved. But, there are still areas in which the Lab seriously fails.
Daniel Voyager Plurked about Grendel’s Children Saved From Shutdown. This a somewhat common occurrence. I’ve long thought anything one wants to do with Lab will require far more time than one will imagine. This is another story adding support to my thinking.
For some time a few of the Second Life™ related blogs have been on about Second Life’s reputation and whether it s a bad or good girl rep and if bad, what has to be done about it. But, Canary Beck posits Second Life has little if any reputation outside the user community. Canary and I both recently looked at the search engines to see what they might show people searching for Second Life and I virtual worlds. The results are pretty much sexless. But, today Hamlet is still on about how bad the reputation is because of a post on Reddit… really!?!
Admittedly Reddit gets a lot of use. But, what is a lot of use? How do we compare that to other services and social sites? First, there is a Redditmetrics.com that tells us something about which sub-reddits have the most subscribers. There is a way to see how many of those subscribers are actually reading a Reddit page. (Traffic) One can also look to see how many are reading a given sub at the time you look. (Notice in the right column of a sub-reddit.)
Myst-Uru or Myst Online:Uru Live again (MOULa) has been open source since about 2010. In the following 4-½ years we have seen little change as we wait for new fan made content to appear in-game. A lot of work has been done, but little of it is stuff fans can play with. Here I take a quick look at What is Taking So Long and compare that to what Myst-Uru fans are building in Second Life™.
Recently it seems more people are coming by the MOULa forum asking where the new ages are and what’s taking so long. One of the people working on building new ages (ages = new game areas or game mods), Tweek, wrote a reply. See: WHAT’S TAKING SO LONG?
Many of us in Second Life™ use Blender as our creative tool. Few of us have taken a college course on using Blender, so Blender tutorials are popular. But, it takes a bit of time for the tutorials to catch up with Blender’s latest updates. So, I was happy to come across a rich source of Blender Cycles Materials tutorials. See: Reynante Martinez.
Plus there are a number of handy tips on using Blender. They can make life with Blender nicer.
The main page about Blender Materials is here: Cycles Material Studies. Not all these materials can be used in Second Life. But, it is some pretty impressive materials.
If you use Gmail as I do, you soon find out that it lacks many of the tools in advanced email applications like Outlook. What you may not know is Gmail has an amazing search feature. This search feature allows one to perform many of the tasks you may think are not possible.
I discovered the hidden features of Gmail Search when I decided to clean out some of 7,000+ emails sitting in my Nalates mailbox. Deleting the 50 or 100 emails displayed per page was looking to be rather tedious.
Nothing exciting. Third Party Viewers are catching up with features in the Linden made main and RC SL Viewers. A few are adding their own special features. But, most of the updating is bug fixes and catch up…
