Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Nalates Urriah Cyan Worlds the creators of Myst and Myst Online:Uru Live and the more recent Obuction are starting a new Kickstarter for a game named Firmament. Details here.
I expect this to be another VR game as Obduction is. So, playable on a PC with an NVIDIA 10xx series or better and VR optional.
It is April 1… but I’m not putting you on.
In week 13 there was a third-party viewer UG meeting. A significant part of the meeting was spent discussing the EEP – Enhanced Environment Project (EEP).
The EEP Viewer is in RC and has been for several days. It is the big push in the viewer pipeline. Vir Linen thinks the Love Me Render viewer is the likely next candidate to be promoted. But, EEP should be ready to release in 2 to 3 weeks… Firestorm thinks they will be 2 to 3 weeks behind that. I think 5 or 6 weeks behind, but I’ll be happy to be wrong.
As soon as EEP releases the Lab will move on to EEP2. Some of the things people want in EEP are being put into EEP2 to allow EEP to release sooner.
EEP is causing the current black stars and changes in the appearance of some Windlight (WL) environments. So, lots of complaining going on. I’ve turned off ‘Use Region Default’ on my Firestorm viewer. You do that in Preferences->Firestorm->Windlight->Automatically change environments… (uncheck). I can still control whether WL is using the region-default WL or not with the Photo Tools controls.
WARNING: ASUS motherboard users, you have been attacked. Users in Russia (18+%), Germany (16%), France (12+%), Italy (6+%), and the USA (5+%) are the main targets.
The attack targets specific machines. It is hardcoded into the Trojan. So, checking if you are a target is easy. Check to see if your MAC address is in the list. Links follow…
The virus was transmitted via infiltration of the ASUS update system. As the system provides Certified patches most anti-virus programs failed to detect it. So, you may have updated and opened the doors without your AV warning you.
This story started breaking 3/25/2019. ASUS and anti-virus companies have been working on this since January 2019. ASUS has responded with ASUS response to the recent media reports regarding ASUS Live Update tool attack by Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups. They have a repair tool for the problem on that page.
Yes… bites as in small consumable chunks.
Seems some think so. Here I was thinking it a meat market for kinky hookups. But, in various places, Second Life™ is promoted as more than a meeting point for quick hook ups… it’s for LOVE!
See the DatingNews.com article Linden Lab™ Has Built 3D Virtual Worlds Where Singles Can Explore & Foster Real-Life Relationships (3/14). It is interesting, including some history and a positive take on SL. Yay!
I am curious to find out what people coming into SL after reading the article think of SL…
Star Citizen is an EVE Online type game currently/still in development. Expensive to play as players are paying for game development. Visually it is pretty awesome looking.
Google+ closes the end of this month, March. Everyone writing about it is encouraging people to SAVE THERE Google+ CONTENT… What!?! WHY? Who puts content on social networks that they want to save?
Today I see the Lindens are featuring a Drax video on SL’s Insilico (URL Destination Guide – This lands one at the OLD main landing point.) in Destinations. I personally thought the video fell far short of portraying Insilico as the amazing build that it is. But, Insilico has lost its awesome. It is no longer the amazing build of perspective and scale illusions of the Skills Hax days (2015 and before). So, Drax made the best of what is left.
Drax made a video in 2015 that does a better depiction of Insilico… abet, as it was.
In 2016 it was thought Insilico would close. See my Insilico Update – The LONG Story. Things worked out and Insilico is still around but without Skills Hax.
In SL search there are a number of links (7) into Insilico. Checking them and the older LM’s I have I find most are useless. I would say this is the primary Insilico Cyberpunk Roleplay LM (SLURL). The SURL in the Destinations article is pretty lame and totally inadequate when one considers they were promoting roleplay. However, land there and hang out, you will get you a link in local chat to the Cyberpunk RP location. Now if one just notices it….
Ryan Schultz points us to Inara’s article SANSAR: Why LL Are [sic] Building Their Own Engine? It is a longish article and yet concisely answers the question providing several base reasons.
To condense her longish article to a few sentences… The primary reason the Lab chose to build an engine was User Generated Content (UGC). Other engines are NOT designed to handle the novice designers unoptimized content nor manage Intellectual Property (IP) rights. An added benefit is being able to use third-party tools, think Marvelous Designer.
A couple of things they are thinking about is Open Source. The Lab has become far more appreciative of open source over time. So, they are still planning on having some parts of SANSAR eventually go open source. Unfortunately, that will not be anytime soon.
The Lab is planning to support more VR headsets. OpenVR being one of them. I assume that includes supporting more controllers too.
A new aspect, new to us, is in the ability to run SANSAR on Android and iPhone/iPad type devices. The Lab has always said they want to do this. New in this iteration is they mention whether or not an experience will run on mobile devices is going to be up to the experience designer. So, some complex builds would be limited to desktops with greater render power, simplified builds could run on mobile devices too. So, they are NOT adopting an everything-runs-everywhere philosophy.
There are more details in Inara’s article.