Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Nalates Urriah The political battle for control of the Internet is being won by politicians, citizens are losing. This loss is very likely to impact everyone in Second Life.
Consider. The news citizens can post on the Internet is mostly uncontrolled, as pure a case of freedom of speech as anyone has. For politicians this a disaster and a threat for their control and power. The Internet gives minorities, crazy or sane, a voice they have never had.
There was no Beta Server UG meeting this week. The Lindens were meeting to decide on which projects would be planned for implementation in 2015. With any luck we’ll hear what they decided, at least to some degree.
I am hoping they decide to work on the viewer’s caching system. I’m tired of coming home to a grey house, something I can do several times per day when I am in Second Life.
I am also hoping they get the Avatar Render Cost feature working. My hope is they will flash a value on screen when you add any new attachment to the avatar. I think it would be great to have that happen when trying on mesh demos. I think it would put pressure on designers to make more render efficient items.
The main viewer is now version 3.7.24-297623. (Release Notes) This is the viewer with reduced pipelined texture and mesh fetching timeout. So stalled connections fail quickly, allowing earlier retry. The timeout value changed from 150 seconds to 60 seconds for textures, and from 600 to 240 seconds for meshes.
PrimPerfect has an article up on photography. It talks about Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan, and Wildstar Beaumount being interviewed in a ‘first’ show on Second Life Photography. They say a second show will look at post-processing of Second Life images.
The first show was this past Monday at 2 PM in Garden of Dreams at the Designing Worlds studio. Next Monday they will air the second show. You can catch the replay of the shows at the Treet.tv web site, on the SLArtist.com channel, the Aview TV Designing Worlds channel or on the Designing Worlds blog.
Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix is aware some people are having problems getting Sparkles 50% discount. To help them out she has posted: Troubles getting Sparkles Discount.
This week the main channel gets an update. It is the Experience Tools permission fix update. Release Notes.
Last week a new maintenance viewer became available in Alternate Second Life Viewers – Download: Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.25.298030. According to the Release Notes there are over a dozen fixes: (Note MAINT JIRA items can only be accessed by Lindens. So, I omitted the links.)
It seems the gaming news site Massively is being closed down, in spite of a 40% per year readership growth rate. Click the link above to learn more.
I used to follow Massively’s section on Second Life. But, as SL coverage there decreased, so too did my interest in Massively. While I am not certain of the future of Massively (will someone buy it?), it seems doomed. If it does pass, I’ll feel the loss.
There are photographic artists and skilled photographers playing in Second Life that display their work on Flickr. I follow a number of them, but certainly do not know of all of the talented ones.
Most artists/photographers have a personal style. I think their styles tell us what they like and when similar to my likes, I follow them.
Some photographers do a good job of portraying ideas and/or evoking feelings. Isa Messioptra’s Darwin is interesting in that respect. I wonder how many that see this image consider whether their belief system is provable and whether they blindly believe or can actually show the reasoning behind their belief?