Nalates Urriah

Second Life’s Ebbe Altberg at Engadget

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This year Ebbe went to New York to participate in an Engadget sponsored get together. Sean Buckley describes the panel discussing VR this way:

All three of the entrepreneurs have wildly different takes on how to use VR — Bell’s Matterport 3D camera strives to capture the physical world and make it virtual; Altberg’s vision for Linden Lab and Second Life is to create a platform for creating new experiences within virtual spaces. Roel’s goals are even further reaching: with projects like the Gender Swap Experiment, he hopes to use VR to help humans get along better. “If you can better understand the other you can better understand yourself,” he says. “We’re even applying it for conflict resolutions with partners in the United Nations and other key people.”

A video shows the discussion. You can find it in the article here. It is an AOL-On video, that is a pain to embed here.

Jo Yardley has summarized the video. See: Ebbe talks to Engadget.

Firestorm Viewer – Soon?

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Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

There is a new article up on the Firestorm Viewer site. See: Be Careful What You Wish For. I can read a lot into the article. That doesn’t mean I have it right. The things I am pretty sure of follow.

We have known for some time that the FS Team planned a viewer release for November. It seems the release date is sliding. I am guessing Jessica is feeling pressure or anticipating blowback from users when the release goes out and thus posted the article. We know from her own words blogging is not a thing she really enjoys. Thus we can assume something is motivating the post.

Jessica is explaining the difficulties of releasing a viewer and deciding what is and is not going to be in this release. Her estimated release date is ‘a few weeks’… the word ‘few’ is ambiguous. Dictionaries define ‘few’ as a small number of things. As examples they give 2 to 5. But, in my family 2 to 5 was a ‘couple of’ and ‘a few’ was closer to 10. We have no way to know what ‘few’ means to Jessica. But, I suspect this puts a viewer release nearer to the end of November and possibly into December. 

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Second Life News 2014-45 #2

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ADITI

There is a bug some encounter when logging into ADITI, the preview grid.

BUG-7707 – “Login at last location” not working for any region on Aditi & other assorted weirdness with teleporting.

Don't Panic 2014 - End of Game
Don’t Panic 2014 – End of Game

For now the Lindens think it has something to do with which inventory server your viewer has connected to. Simon Linden said, “…one of the back-end servers for this grid was having troubles and that’s behind some of the problems like logging into the last location.”

Until the Lindens fix it, there nothing we can do to get ‘last location’ working.

Maestro Linden advised us, “There was also an issue until yesterday [Wed 11/5] where Aditi mainland had “Allow Direct Teleport” disabled.  So you’d end up at a telehub in Ahern when trying to TP to Morris, etc.” He also advised us that the ‘troubled’ server had been fixed. I tried last location in ADITI this morning. It worked correctly. 

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Second Life News 2014-45

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Servers

There is a roll going to the main channel this morning. The Deploy thread in the forum describes it as ‘minor improvements’. Not much to go on.

RC Channels

There is no package ready for the RC Channels. Caleb Linden says there will be no roll of the RC Channels.

Deyanira Yalin - Builder's Brewery Class Instructor
Deyanira Yalin – Builder’s Brewery Class Instructor

Problems

I am seeing more people complaining about texture loading and render stalling and things remaining gray or blurry. It is still a small number of people, which means the Lindens are not going to turn their attention to the problem. They are watching for problems from Pipeline and CDN changes. So, that may reveal the problem.

If you are consistently running into the problem, file a JIRA. To helpful the Lindens needs lots of detail and a way to reproduce the problem. If this is a timing issue, the Lindens may not be able to reproduce it from within the Lab, they are sitting on the servers and miss out on some of the problems we see.

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AvaStar Tutorials and Second Life

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Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix, the AvaStar makers, has been providing the Second Life™ community free tutorial videos showing how to use Blender/AvaStar for making animations and mesh clothing. The challenge is in having the time to make them and keep them updated. Blender changes quickly and such videos go out of date a Blender moves forward.

Gaia's Free YouTube Videos
Gaia’s Free YouTube Videos

AvaStar itself has needed to change as Second Life has changed. Plus this past year AvaStar has changed as it developed and improved its tools to provide a better user interface and more efficient work flow. Also, the design community and Linden Lab changing to fitted mesh avatar bodies is changing how we make fitted mesh clothes.

Second Life being 11+ years old now also requires designers learn how to deal with the peculiarities of 3D modeling for a 3D world that, with amazing success, has maintained legacy compatibility. 

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