Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Nalates Urriah About three years ago we started to hear of a company that said they could do amazing things with 3D imaging and rendering, unlimited detail with high frame rates. Well, we have yet to see anything but videos. And now we have another video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AvCxa9Y9NU
May be we will see something other than a video in 2015.
I also wonder if High Fidelity’s use of voxels is along the same line and if some of this tech might make it into SL2.
The final version of AvaStar 1.1 is to be released in 48 hours± per Gaia Clary commenting in Blender-AvaStar group (9/28 1PM SLT). That would be Tuesday 9/30… or Wednesday 10/1 depending on where on Earth she and you are located.
The RC 10 is apparently going to get promoted to a main release. So, if you are using RC10 now, you have AvaStar 1.1.
You can download RC10 now via your download page at Machinimatrix.
There is also the possibility to win L$5,000 for being the first to report a reproducible AvaStar bug in RC10. Apparently as I write this there are no bugs reported for RC10.
The Third Party Developers Meeting was Friday (9/26). So, we have some news about what is happening on the development side of Second Life™.
The main viewer is: 3.7.16.294015, which is the maintenance release I covered last week in Second Life News 2014-38 #2.
There is still only one RC viewer: Login Viewer version 3.7.16.294345, I covered it earlier this week in Second Life News 2014-39.
Oz Linden tells there are other viewers in the pipeline that will appear “very, very, very soon”.
One he mentioned in the meeting is: a Pipelining Viewer, which is going from QA to RC Monday or Tuesday – This is said to be a way faster viewer. It is compatible with CDN and the two changes are synergistic. Monty Linden described the two working to gather as a “friggin’ scary good” change.
I’ve been attempting to do more video/machinima in Second Life™. I also make tutorials from time to time that can be improved by the use of video. And just the other day read Jo Yardley’s Comparing the official Second Life viewer with Firestorm. While reading I realized both she and I need to know more about our alternate viewers. She uses the Firestorm viewer as her main viewer. I tend to use the SL Viewer more than Firestorm. I am switching back and forth between the two more often these days. The Photo Tools in Firestorm are the enticement that draws me to Firestorm.
I am more familiar with the SL Viewer. But, I have used Phoenix or Firestorm off and on since the great viewer purge… when Emerald was excommunicated.
If you do machinima you want to kill chat and notices. Depending on the type of video you plan to make you may want to still have the user interface showing, like tutorials. Both viewers have a load of chat settings. A big difference is Firestorm puts most them out in the User Interface (UI) where users can more easily get to them and remember where and what they are.
Not much news coming out of the Server Beta UG.
The Content Delivery Network for AGNI has grown a bit, more regions added to the Snack Channel:
This is up from the original 4.
Any viewer can be used to try out the CDN. If there are not Second Life users in your area, you may not see much difference. If you’re in one of the areas with a number of SL users, they may have caused the CDN’s cache to load the content you need. In that case you should see a noticeable difference.
Lots of news is coming out of this event. None that I’ve seen is about Second Life 2.0. But, I wonder how much tech used by these other games is making its way into SL2.
For more info see: ‘Bloodborne’ Tokyo Game Show Trailer Shows Multiplayer In Action.
For some time residents of Second Life™ have suffered from TV’s and related systems failing. A set of problems generally tracked back to WebKit. But, now Marine Kelley has made and released a new HD System for Second Life.
See the details here: New product : HD Video System. L$400 See it in world.