Second Life News Week #38

General News

What’s with BoM and Heads?

My experience point is with GA.EG’s Jennifer head. The rest is hearsay. So, you’ve been warned.

Every Time I Breathe I Take You In

Every Time I Breathe I Take You In

There is a significant problem, IMO, taking the current Bento Mesh Heads into BoM compatibility. As the pre-BoM Bento Heads provide considerable control over makeup, at least GA.EG does, and I see no simple way to provide that control to the system layer style of makeup, I expect little change as BoM capability is added to Bento Mesh Heads.

Thus, the simple change is to add the ability to add BoM skin to a Bento-Head. GA.EG does that with an applier. A new head could be made that has BoM built-in. But, would it still provide a choice of applier or BoM skin? The applier does. A new head would have to add scripting to provide the choice. I find script weight already a problem.

I love the Slink Redux body because it reduces my script load by about 2MB. A BoM-Head that increases script load seems counterproductive. Continue reading

Second Life to Kill OpenSim?

Hypergrid Business has an article about what Linden Lab’s® move to the cloud may mean for OpenSim grids. By knowing what may happen to OpenSim we can infer what is likely to happen to Second Life.

David Kariuki thinks moving to the cloud will allow Linden Lab to run on demand regions. Meaning if no one is in the region, the region would spin down and drop out of the servers, go offline. When someone is on the grid next door or TP’s there, the region loads into a server and spins up.

Brand New Colony (Sept. 2017)

Brand New Colony (Sept. 2017)

The result is fewer servers would be needed, a huge cost saving in hardware and electricity.

It sounds to me like this could be a performance problem. Would we have to wait while the region spins up? Or can a region load fast enough we wouldn’t notice? We don’t know. Continue reading

Kokua Viewer – End Times

The Kokua viewer is mostly maintained and build by Nicky Perian. Nicky at 75 is sort of retiring from viewer development. This will likely leave Kokua Viewer without a driving force.

Nicky has posted this information on the Kokua blog, Path forward.

Paths

If you are into building viewers, this is an opportunity to head up the project. It will need a new lead developer.

In the meantime, Nicky plans to add in the Alex Ivy 64-bit upgrade. But, during the remaining time Nicky spends with the project until may be October 2017, he will drop RLV support.

I suspect dropping RLV will cost users that use RLV. But, that can’t be helped.

Nicky has been a great contributor to the SL Viewer community. We will miss his contributions. I wish him all the best.

 

Second Life: Kokua Viewer 2016-21

The Kokua-4.0.2 viewer updated March 29. Since then there have been significant updates to the SL Viewers. The Kokua blog has posted about the new additions and the status of their 4.0.5 viewer and made a request for testers to help as they bring Kokua up to date. See: Kokua project status update and request of testers.

L'Etre Blogger Search [Aura Foxtrot]

L’Etre Blogger Search [Aura Foxtrot]

Current Download: Download Kokua_4_0_2_38137_i686 (53.6 MB)

The, I guess, RC version of Kokua (4.0.5) has the HTTP update, all the items in the Maintenance update, and the fixes and new features in the Quick Graphics update. Plus they have made an RLV version and NO-RLV version of Kokua. Continue reading

Second Life Bits – Week 49

No Blogger Illuminati

No Secret Bloggers Club… Really!!! Honest! See: Exclusive – There Is No Secret Second Life Bloggers Club

Mezzaluna

Mezzaluna

I think this is funny. There are people that are friends with various members of the development community, Linden and third party. It isn’t so much that developers help out their friends more than others as it is familiarity with a person allows you tell when they are up to something or holding something back. That is a sign to start digging.

Often we know a new shinny is coming because people start clamming up.  Continue reading