Category Archives: Changes

ALERT: Second Life Avatar Changes!

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Today we have a post from the Lab about changes to the SL Avatar. See: Introducing Project Bento – New Bones Added to Second Life Avatar Skeleton.

What are the changes?

Ever wish you could incorporate a tail, wings, or second set of arms into your avatar? How about having animations for facial expressions and finger movements? Yes, we know that there are some incredibly creative workarounds that give you some of these, but they can’t leverage skeletal animation, so they have been very complex, often fragile, and very expensive in performance and resources both in your Viewer and the Simulator.

Second Life Has New Avatars?

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Did you know Linden Lab has new avatars for the noobies? I had not realized it. But, Cerise @ SLUniverse posted about the new avatars and I noticed that post. Want to see some of the new avatars and mesh clothes?

Linden Lab's New Starter Avatars - Classic is now the default.

Linden Lab’s New Starter Avatars – Classic is now the default.

This image shows the first page one lands on after clicking JOIN. By default they now have ‘Classic’ avatars selected. It is still possible to select Vampires and People. Those are mesh body avatars. But, the Classic Avatars look to be all new. The older avatars are still in the Library. I just don’t see them on sign-up process.  Continue reading →

Firestorm + MadPea

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Inara has an article up about the new testing of Community Gateways. We have seen the idea of community gateways appear a number of times over the years. We are now on the eve another iteration. In this one Linden Lab, Firestorm Developers, and MadPea Game Designers have teamed up to create a new gateway.

See: Firestorm ready to launch Gateway; MadPea join as partners.

The new gateway will be open Saturday 10/31 with events at; 13:00 SLT – Mankind Tracer, 14:00 SLT – Nance Brody, 15:00 SLT – The Changhigh Trinity Sisters Fire Show, and 14:00 SLT onwards – DJ Quad.

Check Inara’s article for more information.

Are Second Life’s Jelly Babies Breaking SL?

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As I have pointed out more people are talking about Jelly Babies and the coming RC Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.6.305942 movement toward being the main viewer. Of course some know what they are talking about and others don’t.

erratic / ava sweater & meg leggings

erratic / ava sweater & meg leggings
High or low ACI?

I think – Jelly babies will take over SL soon (AKA how linden lab is planning to break second life) – falls in the ‘doesn’t’ category. utilizator404, the author, believes the Lab is breaking SL by introducing the Avatar Complexity Information (ACI) feature. I disagree, but I can see how some may consider the appearance of Jelly Babies as a problem. The opinion that Jelly Babies breaks SL is as valid an opinion as any. I just don’t agree with it. So, I’ll rebut it.

In the article an assumption is expressed that the Lab is not fixing the root causes of lag; failure to optimize the viewer, not changing how the viewer uses video memory, failure to use all the features of new video cards, and no use of Direct3D (a Windows only graphics render engine).

Most of 2014 and 2015 has been spent optimizing features of the viewer and SL servers. If you follow Inara’s or my blog you already know that. If you have only read the release notes of the Linden and third party viewers as they are released,  you know that numerous fixes for how the viewer use memory have been made. From the Third Party Dev’s meeting we know more are in progress.

Continue reading →

Second Life’s Render Complexity – Discussion Starting

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We have been here before. A feature like the old Avatar Render Cost (ARC) was used by what became known as ARC Nazis to abuse people. You see a type of person that has basic authority issues, control issues, or a bullying nature adopt a fascist mentality and start telling people what they can do. Some in those groups start trying to enforce their will on others. Abuse, shame, hate, anger… and more is called into service in attempts to enforce their will on others.

Geisha Shadows

Geisha Shadows – Think this gorgeous outfit has a high ACI?
If it does, is that good or bad?

We could call this politics… In SL it is more often called drama. But, whichever we call it, it has the same source: human nature. Humans are different, unique. But, we all have the same basic traits, just in different degrees and we learn to cope with issues in different ways. We call the result character.  Continue reading →

Second Life’s Not So New News

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Yesterday Linden Lab posted  in their blog about new improvements coming to Second Life. If you follow my blog, Ciarans’s or Inara’s, you already know most of what they wrote about.

Snapshot_029

Snapshot_029

Project Valhalla is the project viewer where they are changing from Webkit to Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). I’ve been writing about this change since 4/2014 (Reference – speculation). They Lab started talking publicly about the coming viewer change in early 2015.

Rendering Complexity / Quick Graphics – I’ve been writing about doing something like The Avatar Render Complexity feature since late 2014. I filed a feature request in December 2014 (BUG-7928). I doubt mine is the reason we got the feature. I suspect the reason for getting the feature was mostly discussion in Oz Linden’s Monday morning Open Source meeting. Whatever the case, it is close to being added to the main SL viewer.

Notifications – This viewer feature is a change in how we will receive notifications. This feature came on the radar in July 2015.

Mesh Importer – This improvement has been in discussion for a couple of months and made it to the main viewer a couple of months ago.

Inventory Robustness – It is hard to say when work on this change started. The Lab has worked on and been adding inventory improvements for a long time. This particular problem of losing no-copy-items that failed to rez is more recent.

If you follow the Server Deploys notices in the SL Forum, you probably had not have realized this feature rolled out.

HTTP Project – this is actually a much larger project than they convey in their post. It has been on going for a couple of years and appears will be continuing for some time. Parts get added as they are completed.

SecondLife.com – The SL Web Site is changing. They are removing Flash and if any QuickTime was used then likely that too. They are moving up to HTML5. CEF is how HTML5 handling is added to the viewer. These changes sort of go together. Parts of the web site are used by the SL Viewer, i.e., search, profiles, etc.

Since the viewer will real soon now be able to handle HTML5 via CEF it makes since for the web site to abandon Flash.

Not So New

Between Inara, Ciaran, and myself there are a few thousand SL Users that keep up on SL Development news. That is out of several hundred thousand monthly users. The SL Blog doesn’t show how many people have read a post. The forum does. It is rare any post in the forum gets a thousand readers. But, as the blog articles are in the splash screen of the SL Viewer, more people may read the blog.

So, while the news may be old to you, for most SL users their post is news.

Havok Bought – Means What to Second Life?

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You might know that Havok is the physics engine used by Second Life. It is the part of the system that figures out when the avatar bumps into a wall or walks on a floor and keeps the avatar from passing through.

It is the part that figures out when a bullet collides with us or misses. It makes balls roll. We see it in operation not only in Second Life buy in Call of Duty, Halo, and is used in movies like the Matrix.  Continue reading →

Notifications Viewer

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Busy Bunnies

Busy Bunnies

The Second Life Notifications Viewer version 3.8.5.305555 is now a release candidate (RC). This is the version that provides a new Notifications floater that separates incoming notifications into Categories. It provides, according to the Lab, a better way to view, interact with, prioritize and manage incoming notices for busy residents.

I haven’t tried this one yet. I am looking forward to it. Now that it is an RC version I may install it. I’ll wait a couple of days to see if it installs itself as I have use RC’s checked.