Second Life and Virtual Worlds
At Friday’s Third Party Developers meeting Oz Linden was asking from some specific help and changes in behavior from the Third Party Developers. I’ll get into the what and why with this post.
The Lab is making new ways of doing things and working to make all the Second Life™ system’s processes more robust, which I take to also mean more efficient and reliable. One way of accomplishing that is changing more and more processes to use HTTP and CDN (Content Delivery Network).
At this weeks Third Party Developers’ (TPD) UG meeting Brooke Linden provided an update on Viewer Managed Marketplace (VMM).
The VMM beta has launched on the main grid. They are limiting access to the beta for now. Also, VMM is currently only in English. In a couple of weeks the localization (multi-language support) will be in place. You can get more information about VMM in the wiki’s VMM FAQ. Additional information is in the Knowledge Base: VMM. And there is technical information on the VMM API here.
VMM or Viewer Managed Marketplace, is getting close. There is a recent wiki page that was created in November 2014 that has just updated. The beta testing information is still there. It instructs one on how to get involved in testing and refers people to the LS Knowledge Base for more details on using VMM.
If you use a translator in Second Life, you know recent changes at Google have caused several models of translators to fail. You also know that since 2012 the viewer’s built-in translator cannot be connected to the Bing or Google translation services as originally planned by the Lab. Viewer translation is essentially broken. We have to use an add-on.
Following this blog you’ve seen the recent previous articles. (See: Second Life: Metanomics Translator Failing.)
Jessica and Oz were discussing the blog article Jessica put up: ‘Restore to Last Position’ Needs You’, in the third party developers meeting, Friday (3/28). There are now 389 comments (as I write) by people explaining how they use the feature and why they need it.
Oz Linden is making his way through the comments and is about half way. He promises to read them all.
His take is that there are definite use-cases that need to be handled. He remains unconvinced that RTLP is the best solution. You will find the discussion at TM: 22:00±.
You may have picked up from the SL Viewer news that a change is coming to the Lab’s mesh uploader. There are, I think, some nice changes coming.
As it is now, when uploading mesh we often get an error and the error message is basically useless, no help. The Lindens are working to improve that. They hope to give us a better idea of what went wrong.
Also, we are currently limited to 8 faces per mesh. That means any single mesh object can only have 8 materials. That too is going to change. The Lindens are saying if there will be a new limit just that we can have more than 8.
There is also something changing about how the various LoD models and physics models will associate with our item based on file naming. I don’t get what they are doing here as I have yet to play with the RC/Project viewer that is out.