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Second Life Bits 2014-52

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Second Life Experience Keys

In progress for over a year the Experience Tools are nearing a first release. The Lab has now made an announcement: Manage Experiences with a New Release Candidate Viewer.

The video is from 6 months ago. There are live ‘Experiences’ you can visit. (Experiences) The announcement moves thing into the Beta stage.

You need to be able to explain what you plan to do with an Experience Key to get  one.

There is also a Project Viewer that goes along with the Beta: Experience Viewer version 3.7.23.297364. Download

For more information from the user side see Inara’s article: Lab issues Experience Keys release candidate viewer. 

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Second Life Wiki Lockdown 2014-52

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I have a bit of time to write today. RL is still busy with work and holiday related stuff. I can confirm that Adobe’s latest release of Dreamweaver is way buggy when one tries to use their new fluid ‘LIVE’ design features. It appears Adobe is moving away from Dreamweaver and toward their new Adobe Edge.

SL Wiki

I’m not sure how many of my readers use the SL Wiki. I suspect even fewer add to its content. Those of us that do contribute to the wiki content have been blocked for some time. The SL Wiki is no longer user editable. Few Lindens can edit it.

Months ago some socially dysfunctional people started vandalizing the wiki. The Lindens locked it down to stop the vandalism.

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Second Life and LoD

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LoD is Level of Detail. It is a term used in 3D modeling to improve performance by reducing the amount of data that has to be rendered. In Second Life™ it seems to be poorly understood and ignored by many. The result is a poorly performing Second Life. This video shows the major problems.

I did not intend to belittle anyone with the video. But, having a ton of poorly rendering mash in a region gave me the extreme example I needed.

Some of Mad Pea’s builds are absolutely gorgeous. But, with a little bit more work they would not have had the LoD failings I was seeing. It may also be that they intended to have the various victims’ business cards be hard to find and they used LoD to make it even harder. I doubt it, but may be… 

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Second Life: Viewer Managed MP

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We have known for a short time that a revised Market Place tool is coming to Second Life™. Yesterday the Lab posted that they have a Beta Version running in ADITI, the preview grid. The announcement is here: Viewer-Managed Marketplace Available on Aditi. (VMM)

There is a JIRA Project for reporting bugs and requesting features. More information on using the new Market Place is available here:  VMM Beta Knowledge Base.

The Merchant Outbox is out. We will now have a new management tool that opens from within our Inventory panel.

If you’re like me you are wondering how this affects existing items we have in the market place. According to the KB there is a way to migrate listings in the Market Place to the new system. It appears we are basically finding the UUID, or some kind of ID, of an existing listing in the Market Place and matching it to a folder in our inventory.

For information on how all this works, see the KB article.

Second Life Performance Boost

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Market Place

Yesterday about lunch time the Lindens posted a blog article titled Performance, Performance, Performance. The surprising part, at least to me, is the performance improvements made to the Market Place. I’ve been covering the coming change to Viewer Managed Market Place. But, I don’t recall hearing about Market Place (MP) performance improvements.

Whatever, the Lindens say they are seeing a 70% faster response time and pages load 30% faster.

Builder's Brewery Materials Class
Builder’s Brewery Materials Class

Group Chat

I’ve been sort of covering the improvements to group chat. News in this area is almost always after the fact. The Lindens have realized that whenever they say anything about changing something they get complaints about how the change is the cause of whatever problem users are having. So, they think they get better feedback on some things if they change and listen before saying anything.

This last week we have been running on new code in the chat servers. The metrics say things are MUCH better. I know I haven’t got a ‘cannot connect’ error when trying to comment in group chat this past week. But, I have also been busy and not in world much either. 

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Second Life Updates to DK2

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The Oculus Rift Project Viewer has been upgraded 3.7.18-295296. Along with the upgrade comes a post in the blog: Oculus Rift DK2 Project Viewer Now Available.

They are still careful to point out that this is a somewhat incomplete viewer, but then Oculus Rift is incomplete. However, those with DK2 units can play with this viewer.