Oculus Rift and Second Life

The Lab has announced that they have a viewer ready for the Oculus Rift. The Lab’s announcement is here: Using the Oculus Rift with Second Life. It includes the video I have here.

The big announcement is the release of a project viewer: OculusRift Viewer version 3.7.8.289834 – download. It features:

  • Full Oculus Rift Hardware Support
  • Full UI Support
  • Customizable UI
  • Avatar Head Motion
  • New First-Person View
  • Align to Look
  • Action Key

The viewer detects a Rift and provides quick setup. The Lab writes you can use HUD’s and all of the viewer’s interface functions. We are told we can customize the interface. Also, a new first person (mouse look like – use the M-key to enter it) view has been added. There is a new ‘Action Key’, which I suppose takes the place of a mouse click.

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New ‘Starter Avatars’…

New Avatar - Interesting Mesh Density
New Avatar – Interesting Mesh Density

OK everyone is posting about these.  If you haven’t already heard, you have to be hiding. They are far better than the Ruth and Roth avatars from earlier times.

They are interesting and noobies will look much better. However, noobies will still act like noobies . They won’t be all that hard to recognize.

However, Saturday when I was trying to play with the new avatars the SL system was acting up. The Choose an Avatar panel did not want to load. I kept getting an empty panel. I left the panel open and relogged, that got it working, or it may be just the relog did it. Or my region may have been having difficulties.

Once the panel was loaded then some avatars would not load. I would get what looked like an LOD4 version 0f the avatar only, very bizarre looking up close but ok from a distance. Switch to another one and later retry the one with loading problems, seemed to work.

When you wear one of these avatars a folder is created in the Clothing folder of your inventory. The ‘Lucy’ avatar is of course in the Lucy folder.

These avatars completely replace, well are worn over, your system avatar and a full body alpha mask hides the system avatar. They are complete mesh bodies and clothes. I am not sure why they made them No-Mod. 

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Facebook, Flickr & Twitter from Second Life

SL Share is the feature name the Lab uses for their sharing feature. You probably remember that Facebook sharing was blocked for a time. Facebook advised the Lab on what had to change for the feature to be unblocked. The Lab made those changes. Now Facebook sharing is back.

While the Lab was making changes they added the ability to share with Flickr and Twitter. Torley Linden made a video tutorial that posted with announcement about the newly enhanced SL Share.

[youtube uVlNa2O9if4]

To use these new features you need to download and install the  Project SL Share2 Viewer version 3.7.5.288424

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SL JIRA Change 2014-10 Update

There was interesting discussion about how existing JIRA items will be handled. They may not be part of the new open JIRA. The open setting may only affect newly filed JIRA items.

I am pretty sure no one but the guys setting up the new permissions know. But, there are some possible privacy issues being considered.

What if, as Simon pointed out, somebody thinking they are private filed a my embarrassing part doesn’t work right type bug report? Now we open all those JIRA’s up? Oops!

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BREAKING: #SecondLife JIRA Change 2014-09

We have a major change in the SL JIRA System. Today at 9:55 AM a new post by Linden Lab appeared. Changes to Our JIRA Implementation. I think this is good news.

 All users will be able to see all BUG issues, all the time. YAY!!

JIRA Change 2014
JIRA Change 2014

More controversial is the change: You’ll also be able to comment. Before an issue is triaged, everyone can comment to help isolate and describe the issue more clearly. Do remember, there are some basic guidelines for participation that need to be followed.

Those guide lines have not changed since June 2011, which was before the previous JIRA Change that closed the JIRA. So, this is going to put an enforcement burden on the Lindens using the JIRA.

I think another measure will reduce the problems we had before: Once an issue is Accepted and imported by Linden Lab’s QA team, the original reporter will still be able to comment, as will Lindens and a small team of community triagers – a group that includes some third party Viewer developers and others selected by Linden Lab for having demonstrated skills in this area

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