Changes

Second Life Interesting Bits 2014-23

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SL Go 7 Days

This past week the SL blogosphere has been talking about OnLive’s announcement that they now offer a 7 DAY trial period of their SL GO product. If you don’t know what SL Go is, OMG! Well, see #SecondLife Gets a Mobile App (early March 2014). Prior to this the trial period was far too short for anyone to get an idea of whether this was a useful service. This longer trail should allow one to use SL Go long enough to learn the basics and actually use it to gain a sense of what it is like.

OnLive 2014-10 Games Page
OnLive 2014-10 Games Page

The last few days I have been experimenting a bit with viewers, something I used to do frequently in my quest for the best viewer. Those were the days when viewers were each very different and had very different feature sets. To some extent that is still true, but I think much less so than in the past.

What I have found is that where FS and SL Viewer get 6 to 20 FPS in a crowd of avatars SL Go runs a pretty steady 40 to 50 FPS on the desktop and my S4 in the same crowds. Impressive.

You might want to give it a try. 

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Group Ban 2014-21

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This is a feature many large group owners are wanting… desperately. Once it rolls out things should be nicer in several ways.

This is the feature that bans and ejects a user or group of users from a group. Now we can eject them. But, on open groups the ejected user just joins up again and they are back. Group ban will add them to a list server side and the servers will not let them join the group again. Pesky problem solved.

On Wednesday an infrastructure part of the feature rolled out to the backend servers. This isn’t anything we can see now, but the main grid is a step closer to having Group Ban. One more change is needed before the server RC channels get the new code for Group Ban. The Tuesday down time messed up that schedule. I suspect it will recover quickly.

Maestro says that only one region server update will need to go through the RC channels. That assumes no bugs.

There is a set of viewer changes winding through QA and then RC. But, we are getting close to having Group Ban.

Oculus Rift and Second Life

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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’…

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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

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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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JIRA Change to PUBLIC

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Those old JIRA BUG items that the Lindens left as unreadable… Well, the one that filed the report can mark it readable. So, if you have a bug that has not been closed and want help with it, or feel it should be open to the public for some reason, change it.

This change is only possible for your BUG items. To make the change so it is open to everyone for reading look in the horizontal middle of the report heading where you’ll find an item labeled Security Level. It will likely be marked Triager and Reporter. Change that to Public. Done.

This option allows people to keep issues private. Since it was known the issues were private at the time of filing, it would be rather rude to remove privacy when there was an expectation. This choice to leave it to the one that made the report, allows the privacy to be protected or removed at their discretion. Smart.

All newly filed BUG reports will be PUBLIC by default. But, this gives us a way to open up older reports filed during the JIRA dark period.