Category Archives: Changes

New Things Coming to Second Life

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There are several projects now making their way into the Release Channels and soon to the main grid. None are as fun or exciting as mesh, but they are things that should make SL faster and nicer to play in.

Faster Non-Texture Assets

Monty Linden attended Oskar’s office hours meeting. There is a small project (small code-wise) coming to the grid soon that will speed up non-texture assets moving through the system. Now is that cryptic or what?

Seems Monty means sounds and wearables. The change won’t be as dramatic as ‘Compression’ is for region crossing, but it is expected to be significant and have noticeable effects. The change has to do with making the process smarter, whatever that can mean in this case. Monty describes it as removing artificial slowdowns… which may have mostly to do with making the path things take through the system more efficient.

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Second Life 40 Groups

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Updated 2010-01-13 – 6:15 PM – SLT

Several blogs are reporting that in some regions with some viewers one can now have 40 groups. There is no Linden Lab announcement out. So, this is testing and it may change at any time. Try it at your risk.

Update: So far there is still no official word. Speculation is that one going over 25 groups may lose those if Linden Lab turns the feature off. Whether the excess groups would be lots in alphabetical order or join order or something else is unknown. Actually whether they would be permanently lost or come back when the limits is raised is unknown.

Using Phoenix you will see the limit listed at the bottom of the Groups panel listed as 25. This does not mean that is the limit. That is just a cosmetic thing. One is supposed to be able to set the Debug Settings value in Phoenix40GroupsSupport to TRUE and see what limit the server is using (requires a viewer restart). Update: Phoenix is rumored to only support a max 40 groups. Whatever the case the next version (Firestorm) is planned to have better group support.

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Second Life Update

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I write about the changes in Second Life that interest me and/or that I think will be of general interest. Most of the recent changes have been boring bug fixes and tedious changes to the SLV2 user interface. Things like making this or that button transparent when the panel loses focus. Mostly stuff everyone wants done, but doesn’t really want to read about or at least, I don’t. But there are a bunch of those tedious changes, which I’m skipping, and few interesting ones I’ve touched on here.

Mesh

Throttling has been added to mesh to prevent using mesh animations. You may or may not know that sculpties are animated by changing the sculpty map a prim uses. It took no time at all for that idea to come those using meshes as a similar process  is used. However, there is a drastic difference in the load mesh animation throws on the viewer and server. Throttling mesh changes will prevent the use of mesh swapping for animation and lagging the region.  Continue reading →

Second Life Mesh Update

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Viewer Changes

The mesh upload interface has been revised in the Mesh Project Viewer and the upload reworked. One can get the latest Second Life Mesh Project Viewer and check it out. I think the layout is much nicer. (Also this link should always point you to the latest Mesh Viewer.)

This version is likely the user interface that we will have at Mesh rollout.

Second Life Viewer

New Mesh Dialog #1

Bones

Lots of people want working fingers, which requires the addition of more bones to the avie. No word if that is going to happen. I personally have my doubts, but may be down the road.

Custom Animated Skeletons

Currently the only usable skeleton in SL is the avie’s. But, having other skeletons that could be animated would make things like dragons, horses, and dogs much easier to animate. Whatever, they will not be part of the initial rollout of mesh. However Prep Linden is working with them.  Continue reading →

Second Life Display Names

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There is soooo much misinformation out about Display Names. I think it also reveals how few Second Life residents actually know how to research anything about SL. That they are willing to post their imaginings, without any checking, in forums and blogs is even more … choose your own adjective here. Sheeesh…

Jessica Lyons wrote a post on the Phoenix Viewer web site/blog that does a good job of getting the facts stated clearly. She provides good information on how to use them in world and for logging into the web sites and grid. She covers how to use older series 1 viewers with the new Display Names. She also points out the eventual coming end to Phoenix Viewers as they move to their series 2 viewer Firestorm Viewer.

See: Display Names and new SL Account names explained…

Also if you use the URL http://www.phoenixviewer.com you may find the URL http://phoenixviewer.blogspot.com/ much nicer to use. The first URL cannot be added to an RSS subscription. The second one can.

Happy Thanksgiving! 🙂