Category Archives: Changes

Second Life: New Things

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I missed the Content Creators UG meeting this week, lunch and drinks with friends. So, of course this is the week we got word from the Lindens that we are getting new shiny stuff, a new project: Animation Extensions.

Zizi

Zizi

The new extensions will extend how and what we can animate in s couple directions. First is what is being called Supplementary Animations. These are for the new Bento skeleton.

If you don’t animate in SL or haven’t been around forever, you probably don’t know there used to be just the avatar default animations (think duck walk) and the animations we played via script. Our Animation Overriders (AO’s) worked by the viewer continuously asking the server what out avatar was doing (walking, sitting, flying, etc.) and then telling the server which animation to play.  Continue reading →

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Second Life: Will We Bake Our Mesh Body Avatars?

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The idea of baking mesh avatars has been a subject coming up in the Content Creators UG over the last couple of weeks. The idea is to change how mesh avatars work. If you don’t understand how a Classic body layers work now, this may be confusing. I’ll try to sort it.

Mechanical beauty

Mechanical beauty

Starting back a couple of years, the Lindens added Server Side Appearance baking (SSA). The Classic avatar is made of three separate parts; head, upper body, and lower body. The parts allow layering of textures placed on the Classic body. Sort of like sticking decals one a top another.  Continue reading →

Second Life: Server OS Upgrade & Coming Server Packages

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The Lindens have been upgrading the server operating system. Mazidox Linden describes it, “For those of you who don’t attend regularly or just missed that meeting, DRTSIM-323 is an upgrade to the simulator operating system to bring it up to more modern standards. It won’t change anything you should notice, and could change anything, at the same time.”

"Empty minds" by Romy Nayar @MetaLES ..O..

“Empty minds” by Romy Nayar @MetaLES ..O..

This is like a user changing from Windows 7 to 10. Everything working on 7 is supposed to work on 10. But, until you try it, you don’t know. Continue reading →

Second Life: How many Avatars can you fit in a region?

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The Lindens have posted Improved Region Capacity and Access in the forum. They are raising the number of avatars a region can support. Not by a lot, but who can enter and when is changing a lot. I think for events this will be a big deal. If people actually kept up on Second Life development news, I think we would hear screams from the snowflakes.

Fireworks... when it's all over

Fireworks… when it’s all over

Once the feature is rolled to ‘your’ region owners and estate manages will be able to enter regardless of the current avatar count. OK, that makes sense to me and shouldn’t have much effect on us non-owner-manager users.  Continue reading →

Second Life: New Community Site – How to Use

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The SL Blog, Forum, Knowledge Base, Answers, and other parts of the “Community” web site are up and running. See: Welcome to Our New Community Platform! While this isn’t a tutorial, it will give you some tips and probably save you some time.

Community Site Home Page 3/2017

The thinking is the new HOME page provides more information about what is happening in the community. The Blog, Forums, Events, and more are supposed to be easier to find. Well, the Home page has a synopsis of the latest SL Blog post, the most recent SL Forum post, and the Flickr picture of the day… I don’t consider this page particularly revealing as to what is happening in Second Life™. I am curious how helpful you think the page is?  Continue reading →

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Gaming in 2016 – Predicting 2017?

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According to SuperData Research  people spent US$91,000,000,000 on games. Billion… This is an all-time record. But, they are hyping things a bit. In 2015 Statistica shows $91.5 billion spent and $99.6 billion in 2016. I suppose it depends on where one gets their numbers and categorizes them. Game revenue is notoriously flaky as companies like to hype their increasing sales and keep decreases secret.

Still that is about a 10% increase year-to-year. Eight billion isn’t chump change, unless your spending $10 trillion on credit, like some governments…

Data From Statistica

They break the revenue down into subcategories. Handheld games are dying. Smartphone games are the hot item. They show the largest growth from 2015 to 2016 and that is expected to continue, which seems reasonable as smartphones are selling well.

In 2005 smartphones sales were just $3.8 billion. Eleven years later in 2016 sales of smart phones was $55 billion, a 1,447% increase. So, as more people get smartphones there are more possible users of smartphone games. According to Statistica a little less than half of the 2016 game revenue was from smartphone gaming. Continue reading →