Second Life and Virtual Worlds
December 12, Friday, there will be a meeting for discussion of the new Marketplace features. It seems few merchants know much about the coming change. The announcement is here: In-World Feedback Session.
I guess this tells us how few residents actually keep up with SL news, either via forums or blogs. Of course that reflects a similar RL fact that only about 20+ million of 300+ million people in the U.S. watch TV news (national news).
This past Friday was the Third Party Developers meeting. Chakat NorthSpring has a video of the meeting: Second Life: Third Party Viewer meeting (21 November 2014). These meetings are consistently getting shorter. This one is down 30± minutes or so.
A couple of extra Linens were in attendance Friday; Brooke, Xiola and Bazz.
Oz Linden did his usual recap of viewer devlopment. He says they have lots of stuff in progress.
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.
We have and are hearing lots of complaints about how some number of avatars lag our Second Life™ experience. If you open up the Viewer Stats (Ctrl-Shift-1) and look at server performance (Simulator: Time Dilation, Sim FPS, Physics FPS, and others), you often find the region server performing well; TD=0.999, Sim FPS=44-45, Physics=44=45. Even with lots of avatars in a region. So, it isn’t region/simulator lag that is the problem. Over the last year large steps in reducing simulator lag have been taken with CDN being the most recent. The lag is now in our viewer.
There is a value the viewer displays labeled Avatar Render Cost (ARC). In November 2011 I wrote about ARC and how to use it, as it had recently changed. (See: #SL ARC Replaced) Things have changed since then. We now find the value displayed in two different ways. Try: Top Menu->Advanced (press Ctrl-Alt-D if you do not have that menu item)->Performance Tools->Show Draw Weight for Avatars. This will display a colored text above avatars showing their ‘render cost’. This does clutter the screen, but makes it easy to see which avatar has what ARC.
I see that SL Capital Exchange is suspending trading in Linden dollars. Today I see they announced:
On July 16, 2014, I filled out the first form for the Skill Gaming Application for Capital Exchange Stock Market Simulation Game. From that point until today, there have been numerous correspondences between me, my law firm, and Linden Lab. As of today we still do not have an official determination, positive or negative, on our application.
I was hoping that because much of the delay has been on the part of Linden Lab, that we would be allowed to operate past the November 1, 2014 deadline set forth in a recent post by Linden Lab. Unfortunately I was informed by Rowan Linden that we cannot. So therefore effective immediately, I am suspending all trading at Capital Exchange until our application is approved or denied by Linden Lab.
….
See the full article for more details and information: Capital Exchange Suspends Activity Until Further Notice.
The Main Viewer has jumped up to 3.7.17-294959. This is the new Login Viewer with some maintenance fixes mixed in.
Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.17.294943 – Minor fixes and additions. I’ve listed them before.