Second Life and Virtual Worlds
I spend time helping people in the SL Forum, mostly in Answers. A question came in about making a Cover Photo… a what?
When logged into the forum open your profile. There are a couple of ways to do that. Up in the upper right click your name and select Profile. Or on any forum page where you have posted click your profile image.
GA.EG has a gum chewing, bubble blowing animation for Jennifer. The chewing animations are awesomely cute.
This is what bento is about. The neat animations we can build.
Ryan Schultz is writing about his Pet Peeves in Second Life™. The great part of the article is he gives solutions for all of the solvable ones. The solutions are free. So, you’ll want to get them.
Freebie stores… Ryan has his rant on those. I agree with him. There are really bad freebie stores. There are also some good ones, He lists a couple. A favorite of mine that he likes is Free Dove.
In 2008 when I was a new avatar Free Dove was my store of choice. Some great designers had introductory gifts. GuRL 6 had a free hairdo for those newer than 30-days old. I jumped on that. I bought a bunch of GuRL 6 hair once I figured out how to earn money, my stripper-days. I still have some GuRL 6 do’s I wear. The ACI is pretty good. But, GuRL 6 is no more. 🙁
Oculus Go – A new cheap Oculus is coming. Word is this year. Stated price US$200. For details see the long article, Oculus Go world premiere: Acceptable compromises, amazing quality. Consider this, Hands-On: Oculus Go – The Gear VR Killer.
So, will Go wipe out sales for Gear VR, DayDream, and similar phone-VR headsets? For those that don’t have or are avoiding an update of their smartphone, yeah. The phone-VR field has its problems and dedicated VR headsets are a better choice on several points. But, the price is still holding back VR adoption, IMO, and supporting the cheaper phone-VR headset market.
Ryan Schultz talked with Patch Linden about the returning ability to pick a last name. And today in the Content Creators UG meeting Oz Linden spoke more about the coming ability to change your name.
First, both are making it clear this is something that will change in late 2018. Oz hopes before the end of the year, not the last minute of December, but not real soon either.
Anyone, new or old, can change their first and last names. It will cost RL money to change your name. Price has not been decided. Some MMO’s charge US$20 and a few more. So, whatever rumors you hear on price, that is wild speculation so be skeptical.
You will be able to change first and last names. So, all those scripts that depend on remembering an avatar name, they are going to be obsolete. If you have a need to remember an avatar, your script will have to use the UUID, as the UUID for an avatar will never change.
You can create any first name. Last names will be selected from a list. I think it was Hamlet that was writing about watching a Linden trying to come up with last names to select from. Oz says they will be selecting names users submit. They will probably update the selection list in batches.
The Lindens are talking… somewhat. But, we will have to capture one and waterboard them to get any real details. See their post, Happy 15th Birthday, Second Life! Fifteen Reasons to Celebrate.
We already know about lower land prices and double tier. But, you may not know they are planning to go farther with making land cheaper. Don’t think they are going to lower their income. They are just looking for ways to shift the cost to us.
Part of that shift is finding ways to make Premium Membership more enticing. So, Premium Members can expect nice stuff coming their way.
We know Animesh and Bakes-On are coming. And there is the migration of SL systems to the cloud.
Windlight is getting an upgrade. We know that change as Enhanced Environment Project or EEP. I’ve been writing about it over the past weeks. Of the known things coming, this is the one I am really excited to see.
There is a video of Ebbe at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference. Daniel Voyager posted it and I picked it up from his site.
There is about 4 minutes and 20 seconds of a test pattern at the beginning. I’ve started the video 4:20 in. So, you only have a couple of seconds of it.
If leave the display of the video on mid-size display you see the live chat recorded scroll in the window to the right. Different links will display the chat differently. I thought this was the better one.
The location and computer rendering of the scene both suck. Sad. This looks like something from 10 years ago. The audio has apparently not been edited. So, you’ll have some volume issues but it is OK.
I wanted to sit in on this week’s Third-Party Developers’ meeting. I wanted some footage of the meeting to use as an opening for my summary of the meeting. I was late. Seems to be a pattern. But, I was planning to use Pantera Północy’s video of the meeting. It comes out Saturday morning.
I was surprised to find Ebbe Altberg talking! Whoa! So, I brought up OBS and recorded the rest of the meeting. The first 15 minutes are missing. Those minutes are in Pantera’s Video, which came out before I got finished.
I’ve been having audio problems with the SL recordings. I got some of that cleaned up. I still had problems but the audio is intelligible and better.
I thought about indexing the video. I usually do. But, Thursday is an RL busy day and I already have a work-related video rendering in the background. My completer is WAY sluggish and all 4 cores are pegged at 100% heating up to 57. This one of the few times I hear the fans pick up speed. So, I’ll do the index later when I don’t have to deal with pauses.
The video is jerky in places. I was recording and had the rendering paused. But, I was still seeing a hit in the viewer. My i5-6600 did pretty well considering the load on the system.
See the thread in the SL Forum, Ebbe Altberg talking at the Third-Party Dev Meeting.