General News

Second Life and the CLOUD

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Inara Pey has apparently sat through a dry video of Tara Hernandez’s, Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Lab, presentation at Amazon’s Las Vegas promotion for their services. She has written about it here: SANSAR AND SECOND LIFE IN THE CLOUD: LL SPEAKS AT AWS RE:INVENT. The video is here:

That is a 34-minute video on YouTube. There are some gems in the video that interest Second Life™ people.

I had not realized the first iteration of SL used a graphics engine designed to circumvent the Windows graphics and go directly to hardware. This go-to-hardware was the early game-graphics optimization used by most of the industry. That is long gone. Now OpenGL is the optimization that interfaces with all the various graphics systems in use with SL.

Inara covers the main parts SL’ers will find interesting. But, the video is loaded with tidbits about Second Life and how they are changing away from the problems with ideas for Sansar. So, some seldom talked about SL things are described in the video.

There is about 10+ minutes of tech description on Sansar and how it works. And toward the end some words on how they plan to adapt Second Life for life in the cloud.

Pine Lake – November 2017

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Pine Lake is a post-apocalyptic build in Second Life™.  I’m not that much into doing travel guide stuff for SL. But, occasionally I find a place that is like… Wow! Pine Lake is such a place.

PineLake_001 - Landing Point
PineLake_001 – Landing Point

You can get a kinda lame idea of what the place is like from their Flickr Group. The images there today do not do the build justice.

It is the attention to detail that impresses me. Wow! Just wow. The amount of detail is incredible.

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Planned Second Life Updates

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The Linens have announced some new things coming to Second Life™. Some are good, some are a pain.

In the pain department first, there is an increase in the fee to buy Linden dollars (L$). It is going from US$0.60 to $0.99 per transaction. This goes into effect today, Nov 2, 2017. Dang. I need Lindens…

Also, when cashing out the fee goes from 1.5% per transaction, with a $3 (USD) minimum and a $25 (USD) maximum to 2.5% per transaction, with a $3 (USD) minimum, and no maximum. This happens January 3, 2018.

- to The Mist -
– to The Mist –

Why? Thank criminals and government regulators. The cost to remain compliant with regulations is going up.

In the goodies department, money is being budgeted for; new features, engineering support, customer support, billing systems and upgrades, and customer acquisition outreach. These are all good things. I like new features. Animesh is the exciting one. The improved server-side baking for 1024 rez and adaption for use with mesh bodies and other mesh attachments is intertwined with animesh phase I & II. But, it has great potential to reduce avatar induced lag. 

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SL Support Offline 11/7

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The Lindens have posted that they will have support offline November 7th starting at 3PM PT. They plan to have it back up by 9AM PT 11/8. It may take longer.

*^-^Meow^-^*
*^-^Meow^-^*

They are changing the infrastructure of the support system. Only ‘open’ tickets from 2017 are being transferred over. There are 1.2 million tickets and 200,000 live chat records from 2016 and before that will eventually transfer over. But, probably not for some time.

If you need ticket information from before 1/1/2017, get it now, before 11/7.

Second Life – Beta Animesh is HERE

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This week the awaited project viewer for Animesh was released. See Second Life Project Animesh Viewer version 5.0.9.329458 here.

2017 Oct Animesh Test

Release Notes:

This is the first build of the Animesh Project Viewer. Animesh is a new feature under development that allows non-avatar objects to play animations like avatars do today. Animesh is still under development, so the new features will only work in supported test regions on Aditi. See the wiki page for details on how to get started with animesh. You can report problems with animesh in our JIRA and discuss it with other interested residents at the Animesh Forum .

For more information, see our blog posting.

This viewer ONLY works on the ADITI – Preview/Beta Grid.

Lindens are answering questions in the SL Forum. Please read the thread before asking your question.

The announcement for Animesh is here: Join the Project Animesh Beta – New Support for Animating Mesh Objects.

The details are in the SL Wiki here: Animesh User Guide.

ADITI

The only place Animesh works is in the Preview Grid (click for info). If you have never logged into ADITI, you will need to try and likely fail. Then contact support and tell them you tried to get into ADITI for the first time and cannot get in. They’ll fix you up. Then you’ll be able to log in.

Tutorials

Medhue has some Bento tutorials that should help with animesh.

Otherwise, it is too early for tutorials. There are problems with animesh. The basic mechanics are working. But, amimesh’s right and left click behavior, various alignment issues, attachment issues, and Pathfinding integration have some issues.