As the Second Life™ system advances more of the content will be transferred to the viewer by HTTP protocol. This takes load from UDP and the region server-simulators and moves it to the Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Shadow Puppets!
We expect some degree of region performance improvement, especially in crowded regions with lots of avatars. But, there may be a cost for those on slow Internet connections. It is hard to estimate the impact on those with slow connections. But, there are things they can do if they see performance degrade.
There is an announcement in the SL Blog telling us the Lindens are going to set the SL Forum to read only. Why? To upgrade the forum, blog, and everything… as best I can tell.
The Bento Development group has changed to the Content Creation group. There was another Content Creation/Mesh Import group that stopped meeting in 2014. The meeting transcripts for that old group are still available. They are not the same groups but, similar.
Imagination
This week and next there are no Content Creation group meetings. The next meeting is February 17.
Currently the Content Creation group meeting in Hippotropolis is the most interesting. They are dealing with the challenges of creating Bento Content. As problems come up the Lindens look at ways to make fixes or changes and users work to figure out work-arounds and better methods for creation. Various Lindens attend the meetings.
SexWe all have our thoughts and beliefs about sex. In Second Life™ we can push the envelope on our thinking. Plus, we encounter people from all over the world that have very different ideas about sex and the roles of male and female.
The Walk
In SL I continue to find aspects of life I hadn’t thought of before. For instance, bloggers tend to write reviews of the previous year about now. It is interesting to be reminded of what changed this year. Caroline, of Second Life Adventures blog (NSFW), did a review of the 2016 events and happenings that affected her the most. There is a new meme. See: My Second Life Story in 2016 (NSFW XXX).
Gaia has a new post up on Machinimatrix.org. According to the announcement they have reached the end of design and are going into a user-testing phase. Those that have filed trouble tickets on the Machinimatrix bug reporter will get their copies of 2.0-24 first. The rest of us, later.
There is a load of documentation in this announcement. So, check it out.
There are people using a 2.0 version for their main production tool. However, others are having problems. I think many of the problems are from a lack of documentation. It is hard to keep the docs up to date with an in-development product. Much less make the video tutorials.
If AvaStar 2.0 finalizes we will start to see more tutorials arriving.
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…
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.
