Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Penny Patton has a post in the SL Forum titled, Why No Mod? She is finding a lot of the stuff being sold these days is no mod. She apparently finds it as annoying as I do. But, Penny does a good job of explaining why mesh things should be Mod-OK.
There is a good discussion in the thread, still short. Most are in support of Mod-OK items. No-Mod demos are understandable and most have no problems with demos being No-Mod.
Recently the Lab gave land owners more prims, well changed the prim limits on land. Today about 10 AM (12/7 – Pearl Harbor Day) the Lab announced Land owners can buy even more prims, push the limit from 20,000 to 30,000 prims… or more accurately change their Land Impact limit for some money. See: Upgrade … Read more
This morning about 11:30 AM The Lindens announced Project Bento is now live. The main Linden viewer has updated to include Bento. Firestorm has talked about releasing their Bento capable viewer next Monday the 12th. I suspect if things go well for them they will release an update. But, FS is picky about quality, so there could be delays. Still I’ll bet on next Monday.
The Firestorm viewer is used by half to three-quarters of SL users. The Linden viewer is used by a quarter to a third of SL users. So, until Firestorm adopts something many developers and merchants consider too few people as being able to use the feature to justify releasing products using the feature.
In the Server-Scripting meeting Simon Linden told us the regions were being restarted to enable the increased prim limits. So, as of today, all the regions in all the channels should have the new prim limits in place.
Jo Yadley, Inara, Linden Blog, and I have all covered the change in prim limits. Designing Worlds had an interview with Patch Linden talking about the change. The video of the meeting will be out in early December.
Today I find a new scam is popping up on the Internet. Basically blackmail, a really old crime. The media is giving it a new name to describe a specific kind of crime: sextortion.
Sextortion is the scam of getting someone into an online sex thing where it can be videoed or pictures taken. This is apparently most prevalent on Facebook. The threat is they will show your kink to your family, friends, and/or business associates.
Lumiya viewer adds support for Google Cardboard. Inara has an article detailing it. There are some interesting user interface ideas.
Inara covers Radegast’s recent voice issues, a viewer apparently favored by the disabled.
You may or may not be aware of the VLC media player. It is a free, open source video player. It has basically replaced QuickTime in the SL viewers. The development team, VideoLAN Project has added the ability to view 360-video and pictures. See: VLC media player now supports 360-degree videos.