Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Last night I wrote my update for servers and viewers for week #23 and scheduled it for 6AM this morning. This morning at 7 AM I find new viewers on the RC and Project Viewers page.
Second Life Project VLC Media Plugin Viewer version 4.0.6.316087 – This viewer completely removes the need for QuickTime… well, maybe more accurately… removes the code that tried to run an Apple abandoned and broken QuickTime.
Here is the video of the Project Bento user group meeting. There is a POST meeting video that I am working on. It has good information. Cathy Foil was answering questions from her experience with Bento from building MayaStar Bento support.
Dan Linden, at the Server Beta UG, elaborated a bit about project Bento going live SOON, saying, “And by live, I mean the server component that will allow the upload of Bento meshes animations that have additional bones. The Bento Release viewer is still a ways off. You’ll need a Bento Project Viewer to see Bento content for now.”
There is more and more being said about the Lindex and the current trend in exchange rates. I was curious about trend so I’ve been graphing it.
The raw data comes from Linden Lab. Tyche Shepard collects that information and has since 2009. (See: GridSurvey) The Lab publishes the raw numbers for the last 30 days and charts it for that last 90 days. My chart is a combination of both. The last 5 days have not shown up at Tech’s. The last few days are the most interesting.
This week has been busy, RL. So, I’ve missed some of the goings on. One is the release of the Quick Graphics viewer as the main Linden Viewer.
To learn more about the development process and history of this viewer and how it works see my articles on Avatar Complexity. Also, Inara has a good write up titled: Avatar Complexity and Graphics Presets in Second Life.
If you use the Preview/Beta Grid (ADITI) then you know that there were problems in ADITI this week. But, last week on Friday parts of the main grid went down. The operations people via April Linden have posted an article on what happened.
See: The Story Behind Last Week’s Unexpected Downtime – 2016-05-09 10:22 AM
As part of the problem the Grid Status page went down. This is a tuning issue. That site normally has very few users. But, when the grid goes down users flood in and swamp the site. That is a common problem for hosting systems and there are ways to scale up to handle the load and down once demand passes. So, a future outage from overloading is now less likely.
When the Grid Status site is down there is a fall back: Twitter. See: SLGridStatus. This service stayed up. It has 12k+ followers.
I have the SL Grid Status in my favorites. Now I have added a Twitter link.
Inara Pey has written a well done summary of the Lab Chat #3 meeting. See it here: Lab Chat #3 in 10-ish minutes. Inara touches on all the questions asked and answered.
While most of the initial questions and answers have to do with Project Bento there are plenty of general Second Life™ questions and answers in the middle. Discussion then moves to Sansar. I’ve touched on just a few of the interesting points I think needed more information and context.
In regard to adding photography tools to the Linden Viewer similar to Firestorm’s Photo Tools, the Linden answer is a bit of spin. But, very much in line with their policy of not commenting on coming features until just before release.