General News – Page 39 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Marketplace Beta Search: Better?

2016/02/252016/02/25 by Nalates Urriah

I am one that has bitched about ‘search’ in Second Life™ for years. The results have always been a confusing mix of items related and unrelated to the search target/term. Now the Lab is making the new search, Marketplace Beta Search, easier to find and use.

In November 2015 Linden Lab posted an article about the Beta Marketplace Search. See: Introducing Marketplace Search Beta. They updated it later the same month. Now they seemed to have moved to broader testing and have placed a link to the new search on the landing/home page of the current Marketplace or I’m just noticing it.

Second Life Bits Week 8

2016/02/22 by Nalates Urriah

Ciaran Laval writes RL is taking time away from his blogging. He’ll be a bit sporadic about posting. See: Brief Update. Darn. Ciaran is good.

Inara Pey is responding to those saying they will never visit a Project Sansar world if there is no World Map… or I suppose in the case of Sansar it would be more of a Universe Map. See: Maps as metaphors: Second Life and Sansar.

Anyone saying what they are NOT going to do something because of what something is going to be before they know what it is going to be… is obviously a shallow thinker… if they think.

Inara in her updates mentions the Gray Box problem, which has to do with regions crossings while attached to a vehicle. I can’t remember when I last crossed a region boundary with a vehicle. If you are running into that problem more information is here: SL project updates 16 7/1: server and viewer.

Your SL Firsts

SLUniverse has a kind of fun thread running. It is about your First ____________ in Second Life™. Check it out here: Your SL Firsts.

Linden Fix It

2016/02/19 by Nalates Urriah

You may or may not have noticed the Lindens are talking more about what is happening behind the scenes in Second Life. See: Tale of the Missing ACK.

The article is a good example of the troubleshooting often needed to find a problem.

All you need is LOVE... — All you need is LOVE…

Firestorm Team Thank You

2016/02/13 by Nalates Urriah

Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.

Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.

Firestorm Support Jacket - Link farther down the page — Firestorm Support Jacket – Link farther down the page

You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.

Second Life in the News Week 3

2016/01/21 by Nalates Urriah

Annie Gaus, a reporter for the San Francisco Business Times has written In virtual reality, Second Life prepares for its second act. Annie interviews Ebbe Altberg. Starting with Second Life as a virtual world and moving into talk about Project Sansar.

Nothing new here to those following Sansar in the SL Blogosphere. But, it is a nice article.

Second Life: No Interest?

2016/01/21 by Nalates Urriah

With concurrent user count recently peaking at 57,000± and user group meeting attendance low I think it is fair to ask if people are losing interest in what’s happening in Second Life^TM. The answer is one of those things that is very subjective, because it is so difficult to get objective or complete information. So, most answers are opinion.

We see attendance at user group meetings at 10 to 25 people. Yet, we see 4 regions fill up for Firestorm meetings. The video above shows the casting call for Project Bento. About 10 people attended and 4 of use were bloggers or people managing the event.