Category Archives: General News

BoM to Release Monday

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Vir Linden has posted in the SL Forum BoM releasing Soon.

So, BoM will release August 26, Monday.

Never Let Me Down Again…

Never Let Me Down Again…

There is an RC level viewer for BoM here, which you can use now. Presumably, that RC Viewer will promote to the main default SL Viewer.

There mostly aren’t any BoM products to play with. But, you can jump to the Knowledgebase article on Bakes On Mesh and learn how to use BoM. There is also a step-by-step for making BoM stuff. For users, the use of BoM will be almost identical to how we use the classic avatar and system clothes.

I know Slink is ready to release their BoM compatible Slink bodies. We should see those quickly. Presumably, other major designers have BoM products waiting in the wings. So I expect BoM to quickly be adopted by a significant number of SL residents.

The hope is this feature will reduce ACI and improve SL performance. BoM should affect bodies, clothes, feet, heads, and hands. But, it will NOT affect existing mesh bodies and clothes. Those will all continue to work as they do today. Only new BoM capable stuff will use the new feature.

Second Life News Week #33 Late

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General News

Busy week for me in RL. I’m behind. MIssed the Topless Cruise. We do have interesting news.

We had the first Content Creators’ meeting in a couple of weeks. Vir Linden gave us a little information on what came up in the Linden Summit Meeting held in Massecuites a couple of weeks ago.

orinoco valley

orinoco valley

The ARCTan project is being set at a priority such that we will likely see work resuming on it this quarter.

EEP and BoM are hopefully to soon release. Vir is on BoM now. There are a few bugs blocking the release of each. EEP has some performance issues and problems with various graphics cards. BoM has good overall performance. But shadows and alphas still have some render problems.

Also, there should be a new Animesh Project Viewer out soon. This will have the Phase II stuff, animesh customization. There will be LSL stuff to play with.

Dirt Sim 421 is the server-side of the viewer on ADITI that works with this coming Animesh Viewer. Continue reading →

Second Life News Week #32

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General News

The Third-Party Dev’s meeting was a couple of weeks ago. We learned the BoM and Render viewers are very close to release. The EEP viewer was/is not quite ready.

So, file your JIRA’s on BoM.

The Render viewer would have released except for it being Linden Summit Week. But… it got an update this week and did not release…

No new rendering projects until the current ones are released.

Parcel Voice has some problems the Lindens are considering solutions for. See BUG-227350. The JIRA was accepted for its value as a problem statement more so than its presented solution.

Topless Cruisers has a new hangout, Eden Naturopolis. There are 7 boat slips for rent in the area. Also, this location is often the destination point for Tuesday’s cruises. Bouncing boobies parties.

Topless Cruising Map for August 6, 2019

A number of Lumiya Viewer users showed up at the Server-Scripting UG. You probably know the UDP turn-off for assets killed Lumiya for anything but chat text use. I expect they will show up at Oz’s Wednesday morning UG for Open Source.

There is a mobile viewer in the works. But, don’t expect a Lumiya replacement this year or probably not even next year. WAY MORE people are going to have to show up at meetings asking for help.

Servers

Last week the Linens were having their Summit Meeting. We don’t get to know everything going on in those meetings. There is usually a bunch of planning going on. I suspect we will hear a bit of that news in the coming meetings. Otherwise, there has not been much news.

There is no Deploys post today.

My Zindra region has not restarted as of 11:00 AM SLT.

Simon Linden told us at the Server-Scripting UG that we will get a new RC release next week, maybe two. Continue reading →

Second Life News Bits 2019 Week #29

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General News

Preparations for the 9th Annual Christmas Expo are now underway. See REGISTRATION OPEN – 2019 SL Christmas Expo.

Updating the EEP RC Viewer – If you are running on Win-10 v1903 with NVIDIA and update the EEP viewer as it requires by clicking OK, it will trash your video settings. I mean your screen will go wonky and require a computer restart to reset it. The NVIDIA reset (Win Key)+Ctrl+Shift+B won’t help.

Paint for Shergood's H-160

Paint for Shergood’s H-160

Avoid the problem and download the EEP RC Viewer from the Alternate Second Life Viewers page. You can install over the top of the prior install.

AvaStar – Welcome to Avastar 2.79, the new release, July 14, 2019. This will be the last release for Blender 2.79. With this release the version numbering changes. I suppose the point is to make it easier to know which AvaStar works with which Blender.

AvaStar 2.79 will NOT work with Blender 2.80 and above. The next version of AvaStar will be 2.80 and it is being designed to work with Blender 2.80 and up.

Shergood Aviation – New waypoints have been released. These are server-side changes. So, various aircraft do not have to be updated. This is primarily a help to H-160 and Chinook pilots and GPS HUD users. It will be of less importance to older craft but, still a nice improvement.

A notice was sent to the Shergood Aviation group (SLURL) members explaining how to make use of the new waypoint system. To get a copy, join the group, look in Notices.

Topless Cruise – Cruises start weekly Tuesdays 1PM SLT (21:00 BST / 22:00 CEST) – To get updates, join the group Topless Cruisers.  (SLURL)

Sailors are welcome to change wind direction. I try to make it without changing wind direction. For me, it depends on whether or not I hit some laggy regions where I cannot maintain control of the boat.

Everyone is welcome to the after-party. This week it is (‘was’ depending on when I get this published) at Twice Bitten Villa. (URL)

Servers

Again… no Deploys post.

My home region in the main channel was restarted this morning. It is running version Second Life Server 19.06.14.528215, which is the same version as last week and the week before.

Blue Steel is running the same version as of Tuesday morning. I presume Le Tigre and Magnum are also. I will have to look tomorrow to see if they change.

Aah Ha. Simon Linden at the Server-Scripting UG says we will get an update on the Magnum channel Wednesday. Saying, “a tiny performance boost … one crash fix, an esoteric TP failure fix, update a system library … general fix-it stuff that isn’t likely to be visible.”

Simon also points out that various employees are on vacation. So, some projects, like Scripts Run %, are not being worked on. Continue reading →

Second Life News Bits 2019 Week #28

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General News

Linden Homes – Patch Linden warned the community that the Lab has throttled the ‘Homes Page’. In this case ‘throttled’ means there is now a limit on how often you can refresh the page. Refresh too often and you get a timeout. The server simply refuses to send you a copy of the page.

People are refreshing the page to catch the near daily release of Bellisseria homes. It is bad enough when people sit there poking the F5 and Ctrl-F5 keys. What seems to have become intolerable is the use of automation to do the refreshing. There are browser plug-ins that automate the task. Who knew?

Between all the interested people and the few resorting to automation the web servers are overloading. Thus, the throttle.

Reposed

Reposed

Sansar was the chosen platform for Monstercat’s eighth birthday celebration as a LIVE VR performance. For details about the July 12 event see Call of the Wild: An Upcoming VR Live Music Performance Created by Sansar and Monstercat

I think this announcement begs the question of whether people are learning about Sansar or the Lab is marketing Sansar well.

Hair Fair – This classic Second Life event is a little over a month away, starting August 17th, 2019.

Event management is asking the community help by creating Bandanas to be sold during the event and to round out the event the last day is the official Bandana Day.

Visit the website Hair Fair 2019 for details.

Hangers Liquides – This 5-region cyberpunk area around since 2007 looks to be closing. Hamlet has details. See Second Life’s Most Acclaimed Cyberpunk City Will Disappear This Month

Forum Angels – This is an SL in-world group made for the fashion-conscious AVs who hang out on the Forum. You find them in the Vanity Threads How Does Your Avatar Look Today and The VaNiTy ThReAd.

Wendy of Peanut No9 OpenCollar has a video on creating RLV outfits. You’ll find it on the OC Manual’s RLV Folders ‘OUTFITS’ page.

 

Second Life News Week #26A

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From the Content Creators’ UG (CCUG) meeting we get some more precise project updates. I’ve also tossed in some information from Meet the Lindens get togethers.

Starting out Alexa Linden is talking about Bakes on Mesh, BoM. It appears they are getting close to releasing it. There is apparently ‘one more’ thing they are tweaking… presumably, before it can release.

Alexa says items that use the new BoM will have a unique inventory icon.

EEP is getting another viewer update. This version will be in QA over the weekend and if it passes, they hope to have it out Monday. Continue reading →

Second Life News Week #26

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Getting the news out took a bit as I decided to include my own Meet the Lindens video. Pantera Północy posts his videos more quickly than I do. I get bored with his single camera angle. I also process the video to improve the audio… since my camera is moving around have to capture audio at my avatar’s location, not the more easily controlled camera location which has the audio level is all over the place if I move around. That single spot audio is not the best, so I think it still needs some help. But it is serviceable.

Other News

I’ll start off with this alarming bit of news showing where RL government is going with climate change, Climate Apocalypse? Ireland To Ban Private Cars, Import 1M Third-World Migrants. Whatever you think about Climate Change, make sure you aren’t just drinking someone’s Kool-Aid.

SL16B Crowd – The Meet the Lindens Tuesday event was attended by close to 200 people, 11 were Lindens, spread over four regions. Max per region was about 55. I didn’t crash and things worked well. People were a bit slow rendering, textures lagged, but no regions crashed. My FPS was in the 7 to 11 FPS (i5, 32GB, GTX-1060 High-Ultra Shadows + Projectors). – April’s mic was cutting out. – The video is a bit jerky. At 7FPS that happens.

Video Abstract

The video starts with Oz and April telling us about their history with Second Life™. Both were residents before they were hired by the Lab. I found this part of the video INTERESTING… Saffia is a good interviewer.

When we can get Oz or other techy Lindens talking, they always have interesting stuff to say and we learn things about the SL system.

In this Meet the Lindens meeting, April Linden confessed that 2 to 6 months ago they moved the SL inventory to the cloud. Not every detail has moved, but basic inventory (database) now runs in the cloud on much faster computers. And no one noticed, which is what the Lindens want. Continue reading →

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Second Life News Week #24

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Other News

Server Deploy Posts – They are back… Last week speaking to Caleb Linden at the Beta Sever UG meeting I learned there was a problem and it would get resolved. It apparently has as there is a deploys posts this week.

Caleb posted the announcement Monday about noon SLT/PST. Yay!

June 24 – This is the date Premium Membership Rates increase. Until then you can renew for one more billing cycle at the current rate, US$72 per year, which is a deal. I just renewed. I am good until 2021.

Someday Soon

Someday Soon

With Premium, one gets a L$1,000 signing bonus (down the road) and L$300 per week. At the average exchange rate of L$250 to the US$1 that is L$16,600 or US$66.40. Net cost is $5.60. With a jump up to US$99 the net cost goes to US$32.60. That seems like a huge rise until one considers the cost of some other games.

Star Citizen with ships costing US$400 to $2,500 and EVE Online at US$15/month are particularly expensive. Other monthly games are often US$10 per month or US$120 per year. Continue reading →