Second Life and Virtual Worlds
I went through today and updated my blog roll. I removed sites that have not posted anything in the last 12 months or so.
I added two or three replacement links. I also added several from the Firestorm Gateway Project. For information on the project see: NEW: Share your love of Second Life with new tools.
Second Life™ made it in the news this week. PSFK ran an article titled: A Look Into a More Social Virtual Reality With the Makers of Second Life. This is an interview with Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO, and Senior Director of Global Communications Peter Gray. While referencing Second Life most of the information is about Project Sansar.
Both Ebbe and Peter think the social interaction in VR will be huge. While that is debatable, they have a lot of company.
Second Life™ made it in the news this week, again. This time at WIRED in an article titled: 5 Companies You Thought Were Doomed But Are Actually Fine (For Now). The title explains most of the story. The companies are; Dropbox, Pandora, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Second Life.
There is nothing in the story we don’t already know. Nor do I think it will inspire anyone to come check out Second Life. But, its press… and positive…
The UKanDo viewer version 4.0 has released. When going to download it I noticed their note that Flash won’t work with this viewer, unless you take some special steps. This is because v4.0 viewers have changed from older web tech, Webkit, to the newer Chromium Embedded Framework.
There is a lot of stuff on the grid that uses flash. So, if you need to display Flash in the viewer go to this Linden article: How to use Adobe Flash in Second Life Viewer 4.0 and later.
As I scan through the posts in the Second Life™ blogosphere I find more and more articles are about places. The blogosphere is becoming a tour guide. It seems Second Life is fashion and tourism. Fashion makes money, tourism doesn’t.
Whatever the case, Inara has an article on Ghost Town. But, her story is not about tourism. Ghost Town is a training area in the Firestorm Team’s regions designed as a game by MadPea. The area opens today (12/19) at 14:00 SLT or 2 PM SLT/PST. They will have entertainment from various people/groups. They are expecting the 4 regions to handle about 200 people.
This is the second of may be twelve articles on what was happening this past year, 2015.
The RC server channels got an update to fix a teleport problem SL Go users were having.
Viewer-wise we were being told it would be some time before we saw Webkit abandoned and a move to Chromium Embedded Framework. Well, it is December, almost a year later, and we are seeing the change in RC Second Life Valhalla Viewer version 4.0.0.308641. So, it was some time…
The first week of Feb the main viewer was version 3.7.25-299021. The RC viewers were:
In February we were noticing a slowing of updates, server and viewer, but improved communication between the Lab and users. We were also noticing slower rendering and more items not rendering.
In mid Feb we saw an RC of Login Viewer version 3.7.25.298971 release. The Lab was A-B testing login screens.
The new versions of the viewers compiled with VS2013 will be driving Windows XP users to other viewers. The Discussion on dropping support for XP had yet to heat up.
More work on and testing of Group Chat was in progress. HUD’s were detaching after teleport. Oz Linden spoke about how bad an idea cache clearing is. See: YouTube Oz on Cache Clearing @ 1:01:20.
Render Muting was in QA. We know it now as Avatar Complexity Information, which as of December was still in the RC viewer stage.
Week 6 saw the conclusion of the 2015 planning meeting. We heard nothing about what was decided. However, excitement within the Lab was said to be high. We already saw the Lab’s post on recent improvements to Second Life; Hover Height, Notifications, Mesh Import, VMM, Graphics Settings Presets, and developer tools.
Gaia Clary was asking for feedback on AvaStar.
The No Link> error started showing up.
Astrid Kaufmat was writing about Fitted Mesh not fitting and the need for a new avatar. At the time I thought there was little chance of a new avatar. But, Project Bento (Dec 2015) has proven me wrong.
A Freeze Frame bug started causing problems. Freeze Frame is a feature in the Snapshot panel. Closing the panel with Freeze enabled froze your world. The only escape was a relog.
This was the month OSGrid came back online after L O N G time offline. Later in the month more assets were recovered.
Net Neutrality and Chinese hacking was all up in the news. See: Net Neutrality Explained
Road to VR was on about social VR. Lots of people in the SL community, including me, were blogging about VR.
A handy work-around for tweaking a region’s Windlight settings was revealed by Honour McMillan. See: Changing Windlight & HDR. Designing Worlds did a series on photography with Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan and Wildstar Beaumont. See: Second Life Photography Tips.
MayaStar was released. The Maya side of Blender’s AvaStar tool.
Shug Maitland was blogging her wondering whether SL1 could compete with SL2 (Sansar). Later in the month Oz Linden was speaking on the same point. See: Second Life Continuing … for real…
Blender released a set of free 3D brushes. See: Blender 3D Brushes – Free.
Avatar render cost continued to be a big topic in the SL Blogosphere. Avatar Render Cost 2015-07
This month we started to hear more about Windows 10.
The gamer’s blog MASSIVELY closed. The employees behind it came back with Massively Overpowered a few weeks later.