There are a lot of interesting places in Second Life™. Dolls and Demons, love the pictures, has an article up about a Gotcha Event: Hanging With The Bad Boys. Checking out the regions mentioned I came across Wayward Peaks. It is an awesome Gotcha event. There are Gotcha vendors are all over the region. So, you’ll be exploring.
Go to AllesIst Klaar’s photostream – Image by AllesIst – Outfit @ her blog
The region is full of mesh. Much of it has poor LoD modeling. If you have set your RenderVolumeLODFactor set to 4, a bad move, you won’t notice. Using 1.125 I noticed. At 1.125 you have to be close to things for them to look right. But, in general the place is interesting.
The Center did a study to see how effective the class was. They assigned half the study participants to a class in SL and the other half to a class at the hospital. Quoting the Globe:
The trial was a hit. Mitchell said the Second Life participants didn’t just sit in on the course sessions. They made friends, swapped recipes, had dance sessions, hung out. Most tellingly, participants wanted to know if they could involve their families in the game too.
The results were both groups progressed at the same rates and improved in equal amounts. But, it was the SL group that evidenced more engagement and learning persistence.
Most of the news coverage of Second Life™ is about SL. But, the blog Business 2 Community has an article about how one can use SL to promote a web site. Different.
The author Lori Soard promotes SL as having 20 million users… that should tell you something about this author’s knowledge of SL… or lack of… At best we probably have about a million or two unique active users in a year.
Cirque de Seraphim
Lori presents a couple of case studies; Novelist Karen Kay and the idea of Health Promotion.
The odd thing is the novelist used her RL connection with readers to promote a class in SL. Seems this isn’t using SL for promotion, just the opposite. Then Lori says, “…This is a fun way to attract new customers, or in her case readers, you might not otherwise attract.” Have you ever tried to attract people in SL to an event? What results did you get?
We have been here before. A feature like the old Avatar Render Cost (ARC) was used by what became known as ARC Nazis to abuse people. You see a type of person that has basic authority issues, control issues, or a bullying nature adopt a fascist mentality and start telling people what they can do. Some in those groups start trying to enforce their will on others. Abuse, shame, hate, anger… and more is called into service in attempts to enforce their will on others.
Geisha Shadows – Think this gorgeous outfit has a high ACI? If it does, is that good or bad?
We could call this politics… In SL it is more often called drama. But, whichever we call it, it has the same source: human nature. Humans are different, unique. But, we all have the same basic traits, just in different degrees and we learn to cope with issues in different ways. We call the result character.
Yeah, this is an old argument. I’m not going to answer the question. I have my opinion. But, I did see the question come up again in the SL Forum (reference). I thought one of the better answers was quite creative and insightful and funny.
Yesterday Linden Lab posted in their blog about new improvements coming to Second Life. If you follow my blog, Ciarans’s or Inara’s, you already know most of what they wrote about.
Snapshot_029
Project Valhalla is the project viewer where they are changing from Webkit to Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). I’ve been writing about this change since 4/2014 (Reference – speculation). They Lab started talking publicly about the coming viewer change in early 2015.
Rendering Complexity / Quick Graphics – I’ve been writing about doing something like The Avatar Render Complexity feature since late 2014. I filed a feature request in December 2014 (BUG-7928). I doubt mine is the reason we got the feature. I suspect the reason for getting the feature was mostly discussion in Oz Linden’s Monday morning Open Source meeting. Whatever the case, it is close to being added to the main SL viewer.
Notifications – This viewer feature is a change in how we will receive notifications. This feature came on the radar in July 2015.
Mesh Importer – This improvement has been in discussion for a couple of months and made it to the main viewer a couple of months ago.
Inventory Robustness – It is hard to say when work on this change started. The Lab has worked on and been adding inventory improvements for a long time. This particular problem of losing no-copy-items that failed to rez is more recent.
If you follow the Server Deploys notices in the SL Forum, you probably had not have realized this feature rolled out.
HTTP Project – this is actually a much larger project than they convey in their post. It has been on going for a couple of years and appears will be continuing for some time. Parts get added as they are completed.
SecondLife.com – The SL Web Site is changing. They are removing Flash and if any QuickTime was used then likely that too. They are moving up to HTML5. CEF is how HTML5 handling is added to the viewer. These changes sort of go together. Parts of the web site are used by the SL Viewer, i.e., search, profiles, etc.
Since the viewer will real soon now be able to handle HTML5 via CEF it makes since for the web site to abandon Flash.
Not So New
Between Inara, Ciaran, and myself there are a few thousand SL Users that keep up on SL Development news. That is out of several hundred thousand monthly users. The SL Blog doesn’t show how many people have read a post. The forum does. It is rare any post in the forum gets a thousand readers. But, as the blog articles are in the splash screen of the SL Viewer, more people may read the blog.
So, while the news may be old to you, for most SL users their post is news.
