General News

Second Life News Bits 2014-43

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This past weekend was a party weekend for me. I’m still moving a bit slow today.

Viewer

Oz Linden says that when the Benchmark RC Viewer, the one that stops using a GPU Table to select viewer settings, everyone will get a viewer-settings reset to what the viewer now thinks your default settings should be.

Open Source 2014-43
Open Source 2014-43

I don’t know if that means ALL settings or just graphics settings. I suggest you backup your settings now.

The HTTP RC Viewer when used in Blue Steel regions is simply awesome. Download: HTTP Viewer version 3.7.18.295372. A list of Blue Steels regions is here: List of Blue Steel regions in Second Life.

I’ve gotten to use the HTTP RC Viewer for a couple of hours exploring Blue Steel regions. It is a nice change. I quickly got used to the fast render. When I left the Blue Steel regions it was like going from walking downhill to trying to walk in a swimming pool. Ooouf!

See Bittersweet Frostbite’s post about the performance: New Second Life “Berlin” HTTP Viewer: Fast, faster, much faster. 

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Bits of Second Life 2014-42

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I have lots of interesting bits this time. RL has been keeping me busy and I have SL projects I am trying to complete. So, I’ve been collecting these for a few days. There are several thing here that will affect most Second Life™ users.

Second Life 2014
Second Life 2014

Web Design Second Life

The Lindens have a new job opening posted. Web Design Engineer Wanted.

Second Life HTTP & CDN

I’ve been writing about the subjects for weeks. The Lindens have now made an ‘official’ post in the SL Blog. See: The Sky Over Berlin (and Elsewhere).

I have no idea why they chose the title they did. But, the post has a nice graph that shows the speed up the changes are making.

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Drama: Community Portals for Second Life 2

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Hamlet pointed to my article: Ebbe Altberg Interview in his article SL 2 to Launch Without Shared First-Time User Experience. He took an idea in my writing much farther than I did. His quote from my article:

For SL2 they are developing toward user created experiences and will thus bypass a uniform path for all new users. So, the concept of a single entry door for SL will vanish. The Lab will provide retention data to experience owners. They will let designers compare their experience retention to other experiences, designs, methods, and retention rates. With solid objective data flowing back to the designers, it may be possible to find the magic combination.

It seems he and others took this to mean there would only be entry to SL2 via community portals. I never it took what Ebbe said to mean that. But, obviously others inferred that was what I implied. 

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Second Life Photography

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One of the features added to Second Life some time ago is projectors, lights that shine on things. Bryn Oh used a headlamp thing for use by those visiting his latest exhibit, which is a projector. But, we see little use of projectors as lights in SL. Or maybe we just don’t notice them.

There is the problem of many people probably not having Sun/Moon + Projectors enabled in their graphics preferences for performance reasons. That is a problem for those building places. They want the majority of visitors to see their creation as built. So, they often skip using Projectors for lighting. But, for photography performance is generally not a primary issue and what the camera sees is up to the photographer. Everyone will see the photograph as captured as in general everyone’s computer settings are similar. So, there is no reason not to use Sun/Moon + Projectors. We just want to light our scene to create the image we want.

In RL photography lighting is a big part of it. For portrait photography it is somewhere between a science and an art. Lighting is used in capturing most all commercial images too.

The first I’ve heard of people using lights in SL photography is in the article Bloody Gorgeous in the PrimDolls blog. Notice the link there to Deoridhe’s Flickr images: Bloody Gorgeous.