Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Another third party Viewer meeting and some more interesting news.
The Lindens have promoted the Maintenance RC viewer to the main release. That makes the main viewer 3.6.7-281793. You can see the release notes here.
This release has improvements for avatar render speed and other fixes and improvements. Most notable are:
Ouch! I just saw where Gaia Clary, mover and shaker of Machinimatrix.org, has just posted how Avastar® is being changed to be an OpenSim focused tool rather than a Second Life™ focused tool. I think that strongly suggests how Gaia sees things going in the future.
Toysoldier has a blog post up on the ToS meeting I mentioned on Sunday. He has made a transcript of the meeting available as a PDF. See: Transcripts from Sep-29 SL Inworld Meeting on L.L. TOS Issue.
Ernie Farstrider, a RL retired academic administrator for all of a large university’s intellectual property, sponsored the meeting. Ernie states that he believes “moral rights” are unalienable. He provided links to Harvard’s pages on moral rights. Kylie Angel Skyborne facilitated/moderated the meeting.
It seems Toysoldier Thor has been pushing this issue in the creative community. He was asked to speak at the beginning of the meeting: (I’ve made spelling and grammar corrections [ ] as this was taken from a transcript of live chat. This is not a full transcript, but highlighting of the things I found of interest.)
There is an interesting post on SLUinverse about Avatar 2.0 by Darien Caldwell. See: A Modest Proposal: Moving toward Avatar 2.0.
Darien’s idea of making a new avatar compatible with the current avatar’s UVMaps is a deal breaker for me. That just drags those problems along. Fixing the UVMaps and attempting to use older clothing made for the previous UVMap is going to be a problem causing even more distortion.
Darien does key in on the layering problem. We can layer system clothes. We cannot layer textures on objects, like mesh avatar bodies. Adding that capability would likely be a complex change to the system. Whether it is or not, it would allow the use of even more textures. With the texture load increase coming from Materials use, that could be a serious lag producer.
Inara Pey has an article up about a meeting this Sunday to discuss the change in the Second Life/Linden Lab Terms of Service. That meeting is today, Sunday, at noon SL Time (PDT). See: ToS Changes: in-world meeting.
The meeting will be at: East, West, North Galleries Ampi-Theatre. Region: Georgiana 159/189/1800. This is a main land region from the looks of it.
I couldn’t figure out who is sponsoring the meeting. So, I went there to see what the deal is. On TP’ing in you get this note card:
This is the news from the Third Party Viewer Developers Meeting. There is always lots of interesting new information that comes out in these meetings. The first thing Oz Linden went over were the RC Viewers currently out.
Merov Linden talked about SL Share. Oz Linden translated for him as Merov’s voice was distorted beyond understanding.
I gathered that the SL Share feature is mostly implemented server side. The Facebook login tokens are not kept in the viewer. So, third party developers would not see the Facebook information… But… one does type an ID and password for the account into the viewer to set up the connection. So, is that safe?
I’ll have to look and see how this is actually working. For now I think it may be similar to how SL Search works, where a web page is opened as a panel in the viewer. While you are appearing to type in the viewer, you are typing into a web page. I suspect SL Share is something similar with the account connection setup.
Once the connection is established, future posts from the viewer are passed to the SL server, which has the tokens, for it to pass the post along to Facebook. So, the viewer would never actually be connecting to Facebook.