General News

Second Life Content & Mesh 2013-38

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I haven’t been hearing much exciting or interesting news in the C&M user group. So, I haven’t been writing about it. But, there are couple of interesting things that came up this week. I consider Avatar 2.0 and the Mesh Deformer joined at the hip and there was some discussion about Avatar2.0.

Pants Flare

The Pants Flare thing came up in the Content and Mesh meeting with Nyx Linden. This is the best meeting for getting content creation and mesh questions answered. Nyx is not a modeler, so asking “how to” questions is pointless. But, ‘why doesn’t this work’ questions Nyx can usually answer or dig into to figure out if the SL system is broken.

Seems some people have issues with how pants flare works. Who would have guessed?

Whirly Fizzle offered it up for discussion saying, “If we have no topics, we can discuss how broken pants flare is.” 

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Second Life Integrating with Facebook?

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Daniel Voyager came up with information about Second Life™ adding more integration with Facebook. Daniel has apparently found some of the leaks I use to learn about what is coming to SL. From what he has found the Facebook Floater is apparently due out in viewer 3.6.6 next week. I’m not so sure it will be next week or in 3.6.6.

Second Life's Facebook Page
Second Life’s Facebook Page

I just don’t think it will happen that fast, but it might. Viewer 3.6.6 is already in the viewer pipeline and you can download a copy from the Beta/Alternate Viewers page*. I’ve been using the Ribbon Viewer 3.6.6 (280938). As best I can tell this feature is not in it. 

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Second Life News 2013-36 #2

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From my perspective things are quite on the development side of Second Life™.  I suppose the Lindens could just be busy cleaning up CHUI, SSA, and working on HTTP. We also know they are working on the Advanced Experience Tools, which is probably requiring the rewriting of much of the permissions handling code for the SL system. But, every now and then we get a hint some neat new things are coming. Beyond ‘neat’ we know little if anything.

Beta Server Meeting 2013-33
Beta Server Meeting 2013-33

Andrew Linden said Tuesday that he had been fixing a griefing exploit. This is the one where large prims could knock avatars out of a region. Once upon a time that had been fixed. But, at some point the fix had been broken. That has now been fixed and the code is running in the RC channels.

While we no longer have any user group or Linden person associated with the SL Web Sites, we have heard that Monty Linden is doing some ‘web site maintenance’, which I suspect is adding some of the newer HTTP protocol code to the sites. But, we don’t really know. I guess that adding the newer HTTP communication stuff to the Direct Delivery process would be an improvement. 

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Nomine Closing

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When I first came to Second Life™ it was not long until I decided I had to have a better skin. I spent months searching for one I liked that fit the look I wanted. I selected a Nomine skin. I still wear that skin.

I saw a post on SLUniverse today that Munchflower Zaius has health and cash flow issues and will be closing/selling the region housing the Nomine store.  Munchflower’s market place store should remain open to the end of the year.

Some customers that are on the Nomine subscriber are getting notices of the closing. Caete posted a copy of the notice she received in the SLUniverse forum.

Nomine Closing

🙁 I wish Munchflower the all the best and as easy a health battle as possible.

 

Rod Humble Interview – July

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In July AllThingsD.com published an interview with Rod Humble that I missed. You can read it here: Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble on Second Life’s Tween Years (Q&A).

There are some interesting points in the interview. One is about mobile. The Lab apparently has a working viewer for mobile phones and tables, sort of… It seems building a user interface is pretty hard and likely the reason they have not been released.

Rod also says they are watching Valve to see if they build a console box and Android for their box. The existing consoles don’t seem to interest him.

There is also a hint of where Rod is at in promoting Second Life™. In talking about companies directing the content of their games Rod was pointing out the Lab intentionally avoids that. The interviewer was contrasting Twitter’s directive help and pointing out how they advise media outlets to Tweet, I read that as directing content style. Rod replied the Lab is interested in that, which I take to mean content direction advising and direction choosing. But, if he were to let the company do that he feels they should be very good at it. I gather he has not gone that direction because of his saying this, 2013, is the first year he has felt Second Life performance is ‘good’. He says the Lab may look at reaching out more next year, 2014.

It would make sense to not go 100% on a promotional program to bring people into SL if it was not performing well. One only promotes things when they are proud of them. So, we may see the promotion of SL change in 2014.

It is a short interview. But, there are some interesting insights.