General News – Page 88 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

The Singh Interview

2013/08/08 by Nalates Urriah

Ciaran Laval did an interview with Strawberry Singh. It is a three part article, at least as of today there are three parts. If Ciaran survived the taking of the ring… I suppose there could be more.

I wanted to mention this interview because I think it is about the most creatively written interview I’ve seen. Nice work.

An Interview With Strawberry Singh Part 1 – The Fellowship Of The Singh

An Interview With Strawberry Singh Part 2 – The Too Few Hours

An Interview With Strawberry Singh Part 3 – The Return Of The Singh

Linden’s Second Life Affiliates

2013/08/08 by Nalates Urriah

Ciaran Laval has an article up about Linden Lab’s affiliate program. So what is that and how does one find out more? Ciaran tells in his article: Linden Lab Launch New Second Life Affiliate Program [sic]. I get the impression Ciaran thinks this is a new program. It sort of is and isn’t.

The official Linden page that explains the program is here: Second Life Affiliate Program.

They describe the program as: “The Second Life Affiliate Program is an easy and simple way to be rewarded by associating your Web site with ours. When you place a Second Life banner with a link on your Web site, you have the opportunity to make money. When a visitor clicks a Second Life link on your Web site and registers as a new Second Life Resident, you earn a flat commission for each new valid registration that you refer to Second Life made within 45 days of click through.”

State of Game Engines

2013/08/03 by Nalates Urriah

I think any one that has been around Second Life™ for any time and taken a look at the engine driving SL realizes the current batch of game engines in the gaming world far exceed the capabilities of Second Life. To get an idea of where the art of games engine design is take a look at Game Thirst’s Count Down of the top 5 game engines.

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If you are not that into the tech of game engines you may be wondering if Second Life will ever catch up. Well, probably not, which begets the question: why not?

Second Life News 2013-31

2013/07/302013/07/29 by Nalates Urriah

I got most of the interesting news out Sunday. Today we have confirmation of which server updates they plan to roll out this week.

Main Channel

The main channel will get the maintenance pack with some bug fixes and the faster materials processing that ran in Blue Steel last week (30). So, objects failing to detect collisions after teleporting, run time permissions messing up in attachments, and pathfinding characters wondering out of their parcels should all be fixed. The Materials system will now be able to request 4 textures per second in place of the 1/sec previously.

Blue Steel

This channel gets a new maintenance package. llListen (BUG-3291) and llApplyImpulse (BUG-3307) have fixes. Plus there is another… or some more crash fixes… which I read to mean more exploits cured.

Second Life News 2013-30 #2

2013/07/28 by Nalates Urriah

Some of the most interesting news comes from the Third Party Developers meetings. This is not a meeting that is well publicized. I suspect many think that having just the well informed attend is more productive. I tend to agree.

This article is 2,600+ words. It has some work-around methods for some current problems that people are experiencing. It covers some of the most informative news about SL that is available.

Server Side Appearance

SSA is going extraordinary well. The stats coming in are as expected, which means the backend is performing as expected. This means the Lab’s estimates for the amount of hardware needed are going to be correct.

View adoption is going pretty well. About 75% of users have adopted an SSA capable viewer. (84% of Firestorm users – see chart) Looking at that the other way, something like a quarter million people login each day with an old viewer. Also, the numbers vary quite a bit from day to day.

Second Life’s Annoyances

2013/08/022013/07/26 by Nalates Urriah

I generally think Linden Lab is doing a good job with Second Life. I see the quality of the simulation improve and degrade over time. But, there is a definite trend of improvement. Sort of a two steps forward one back.

Hair Fair 2013 - Waiting to Rez — Hair Fair 2013 – Waiting to Rez

At the moment performance seems to have degraded, at least in regard to texture download and rendering. I saw this problem with the Linden SL Viewer 3.6.1 (278007) Jun 27 2013 12:41:07 when I visited Hair Fair 2013 (HF). And I do keep HTTP Get and Inventory enabled. I’ve given up on the older UDP protocol. It has little future in SL. HF regions were running the main server release version 13#13.07.08.278357 not an RC .