Second Life

Things about SL

Firestorm Team Thank You

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Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.

Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.

Firestorm Support Jacket - Link farther down the page
Firestorm Support Jacket – Link farther down the page

You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.

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MayaStar Update Week 06

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Cathy Foil sent me a note explaining the Project Bento updates to MayaStar. I copied, modified, and paraphrased what she sent.

Brunella
Brunella

The MayaStar 4.5, I’ll call it BETA version, addition runs on PC and Mac. It works with Maya 8.0 through 2016. While most of MayaStar works with Maya LT, but Maya LT is lacking some abilities and that limits what can be done with MayaStar. Cathy asks you contact her for more information if you are working with Maya LT. 

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How to: AvaStar Following & Vimeo

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Gaia Clary has been putting more of the Machinimatrix/AvaStar videos on Vimeo™. There are good reasons for doing that. Vimeo offers better monetization and distribution control. Unfortunately Vimeo has to compete with YouTube.

Vimeo Following
Vimeo Following

As best I can tell, not that many of the Second Life™ community use Vimeo. If I search on ‘secondlife’ at Vimeo, I find 6,373 videos. Doing the same at YouTube I get 572,000 hits or about 90 times more videos.* 

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Second Life Servers Week 6

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There are no rollouts this week to either the main or RC channels. As there are no RC updates this week there will be no update to the main channel next week (7). There is no information I am aware of about new packages for the RC channels for next week.

This must be Heaven...
This must be Heaven…

You may remember that last week’s server updates were about fixing problems that appear when server run for more than a week. I was speculating that this week they would be testing those fixes. They have already had QA and testing on the RC channels that make up about 20% of the main grid. Now they are getting a test as the ‘production’ software.

By this time next week we will know how well they did.

Comments in various places have me thinking the majority of the Lab’s effort on Second Life is now on the Project Bento. But, I suspect some changes will be needed on the server side. After all, the project only runs on certain servers in the ADITI (preview) grid. So, it could be that all server changes and fixes are being built for the Bento capable packages. As they need a break in the rollouts to test long term server stability, it may be saving them some work. Rather than build changes for the pre-Bento servers just build the fixes for Bento capable packages.

Some time ago the Lindens added the ability to enable and disable new features in the servers. So, our next server rollouts could be Bento capable, but with the feature disabled… or not. We’ll have to wait and see.