This week an Alchemy Viewer 3.8.5 update was released. The developers are busy will real life money making. So, updates are coming slowly. It has been almost 3 months since the last update. This update brings Alchemy to a level with the Linden 3.8.5 version. The current Linden version is 3.8.6.
Alchemy 3.8.5 – Oct 2015
This means Alchemy has the 90+ fixes the Lab added with the promotion of the Maintenance RC Viewer. Plus Alchemy fixes. But, it will still lack the new Notifications Handling released in Linden version 3.8.6.
The Center did a study to see how effective the class was. They assigned half the study participants to a class in SL and the other half to a class at the hospital. Quoting the Globe:
The trial was a hit. Mitchell said the Second Life participants didn’t just sit in on the course sessions. They made friends, swapped recipes, had dance sessions, hung out. Most tellingly, participants wanted to know if they could involve their families in the game too.
The results were both groups progressed at the same rates and improved in equal amounts. But, it was the SL group that evidenced more engagement and learning persistence.
As I have pointed out more people are talking about Jelly Babies and the coming RC Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.6.305942 movement toward being the main viewer. Of course some know what they are talking about and others don’t.
erratic / ava sweater & meg leggings High or low ACI?
I think – Jelly babies will take over SL soon (AKA how linden lab is planning to break second life) – falls in the ‘doesn’t’ category. utilizator404, the author, believes the Lab is breaking SL by introducing the Avatar Complexity Information (ACI) feature. I disagree, but I can see how some may consider the appearance of Jelly Babies as a problem. The opinion that Jelly Babies breaks SL is as valid an opinion as any. I just don’t agree with it. So, I’ll rebut it.
In the article an assumption is expressed that the Lab is not fixing the root causes of lag; failure to optimize the viewer, not changing how the viewer uses video memory, failure to use all the features of new video cards, and no use of Direct3D (a Windows only graphics render engine).
Most of 2014 and 2015 has been spent optimizing features of the viewer and SL servers. If you follow Inara’s or my blog you already know that. If you have only read the release notes of the Linden and third party viewers as they are released, you know that numerous fixes for how the viewer use memory have been made. From the Third Party Dev’s meeting we know more are in progress.
Most of the news coverage of Second Life™ is about SL. But, the blog Business 2 Community has an article about how one can use SL to promote a web site. Different.
The author Lori Soard promotes SL as having 20 million users… that should tell you something about this author’s knowledge of SL… or lack of… At best we probably have about a million or two unique active users in a year.
Cirque de Seraphim
Lori presents a couple of case studies; Novelist Karen Kay and the idea of Health Promotion.
The odd thing is the novelist used her RL connection with readers to promote a class in SL. Seems this isn’t using SL for promotion, just the opposite. Then Lori says, “…This is a fun way to attract new customers, or in her case readers, you might not otherwise attract.” Have you ever tried to attract people in SL to an event? What results did you get?
