As previously pointed out, this Friday (9/11 – week 37) was the Third Party Developer’s meeting. There is enough news from that one meeting to fill several posts. So, I broke them up. This is the second one coming from that meeting.
Embracing Autumn
Inventory Changes
Aura Linden has been making Second Life™ inventory much more robust. Over the past year as parts of the SL system have been upgraded other parts have revealed their weaknesses. Months ago the inventory system was updated, AISv3. The upgrade added new code to the servers and viewers.
This Friday (9/11) there was a Third Party Developer’s meeting. This is where most of the early news comes from. These days this meeting is pretty much The Source for any word about anything new or in progress.
~Humana~
Viewers
The main viewer is currently (9/12) Release/3.8.3.304115. This release is based on a maintenance package of fixes. Release Notes
Streaming Second Life™ to YouTube Gaming (YTG) is easy. This is a tutorial based on my first successful try. It is not complete or as detailed as it could be and I’ll probably come back to it and add more or write another tutorial. Now lets get into the basic what we need to do.
The only geekie part is you may need to know your upload speed. You can find your actual speed by using SpeedTest.net. Mine averages 6.6mbps. A safe value for me to use is 80% of 6.6 = 5.3mbps. But, I never HAD to know that to make my first stream.
Go to YouTube Gaming (YTG) and create a channel. (You can search on Second Life to see what channels are already there. To do that, click the GO LIVE link (button?) in the upper right of the page. It is an odd button, which is really a drop down. The first time you click it opens and gives you two choices, GO LIVE and UPLOAD Video. Click GO LIVE again.
YouTube Gaming – Upper Right of Home Screen
From there walk your way through the instructions. You’ll enter your name and possibly a phone number, if your new to YouTube (YT). Whatever name you enter for the account will be displayed on the channel.
At the bottom of the page is a section labeled Encoder Setup. You need to copy the Channel URL and Key shown here and save it. You’ll possibly need that information later, depending on the encoder you pick.
Kohua has a new viewer out (3.8.4-37026). This one has an updated RLV. They can’t really test it because no one at Kokua is a RLV user. So, if your into the RLV feature use, help ‘em out.
Inara has a good summary of what has happened and what is going on with Bright Canopy, the SL Go replacement. The TL:DR is simple. User behavior was not what the Bright Canopy peeps expected. The change from expected behavior drove up backend costs of the service. They were losing money and things had to change. Thus the service shut down.
Basically, no one other than Amazon is making money from this project. If they cannot figure out how to turn that around, expect the doors to close.
There is a future in being able to stream high end games. With VR coming there will likely be more demand for the service. The challenges and/or symbiosis come from Intel, who is working to add more graphics power to their CPU, Apple and others wanting to challenge the NetFlix style streaming services and add gaming, those battling to take over cable and satellite delivery services, and others that want to add gaming as a facet of their entertainment services.
My point is there is industry interest in what Bright Canopy is doing. There may eventually be some way to deliver a SL/Sansar experience to lesser powered hardware. But, as fast as hardware is developing/advancing the need deceases each year. That makes it hard to predict whether Bright Canopy will find an economic model that fits enough people’s needs for their service to remain viable. It is life and death for them, so the motivation is there. At some point the hardware and tech they need will be cheap enough, it is just a matter of timing.
No roll to the main channel this week. I didn’t expect any rolls as it is a short week with Monday being an American holiday.
the very bored
The RC channels did get a new package. Surprising. This is another boring Internal Simulator Fixes package.
Calab Linden seems to have permanently taken over making the Deploy announcements. He is making the forum and wiki posts. They seem to be turning into boiler plate announcements. He might as well abbreviate the reporting in the forum to Yes or No.
We can assume Internal means there is no user apparent change to the server. The change will have something to do with issues that affect operation in ways only important to Lindens. So, may be a variable name changes to better describe its function, a change makes package roll out more efficient, communication between a backend service improved… all things that say little to the user. But, these are still of interest to the geek crowd.
The lack of new features or improved existing features suggests most of the work is happening on larger projects or the viewer. We know there were changes to the inventory processes and Experience Tools going on. We haven’t heard that they have ended. Also, a VIVOX update was expected. We just aren’t getting information about those things.
