Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
Canary Beck has an interesting poll up: How much do you mix your real life with your Second Life? It originate from Hamlet’s site: Short Survey on Second Life vs. Real Life Identity. You can answer the poll at either site. It is the same poll regardless of where you access it from. The results should … Read more
Ciaran Laval has an article I saw this morning: The Project Sansar Media Train Is Still Going Full Steam Ahead. In it he talks about two articles about Project Sansar with some mention of Second Life™.
There is not much of anything new to learn, but a couple of points. Ciaran does a good job analyzing what the two articles may mean for Sansar and Second Life.
There is more and more news coming out about Windows 10 Security… what they actually should be saying is; Windows 10 the No Privacy Edition. No doubt there are some problems. But, it isn’t as bad as many make it sound.
To get some information on privacy settings see: What Windows 10’s “Privacy Nightmare” Settings Actually Do. You’ll learn your phone, tablet, notebook, and Windows 8 are pretty much all doing the same things that Win 10 does. So, it is mostly nothing new.
For gamers there is another Win 10 consideration for anyone with a NVIDIA card older than the 600 series. Eliz926 (7/30) in the Adobe forum points out:
Previously NVIDIA said that its Fermi (400 and 500 series), Kepler (600 and 700 series) and the new Maxwell (750 and 900 series) GPUs would all support DirectX 12. However, an updated support document confirms that the older Fermi series (<600) are still using the WDDM 1.3 drivers, rather than the new WDDM 2.0 drivers needed to support DirectX 12. The article said that support will be offered “at a later date” for Fermi GPUs.
We can assume everything before the 400 series is NEVER going to support DirectX 12. (Reference)
If you are running Windows 7 or 8 you are likely getting popups telling you can upgrade to Windows 10. It was released this month, August. Personally I’m waiting to update my office machine. I am assuming my Adobe products that just updated to CC 15.1 will work well with Win 10. But, just in case…
I’ll be changing my Win 8.1 laptop this week. I’ll play with Win 10 on it and see how that goes. I don’t use the laptop often and should probably sell it. But, it can serve as a guinea pig for Win 10.
For years I have heard how Second Life is losing subscribers. It is true, but the new users and returning users keep the number of people in SL about the same. SL has gone from 1 million plus to about 900,000 from 2007 to 2015.
Let’s try to put some perspective on that. Take a look at World of Warcraft’s numbers. In Q4-2014 there were 10 million subscribers. By the end of Q1-2015 it was down to 7.1 and now at the end of Q2-2015 it is 5.6. That is almost half the users in 6 months. (Reference – nice graph) In December 2005, 15 months after starting WoW, they passed 5.6 million. In October 2010 they were at 12.0 million, the peak I think.
August 1st Henri updated the Cool Vl Viewer. It now handles: Provides full Experiences and Experience Tools support ! Provides Avatar Hover Height support ! Provides Marketplace Listings support ! Provides global clothing layers limit (60 in total instead of 5 for each of the 12 types) support ! Provides CEF3 media plugin support ! (this is still work in … Read more