Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
From Second Life’s Third Party Developer’s meeting we learned the Lindens have been thinking about the issues people have filed in regard to how System Damage is working …or not working. They now have a list of Simulator and Viewer changes to support the planned behavior changes:
Oz Linden said little about what is going on with viewers at the July 31 Second Life™ Third Party Developer’s (TPD) meeting. What we do know is:
RC Second Life VMM Viewer version 3.8.2.303891 – A new version came out in week 31. They had little in the way of stats at the time of the meeting. But, so far it was looking good. This will likely be the next viewer promoted, if things continue well… basically baring any catastrophic problems. They seriously want to release it. So much so they did not release a viewer last week when one would normally release. That was done to avoid releasing two versions close together.
At the Second Life™ Third Party Developer’s (TPD) meeting (7/31) Brooke Linden spoke. So, we know as of Friday, all merchants have been migrated to VMM. Only minor problems were encountered. They are working on fixing those. Brooke and Skylar are working with a few merchants that have run into issues from the migration.
The plan moving forward is to shut down MagicBoxes August 17th. On that date MagicBoxes will STOP working. The XStreet market, the current marketplace, will come down on August 27th and they will run solely on VMM.
This is a Torley video that tells about the New VMM. This is a nice explanation of how VMM works.
This video leads into three other tutorial Videos. Check them out.
Remember Merchant Resource? Well, the second in that series of tutorials is out.
This Tuesday the package running on the RC channels moved to the main channel. That package was said to be Simulator fixes… whatever they were.
As of late Tuesday (5+PM PT) there was no information about what would or if any would roll to the RC channels Wednesday.
Presumably the Lindens are still working on the Experience Tools database…
Inara made it to last Monday’s open source user group meeting where Oz Linden apparently talked about the Second Life Render Muting feature and where it is in the development pipeline. You may remember that a bug was causing the Jelly Babies to be invisible. That is fixed.
Now the feature is waiting on UI changes. Once those are complete we will get an RC viewer version with the feature. Inara is guessing sometime in week 32, which I think is a good guess. I am looking forward to this feature. I think it will have a significant impact on performance in the long run.
Inara quotes Oz talking about the notices that will appear when our Draw Weight changes and when those around us are not rendering our avatar. We will be able to control how long those messages stay on screen. We already have a Debug Setting to tell the viewer when to render high draw weight avatars as Jelly Babies. Presumably we will have that control out where we can adjust it easily too.