Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
For years we have in Second Life™ have complained about how poorly Linden Lab communicates with users/customers. Over the last couple of years that has improved. But, there are still areas in which the Lab seriously fails.
Daniel Voyager Plurked about Grendel’s Children Saved From Shutdown. This a somewhat common occurrence. I’ve long thought anything one wants to do with Lab will require far more time than one will imagine. This is another story adding support to my thinking.
For some time a few of the Second Life™ related blogs have been on about Second Life’s reputation and whether it s a bad or good girl rep and if bad, what has to be done about it. But, Canary Beck posits Second Life has little if any reputation outside the user community. Canary and I both recently looked at the search engines to see what they might show people searching for Second Life and I virtual worlds. The results are pretty much sexless. But, today Hamlet is still on about how bad the reputation is because of a post on Reddit… really!?!
Admittedly Reddit gets a lot of use. But, what is a lot of use? How do we compare that to other services and social sites? First, there is a Redditmetrics.com that tells us something about which sub-reddits have the most subscribers. There is a way to see how many of those subscribers are actually reading a Reddit page. (Traffic) One can also look to see how many are reading a given sub at the time you look. (Notice in the right column of a sub-reddit.)
Myst-Uru or Myst Online:Uru Live again (MOULa) has been open source since about 2010. In the following 4-½ years we have seen little change as we wait for new fan made content to appear in-game. A lot of work has been done, but little of it is stuff fans can play with. Here I take a quick look at What is Taking So Long and compare that to what Myst-Uru fans are building in Second Life™.
Recently it seems more people are coming by the MOULa forum asking where the new ages are and what’s taking so long. One of the people working on building new ages (ages = new game areas or game mods), Tweek, wrote a reply. See: WHAT’S TAKING SO LONG?
Nothing exciting. Third Party Viewers are catching up with features in the Linden made main and RC SL Viewers. A few are adding their own special features. But, most of the updating is bug fixes and catch up…
I don’t see many tutorials about rigging mesh for OpenSim. But, Hypergrid Business has a new one. See: Quick mesh rigging how-to. Of course the procedure will work for Second Life too. But, this is for ‘rigged’ mesh only, not fitted mesh.
While they use the Machinimatrix base avatar, you do not need AvaStar. However, not having AvaStar means using the parts of the model included for working with fitted mesh is awkward and not at all intuitive.
I haven’t played in OpenSim since OSGrid crashed. So, I am not sure whether or not we can use fitted mesh in OpenSim. So, this tutorial is more than adequate for most of those making clothes in OpenSim.
Last week the first phase of the Experience Tools feature arrived for Premium Members of Second Life™. I think by now most bloggers have covered the arrival.
According to Google we are the top three reporting on Experience Tools. There are plenty of links leading to the SL Forum and Wiki. So, finding information on how to use the Tools and what they can do should be easy.