Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
The Main Viewer has updated to 3.7.27.300636. This version was the RC Maintenance release with a load of fixes (Release Notes). This viewer first appeared as an RC Viewer 3/18. I found it to be a good improvement over the previous main viewer, 3.7.26.299635. Some of the improvements are targeted at performance.
Bryn Oh has a short article up about MadPea’s UNIA opening the 27th of this month. See it here: MadPea’s UNIA.
The UNIA countdown clock is here: UNIA The Game. As of today, 4/20, we are 7 days out.
UNIA is a project MadPea started in 2012. It was planned to be an interactive, immersive game with 1st person shooter elements. The plan was to develop the game in stages, mostly due to the limitations of Second Life™, the game platform in this case.
I am not sure why some things come up so late in Feedly, like 4 weeks… This is a decent article about Linden Lab starting development on the Next Generation Platform. See: This company was 13 years early to virtual reality — and it’s getting ready to try again. Quoting:
Linden Lab is marshaling its expertise and experience in building immersive, functional virtual worlds to make a proper successor to the Second Life platform and take advantage of the bold new world of immersive VR. Specifically, Linden sees a huge opportunity in making it easier for people to build and share cool virtual reality experiences.
Everyone is curious about what the avatars in the Next Generation Platform (NGP), or SL2, will be like and what we can do with them. Now we have some clues. High Fidelity is working on their avatars and has just release a set of improvements. See: Creating and rigging an avatar with Blendshapes in Makehuman. The information is somewhat compatible with the current Second Life™ and I suspect a hint of what is coming for SL2 or the Next Generation Platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZHyypkXDd4
This is a great video for designers. You’ll find references to a number software tools I have not heard mentioned in relation to Second Life. Some of those look to be handy for SL.
There are problems and then there are the symptoms of problems. Just as many health problems produce a fever as a symptom, multiple problems can cause attachment problems.
That said, this symptom has been know for a long time. The image shows my hair appearing attached to my butt for a really sophisticated look… not. I’ve seen the problem on and off since I came to Second Life™ in 2008. Now I am seeing it again. For three or five weeks the problem pretty much disappeared.
This problem is generally thought to be a timing problem. The information coming from the server is lost or out of order or otherwise arrives in some way that confuses the viewer. The viewer doesn’t figure out that the hair goes on my head. It doesn’t really attach it to by butt. If I walk away the hair is left hanging in space.
This does just happen with hair. I’ve had a foot, hand, bracelet, dress panel, earring, or other attachment suffer this fate.
Hypergrid Business keeps many of us up to date on happenings in the OpenSim side of virtual worlds. They currently have an article up on expansion and contraction in the OpenSim worlds: Regions, grids hit new record highs.
It is a good headline. In the first paragraph Maria, author, points out that active users on public grids fell by 909 to 30,000. So, even though I consider Maria a bit of a fan-girl for OpenSim, I consider her reporting accurate enough to give us the good and bad news.