Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
I went to the Open Source UG Meeting this morning. Not something I usually do. I had some questions and this UG is a good place to get certain questions answered.
So… what is a jelly baby? The picture explains it better than words.
The solid color avatars in the image are what we call jelly babies. I first heard Whirly Fizzle use the term. I like it. I’ve also heard avatars rendered this way called Gumby or Gummies. I talked about this in: Second Life Performance: Render Muting.
Kess Crystal of MadPea sent me an announcement about the new game they are proudly releasing: UNIA – Unleashing The Monster Within. Release date is April 20th. We have been hearing bits and pieces about this new game. Now it is almost here.
Kess writes that this game has been in production for 2+ years. Kess says this is the biggest, best, and most advanced game they have made. Kess describes the scale of the game as EPIC, in size and scope. I take it size includes play area.
This Friday (4/10) there was a Third Party Developers’ User Group (TPD UG)meeting. We have some news about Second Life™ from the meeting. The scheduled 60 minute meeting ran a little over 30 minutes.
Brooke Linden opened the meeting as Oz Linden seemed to have poofed. Brooke is telling us that they have started deploying parts of the Viewer Managed Marketplace server side. They hope to have a couple of parts rolled out later in the month. Then they can start what I’ll call an open beta. I take it this means it will be moving from the Preview/Beta Grid to the main grid.
Oz was suffering a bad throat and sounded horrible. So, it is no surprise the meeting was short.
The TPD UG meetings are normally every other Friday. Oz is planning to be taking some Fridays off. So, that regularity is going to be upset. Some meetings will occur very other Friday but some may be three weeks apart rather than two. This will mean, I think, Fridays off in place of a longer vacation period. It’s his choice.
As of Friday Jessica was planning to put a release out to their current preview group. She was writing an invitation to ask more people into the preview group or maybe she meant she is inviting more people to a larger secondary preview group. It sounds like they will stage testing, so multiple groups may help. So, the viewer will soon go out to the first with the current preview group then, if things go well, a week later with the larger group.
You can see the invitation here: WANTED: Brave Early Adopters and Testers… This request makes it clear this will be a second group different than their beta testers.
In general people having a problem logging in or staying logged in have connection problems. But we have a new problem. It seems AISv3 removed the LIMIT on how many items you can have in a folder. Apparently any limit has not been enforced for some time. So, we are starting to see some inventories accumulate enough items to trigger a problem.
As things are now a big flat inventory with thousands of items in a single folder, especially the root folder, is a problem. How fast the computer, network, and region are determines when the problem appears. I don’t know for sure, but logging into an empty region should give one a better chance of getting around the login problem. Hopefully they can stay on long enough to move items into folders.
This week we got some new viewers and updates to existing ones.
SL Main/Default Viewer: 3.7.26.299635 – Appeared: 3/06 – Adds the Avatar Hover Height Slider.
RC Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.27.300636 – Appeared: 4/8 – Long list of fixes – This viewer got an update from its previous 3.7.27.300323. It has performance fixes that make using it very nice to use.