Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
A new release is out. It is primarily for users with AMD/ATI video cards. Unless you are having a problem, you don’t need this release.
You may be aware of a recent AMD/ATI driver update to stopped mesh items from rendering. This isn’t a Singularity problem. It affected all viewers as it was a driver problem. If you had an ATI/AMD video card and updated your driver, you had the problem.
If you know the viewer, you know it is an experimental viewer. The author of it tries all sorts of things. Like Benjamin Franklin and others NiranV has lots of what I label failures. But, the gems that do work out make it worth it.
A current feature Black Dragon has is Volumetric Lighting, previously labeled GodRays. This is a rendering process that reveals light interacting with air… the atmosphere. The feature makes for dramatic images. I think this is going to be an awesome features for those using Oculus Rift type displays.
You may have picked up from the SL Viewer news that a change is coming to the Lab’s mesh uploader. There are, I think, some nice changes coming.
As it is now, when uploading mesh we often get an error and the error message is basically useless, no help. The Lindens are working to improve that. They hope to give us a better idea of what went wrong.
Also, we are currently limited to 8 faces per mesh. That means any single mesh object can only have 8 materials. That too is going to change. The Lindens are saying if there will be a new limit just that we can have more than 8.
There is also something changing about how the various LoD models and physics models will associate with our item based on file naming. I don’t get what they are doing here as I have yet to play with the RC/Project viewer that is out.
You may have heard, a viewer is coming that will handle your notices differently. When logging in we are often bombarded with stack of notices; IM’s, inventory offers, group notices, event invites, money transactions… it gets busy.
The Lindens are promising a new way to handle notices. We will get a new panel that better handles the information being dumped on us. We are promised a way to organize and prioritize all these notes.
Second Life™ gets a load of bad press. Now and then someone writes an intelligent piece. Mark Hay has written an intelligent piece: Second Life is Staying Alive. And the images used in the article are recent 2014-2015 images. Wow!
So, I think this article is worthy of our attention and support. It does put an interesting spin on Second Life and why it remains an active place.
The site this article is on is GOOD, a magazine for the global citizen.
Marine Kelley has posted that a new version of the RLViewer is out.
This version has the new Hover Height adjustment. Right-click your avatar and adjust away. The adjustment is saved as a setting and so, persists across logins.
Marine points out that ONLY viewers with this new feature can see the results of your adjustment. I expect most viewers will have this feature with their next release.