Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life Market Place CHANGING

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Last Friday was the Third Party Developers User Group meeting. We often have a wealth of news coming from this UG meeting. This week we learn of a Market Place (MP) project that has been in progress via closed alpha/beta since January 2014. We don’t get much news about the Market Place and commerce.

Viewer Managed Market Place

Brooke Linden spoke at this meeting about how the market place will be changing. The Lab is going to move us from the current Direct Delivery system to Viewer Managed Market Place. I expect for customers little if anything will change. But, for merchants this will be a big change and involve migrating the current Market Place to a new backend system.

Server-Scripting UG 2014-41 - Halloween Nears
Server-Scripting UG 2014-41 – Halloween Nears

I did not hear anything about changes in how the Market Place will look to customers or how it will operate from the customers’ side of things.

The problems the Lab is seeing with Direct Delivery, a feature that starts in the SL Market Place and ends in the viewer in-world, is merchants are having problems managing their Market Place (MP) inventory. Also, the Market Place engineers have not been able to fully complete Direct Delivery. Magic Boxes are still used for selling items the merchant does not have COPY rights to. 

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Second Life news 2014-41 #2

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Viewers

EXCITING NEWS! The HTTP Pipelining Viewer will be going to RC Viewer status as soon as it completes the Lab’s internal QA. Expect it SOON, but not this week. And expect some impressive changes. Monty Linden is calling this viewer the Drano Viewer.

Whirly Fizzle is in Europe and ran some tests. She cleared cache (between each test), and then logged in. With the standard non-pipelining viewer the 105k item inventory took some time to load.

Second Life 3.7.16 (294015) Sep 10 2014 11:08:26 (Second Life Release)

  • Session 1: 16 mins 28 secs
  • Session 2: 17 mins 53 secs
  • Session 3: 17 mins 18 secs
  • Session 4: 17 mins 51 secs

Then again clearing cache between each run and switching to the new pipelining viewer:

Second Life 3.7.17 (294571) Sep 26 2014 12:32:36 (Second Life Release)

  • Session 1: 2 mins 29 secs (I literally had a holy shit moment here lol = Whirly)
  • Session 2: 2 mins 17 secs
  • Session 3: 2 mins 11 secs
  • Session 4: 2 mins 27 secs

If you are measuring load time, you can get exact numbers from your viewer’s log file. Look for “LLInventoryModelFetchDescendentsResponder::httpSuccess: Inventory fetch completed” in older viewers. In the pipelining viewer look for 2014-10-08T23:00:22Z INFO: idle_startup:  Inventory and 2014-10-08T23:25:38Z INFO: LLInventoryModelFetchDescendentsResponder::httpSuccess: Inventory fetch completed. 

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Bits of Second Life 2014-41 #2

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PS CC 2014 Color Panel

The new Photoshop has a new color picker. It isn’t different as much as how handy it can be has improved. See: The Improved And Enhanced Color Panel – Photoshop CC 2014.

Sightline: The Chair

Indigo Mertel has been pointing me to an article on Road to VR about a holographic VR interface. For whatever reason I was missing her subtle hints until she contacted me and sort of asked why I was ignoring it. Oops. I have no idea why I wasn’t picking up on it. I follow a lot of her links from Plurk.

There are a number of articles out about Tomáš “Frooxius” Mariančík creating:  SightLine: The Chair.

This is pretty impressive. I can see why people are excited. It is the best use of the LEAP Motion Controller that I have seen to date.

Experimenters can download his ‘Chair’ experience: Download The Chair. (300mb) The link jumps to Sightline’s home page. There you can link to places to support him, Facebook and Steam. He says a Kickstarter is coming. 

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Ebbe Altberg Interview

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Designing Worlds in Second Life had an opportunity to interview with Ebbe Altberg, the Linden Lab CEO. It has been promoted for a day or two now.  Today the video of the interview was released. You can see the video on SLArtist.com.

Designing Worlds Planned Mesh Deformer Project Meeting
Designing Worlds

This is an interesting video interview. Ebbe’s excitement with SL1 and 2 comes through. He gives us information about SL1 and SL2 and where they are going. I’ll warn you that what he says can be interrupted several ways. His implications are not always clear. So, what you are reading here is what I heard and how I took his meaning. That doesn’t mean it is correct. I think it is, but… 

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Second Life Bits 2014-41

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AvaStar

AvaStar 1.2 is out and now Gaia has published an article on what they will be doing now. See: Remarks from the Creators. The interesting take away is that the tutorial videos will be getting updated now that the product has stabilized.

Remembering - Lost Eden - 2014
Remembering – Lost Eden – 2014

Images from Second Life

This week has seen some articles on creating great images using Second Life. New World notes has: Top Four Tips for Flawless, Photoshop-Free SL Snapshots, Family Portraits: This Second Life Photographer Has a Knack for Taking Snapshots of Domestic Bliss, and How to Turn SL-Based Images Into Visual Art. There are others that have commented on the aspects of what makes great images and art.

The Internet has a ton of image composition tutorials. Google Image Composition. 

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Second Life for Oculus

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As builders plan for a world to be seen by Oculus Rift users we hear a bit more about building things to real life scale. It is a good idea and has many benefits.

Babe @ Lost Eden - 2014
Babe @ Lost Eden – 2014

What we aren’t hearing much about is how to avoid making visitors sick, simulator motion sickness. I suppose many think that the Oculus Rift people will take care of such problems. The Oculus people are certainly putting thought and engineering into building a system that will avoid giving people simulator sickness. But, they advise those building for Oculus headsets to make sure they can keep their frame rates above 60 FPS…

I suspect the majority of Second Life users seldom see 60 fps. I know with my Quad Core and GTX560 I seem to get 25 to 50 FPS most of the time. If I am in a crowd, it is more like 8 to 12. 

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