Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
There is no server UG meeting today as the Lindens are having an internal meeting. The Deploys thread and information from last week is that the main grid got the package previously running on all three RC channels last week (32), a maintenance package with a JSON fix roll-back.
None of the RC channels are rolling this week. That MAY mean no restarts for those regions.
The current main viewer is 3.7.13 – 292225. We might see that change this week.
There are numerous exploits used in Second Life™. YouTube has a series of videos titled ‘What is Scond Life?’ or ‘This is Second Life.’ And links to download the program. Some of the videos are obvious crap and others are pretty good and look enticing. I suspect those are plays on the current popularity of VR and HMD as they are recent.
Many of these lead to pirate download links. I am betting the viewer one gets is a basic password/account stealer.
Today I see the United Content Creators of SL has issued a warning in Second Life™ about BCU.exe. I think this is also known as the Browser Configuration Utility. If so, it has been around since 2010 in a couple of forms and most anti-virus software is aware of it. But, run from inside the viewer, which you have given permissions to, it can circumvent your anti-virus software.
I tried taking pictures of Necronom VI (NVI). But, the lighting is often animated, which doesn’t show up in the still images. So, Saturday I took some time to make what I think was a last visit to NVI and take some video. I’m not a machinamist… or even that experienced with FRAPS. So, I forgot to turn off the cursor for most of the video. But, I think I caught enough to show what NVI was/is like.
[youtube -rgHQjkd6-c]
This video is uploaded in 720p format. That means it looks best in the default YouTube viewer or smaller, not full screen… over 1024.
If you have never visited this region of SL, hurry and see it. It is an adult dark RP area with adult themes. It is listed as an Adult Space Cyberpunk Role Play.
The use of light, glow, and color in the build is amazing. The video does not capture the lighting effects well, plus it is old and SL has improved since then and NVI (Necronom VI) has too. Well somewhat since I first found it. The video does give a sense of the dark RP the region is famous for (infamous?).
[youtube fvh8uxJWzFo]
The video was made in March 2008. The play list is here and it is NSFW.
At Thursdays Server Beta UG meeting we learned that a prior JSON fix (BUG-6466) is unwound by this fix. It is a case of one fix breaking something else and aggravating other problems. JSON is JavaScript Object Notation and was added to the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) as a better way to deal with list/array information, a task that LSL is weak handling. Whatever, a fix is in-the-works.
The server engineers are working on ‘infrastructure’ changes… a somewhat fuzzy statement. Maestro Linden says a major operating system (OS) is planned and this work is assuring that various system services work as intended with the new OS. I suppose when they are sure things work, they’ll start updating the OS on backend servers.
SL runs on Linux. As best we know some flavor of Linux. Recent changes to the Linux core are performance and security related. The improvements touch file handling, memory, power management, and more. I guess that the Lindens have found some of the changes interesting enough to plan an upgrade.
This is the last month before many schools start the 2014-15 classes, which in a round-about way makes it vacation time for families. Lindens are people with families and they take vacations. Those Lindens that supply us with information on the server side of things are on vacation. So, Oz and Caleb Linden are filling in. But, with a few people gone the work seems to have slowed, suggesting not much is happening… happening in the sense work progresses to where we can see change.
I think we are seeing the affect of a smaller team working on Second Life™. Previously vacations did not slow the pace of releases by a noticeable amount.
The result is there isn’t much news to write about. I think because of the reduced pace of change you see blogs covering more subjects. I know I am writing smaller blurbs about what is going on, thus the ‘bits’ articles.