Second Life News 2013-33

We have the plans for this week’s roll outs. Caleb Linden tells us that there will be no roll to the main grid. That probably means no region restart either. Blue Steel This channel gets a new maintenance package. The release notes are here. The fixes included are: BUG-3547 – Sim Crossing Rezzes Objects Surrounding … Read more

Explosive Firestorm Meeting

This is going to be controversial and upset a lot of people. What it is, is a two hour and 45 minute video of a Firestorm meeting that showed up on YouTube. I didn’t see any announcement of the meeting. I do watch for such announcements. Some get past me. Whatever, there is some hot news in the video. If your in a hurry to see what is going to upset people, look for the red text (hint: page 2).

The video below is from a Firestorm-in-development viewer. It shows Materials in Firestorm. This version has not yet been released it is coming. It is not the video of the meeting.

[youtube gAdKIvbnQtA]

I doubt many will have time for watching the whole three hours of video of the August 10th Q & A meeting. I have a link to it at the end of the article. I decided to index it while I worked my way through it. It would be great if it were an MP3. I could play at 1.5x speed.

I am paraphrasing the whole video index I’ve made. My biases and prejudices can color what I hear. So, if something tics you off, watch the video then start your rant.

This is a Firestorm Q&A meeting where Jessica Lyon gets into some hard to swallow news. This is the end of the Phoenix Viewer.

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DGP4SL Store Closing

Darrius Gothly has closed up his in-world store due to the region owner/landlord running into problems.

Also, he is closing up his Market Place store in preparation to leaving Second Life™. Various subscription services are being withdrawn from the market. Subscriptions will not be renewed. Once they have all expired, Darrius is planning on departing SL.

DGP4Sl Gone...
DGP4SL Gone…

You can read his posting: Endings … And Beginnings.

Darrius sees things as many do that leave SL. He perceives the management of SL as messing things up and wanting to abandon SL and move on to new products. I think he is nuts. But, humans are capable of seeing only what they want to see. In spite of mountain ranges of evidence contrary to their opinions. 

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Second Life News 2013-32 #4

The third party viewer (TPV) development meeting was Friday August 9th. This is information from that meeting. This is usually the stuff that is fun to know.

TPV Developers Meeting 2013-32
TPV Developers Meeting 2013-32

Viewer Release Pipeline

There are currently 5 release candidates in the people line. Oz Linden says this is going to a larger number of candidates than he expects to be normal. This is a backlog of viewer work winding its way through the testing process.

The Vivox candidate viewer has made it all the way through the new process. It is now the new primary release for the SL Viewer 3.6.2-279258. The updates in that viewer are now being merged into the remaining candidate viewers. We should see those all updated during week 33.

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Second Life Liquid Mesh Early Warning

UPDATE: 2014/1 –  A newer version of Liquid Mesh called Fitted Mesh is now the standard for mesh clothes. Fitted Mesh is still in beta development in January 2014. Liquid Mesh clothes made pre-Fitted Mesh seem to be usable and are apparently not broken by the implementation of Fitted Mesh. So, Liquid Mesh is now a sort of support way to make mesh clothes.

Liquid Mesh is very very much not supported by the Lab. We hear this at the user group meetings. The Lindens are telling us repeatedly. In some ways the Lindens are getting a bit arrogant about the issue. Like if you didn’t pay attention, tough. We told you. That attitude will walk them into a wall.

Leg Muscle Test
Leg Muscle Test

The problem is the developers and residents don’t attend the user group meetings.

The image shows jeans made of Liquid Mesh. I was changing the leg muscle settings in Appearance. You can see the jeans changed per the Appearance settings.

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SL Materials Viewer 2013-32

We have a new version of the Materials Project Viewer as of August 8. It is version 3.6.3-279651. You can get the download here:  Official Alternate Viewers.

The Release Notes provides an impressive list of fixes, about 5.5 screens of JIRA items. There are 8 known problems listed. This is a significant improvement over the previous release.

This viewer is classed as a Project Viewer. So, if you opt’d in to use Release Candidate viewers you are NOT going to be running this one or any other ‘project’ viewers. At least I am pretty sure you won’t. So, what happens when you install this viewer? 

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