Category Archives: Second Life

Things about SL

50% Off Blueberry Stuff

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Yay, Blueberry is having a sale starting this April 13th, a Friday the 13th. Which in some cultures is considered an unlucky day. While there is no empirical data to suggest these Fridays are any worse than other Fridays, the superstition lives on.

Happy 6th Birthday Blueberry!

Happy 6th Birthday Blueberry!

So, six years in Second Life™… 13th pretty neat time to have a sale. Happy Birthday Blueberry

Not everything is on sale there are some exceptions. You’ll see them listed in the promo image above.

Blueberry is popular. I love how the clothes fit my Slink body. The clothes look good. So, I expected the region to be full. The main region, Lenox & Blueberry, is limited to 20 basic account avatars plus 5± premium member avatars. The store is designed for as lag-free an experience as is possible given the nature of a store in SL. Adjacent is the region Palua. Its limit is about 30± basic members. Adjacent to Palua is Just Because. It has a limit of 25 or 30. Continue reading →

Second Life News 2018 w15

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Servers

This week there is no roll out to the main channel. It continues to run version #18.03.27.513831.

Blue Steel and Le Tigre won’t get a roll and will continue running version #18.03.29.513939.

Magnum will get an update Wednesday to version #18.03.29.513939.

•{ In the morning . . .

•{ In the morning . . .

All are Internal fixes…

Any regions running 14 days or longer without a restart will be restarted.

Second Life Viewers

The main viewer remains version 5.1.2.512803, which came on week #10.  Continue reading →

The Great Bakes-On-Mesh Debate

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Well, we are getting an upgrade to the Server-Side-Avatar-Baking service. That is fact. What the service does is old news. The blogosphere was covering it in 2012. By August 2013 it was considered a success. (Ref)

So, what is the service, aka SSA or SSB? Prior to 2012 the classic avatar skin, tattoos, underwear, shirt, and jacket were composited into a single texture in your viewer and used to render your avatar. This is like the process we use in Photoshop, GIMP, and other image editors when we bake a set of layers into a single JPG or PNG image.

...Wait

…Wait

A significant part of the viewer’s render process was the baking effort. Once I was dressed and my clothes baked into an image safely cached on my computer, I was good. BUT… whenever I saw a new avatar, my viewer had to collect all their textures; skin, tat, bra, and top and bake their clothes into a texture to put on the avatar and render it. Everyone was doing that.

With 6 possible zones (ie., hair, head, upper, lower, eyes, skirt) to bake and 3 of them having 5 layers we were downloading a bunch of textures just for the classic body. So, something like 15 or 20 textures per avatar. In a region with 40 avatars… that is like 40×20=800 textures… if they were 1024 textures that could be as much as 3+GB of texture, admittedly in extreme cases. Plus, our viewer had to composite them before the avatar could be rendered. Each viewer was doing this and the region was coordinating the downloads. Continue reading →

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Other News in Second Life

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Talent, some we have in abundance in Second Life. I was hitting that ‘Next Unread Topic’ link in the forum and found My bad drawings of my worse avatars. This is a thread started in June 2017 and still running.

People draw a cartoon sort of caricature of their avatar and post both a picture of the avatar and the drawing. Kind of fun.

Thou Shall Not Pass

Thou Shall Not Pass – Nal: Figured this should be under TALENT

Linden Home Insurance – This was a big sale on Sunday, 4/1. It’s Never Been a Better Time to Be a Premium Member!

Belleza – A new update came out this month. Belleza bodies now have Bento hands, a better neck seam for Lelutka heads. Updates are being sent or get a redelivery. Read more here: Belleza’s Bento Update is here!

Slink – There is a version v8 of the Slink Dev Kit. There are only small fixes between the earlier March update, v6, and a day or two later v7 update. The v8 update has a newer male body. The changes are ease of use type changes. Have the Kit redelivered to get the new update.

The source file has not been renamed. So, you can use the link in the email you received in March. It still works. Or get a new a link from the Redelivery Terminal in the Slink main store. Only the files inside have changed.

SL Jobs – Hamlet at New World Notes in Virtual Job Hunting In Second Life About As Daunting As Job Hunting IRL  points us to Lexy Neven’s video HOW TO FIND A JOB IN SECOND LIFE (2018 UPDATE). This is all the basics a newbie would need to learn.

Wild Orchard – This designer has a load of EXPENSIVE gowns. BUT… there is a sale on. Marketplace only. Try Wild Orchard Clearance. L$89 to L$149. Some nice stuff.

The Making of… – I found this an interesting video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6TX86uCOsw – Have no idea why this video only works as a link… :/

Natsumi Xenga is the artist. Her Flickr channel, PICSSR, and Google for all the other places her art pops up.

Second Life News 2018 w14

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Servers

The main channel updated to version #18.03.27.513831. The new version has only Internal Fixes.

The RC’s Blue Steel and Le Tigre will update to version #18.03.29.513939 on the usual Wednesday cycle. Also, only Internal Fixes.

Magnum will continue to run #18.03.27.513831.

Sunrise at Isle of May

Sunrise at Isle of May

From the Server and Scripting UG we hear about more region crossing work. Simon Linden is doing some work on crossings. BUG-214653 – After half-unsit at failed region crossing on vehicle due to network lag, “Unsit” button will not work.

Crossing regions at speed… fast cars, planes, boats, and motorcycles, have a big problem. I was recently testing an Apolon helicopter. Great fun. But, region crossings are an annoyance. Continue reading →

Second Life’s The Wastelands

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So, what is The Wastelands? It is a game within Second Life™. It is a bit different. It uses a somewhat typical post-apocalyptic setting. The 10 regions making up the game area are all Moderate rated. Full nudity is prohibited and no sex… O.O

Also, the game has been around since 2006. Making it definitely an SL classic.

This video was taken as I begin to explorer The Wastelands. I happened to be there when the monthly meeting was announced and The War Zone game started. Luck. I don’t plan to video the meetings. This is a one-off type thing.

I clipped out parts of the video and sped up parts I left in. So, reading the chat as it scrolls by won’t get you a transcript of the meeting. So, I have a transcript below.

The War Zone game as I understand it is a control the flag game. I have seen it played and heard the rules explained once. The flag is radio-active. So, carrying it will kill you. As you run with the flag the other team is trying to kill you. You are going to die. But, games have the ability to resurrect you. At the end of the game whichever team controlled the flag the ‘most time’ wins. And… you have to stay in the region.

There is a fans’ mobile ‘bleachers’ that follows the flag. You sit on it to follow the moving game. That is kinda neat. It is jerky. So, that is what you see in the jerky parts of the video. It isn’t my computer stuttering. Continue reading →

Second Life Third-Party Dev Meeting

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This week was a <15-minute meeting. So, not much news.

On the viewer front, there are no imminent updates. So, we likely won’t see any RC or Project viewers changing status this coming week.

All I ever wanted.

All I ever wanted.

The new server-side capabilities were deployed. The viewers haven’t been released. They are still being tweaked. The Abuse Report category change from built into the viewer to delivered by the servers hickuped. The Lindens left out the ‘localization’. Oops. English only. That is being fixed.

Bakes-On Project Viewer passed QA, Oz was unsure of when it was being released (ta-da: released 3/30). See the release notes.

BUG-215951 – Option to allow nearest neighbor on textured faces. The feature request was rejected. So, this is an example of what a definite Linden ‘no’ looks like.

I take it that some core functionality in the render engine would have to change and the Lindens don’t see an acceptable benefit ratio.

The Lindens are aware of an HTTPS problem for those scripting HTTPS data transfer. They plan to fix it, they just haven’t gotten there yet.

That is about it for the meeting. This link to the video leads to a very quiet meeting this week.

SL and Other News Bits

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Star Citizen now has 2 million user sign ups as it nears Alpha version 3.1. At US$45 per sign up, that is $90 million…

Save Our Lives, sad… as other news sources dig into the recent march the mainstream media story is falling apart. Many, like myself, wondered how high school kids could organize such a march and handle the logistics of contacting participants, moving them, providing for them, and acquiring a meeting place in D.C. Much less pay for everything.

Don´t trust me

Don´t trust me

A deep look shows the actual numbers are more in the 200,000± range not 800,000 and 90% of the 200k were adults >=40-years old. So, not really a student movement as is being reported.

Detective Novels – You may not know but one of the Second Life™ residents writes novels using their SL name as a pseudonym. Caitlin Tobias has written a review of the PUBLISHED novels, Huckleberry Hax – AFK, all of it. The book is out in hardcover, paperback, and digital. Awesome. Continue reading →