Second Life

Things about SL

SL Region Management Problems

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WARNING: There is currently a problem that appears to be part of the Region-Crossing update. If an estate manager or other land owner bans and ejects a user, the region will crash when they leave the region. Oops!

It is currently unclear what the details are. Try ejecting without banning then ban. I have no idea if that will help.

The problem is related to https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SEC-1204 and https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SEC-1215. I can’t read the JIRA items in SEC, as most of us cannot. So, it is a pain getting details.

Some of the hinky details are in the Deploy thread: Deploys for 2013-01-28.

Second Life Materials Update 2013-5

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You may have noticed the RC channel Blue Steel is running the server side of the Materials System update. While there is no Project Viewer available yet, this suggests that it is getting close. What more confidently suggests the nearing release are these screen shots of Materials in use.

Materials System in Action - Normal & Specular - Enlarge
Materials System in Action – Normal & Specular – Enlarge

The above image shows an interesting surface. I think that is a simple cube with a normal map. 

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Second Life News 2013-5 (1)

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This is short but exciting… The picks for this week’s rollouts are out. The main channel will get the Region-Crossing package on Tuesday. This package is running on the Blue Steel and Le Tigre RC channels. It has apparently done well in the RC, so it gets promoted..

Unfortunately the Interest List package has not done well, creating lots of problems for users. The package created high packet loss for many resulting in avatars and other objects failing to render. This week we will see a revised version of this package return to the Magnum channel. Hopefully this one will be better.

Blue Steel is getting the Materials System Package. We still won’t be able to try it out. There is no viewer that can take advantage of the feature. There are private testing builds. But, none most SL users cannot find or get access to them. So, I see this test as more of a compatibility thing.

Le Tigre is getting the fix for the World Map problem where some regions are not showing up in search.

I am hoping to see a Materials System Viewer soon.

Second Life 2012 Statistics

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It is hard to find good statistics on Second Life™ that tells us what is happening. Nor have there been any exciting ‘statistical’ developments this year. So, I haven’t been writing much about them. I did want to summarize them for 2012. It took me some time to get around to it. But, here they are.

User Signup per Day
User Signup per Day

Signups per day tells us something. It is just debatable what exactly. We can’t separate re-signups, those creating Alts, from new users signing up. We can’t even get an idea of how many people may be going for an Alt. My belief is the majority users have at least 1 Alt.

But, we have never known and as far as I can see there is nothing that would have changed the rate of users creating Alts. So, the signup rates are hopefully consistently distorted.

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Second Life Reddit

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I have spent some time on Reddit. I used to regularly post on Reddit, but not so much any more. I see people talking about how handy Reddit is. Some say it leads visitors to their blog. Daniel Voyager in his article titled: Second Life on reddit says, “…it’s a very good way to get the latest Second Life news…”

So, I was wondering just how popular Reddit is. I needed to find some stats. It took a bit of looking but I did come up with them.

Links Posted Lead to these Domains
Links Posted Lead to these Domains

A quick look at them shows who most of the posters are. The far left site is Inara’s modemworld.wordpress.com. The web page chopped off the name. 

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Second Life Materials System 2013-4

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Maestro says server side support for Materials is very close to going to RC status. It might make it into an RC channel next week. But, don’t get too excited. The viewer side has to complete and make it through QA before we can test it.

The server side is already running in ADITI for testing.

An Early Look at Materials
An Early Look at Materials

As there is no public version of the Materials Project Viewer, there is currently no way to test the new feature. Geenz Spad the primary programmer for the update said at Wednesday’s Open Source meeting, “I don’t have any particularly specific updates outside of we’re inching closer to something people can use. To be perfectly honest, I’ve largely been focusing my efforts on the rendering side of things and a few Mac related odds and ends.”

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