Strawberry Singh has a post about a new game, Strangelings, expected to be out the first quarter of 2013. She says the Ozimals team has joined up with two former Lindens and a financial expert to form Flying Monkey Interactive, Inc. The team is developing a product platform called Toto that will run on iPad, the web, iPhone, and Facebook.
Strawberry Singh as a Strangeling
The Magic of Oz region has been remade to create a promotional and information spot in Second Life. It is an all mesh area. Check it out. Also bounce over to Strawberry’s blog and see the video she made. It shows the Strangling in all is awesome cutness: Strangelings & Mesh Oz!
There is an issue for some with the Mesh Deformer and the time it needs to calculate the mesh for offsetting. Kitsune Shan has been working with the Deformer and voicing concern about the time needed for the Deformer to kick in.
Kitsune Shan
Kitsune is proposing that we do something like what is done with avatar baking. The viewer does the bake and sends a composite image to the servers for everyone else to use. Of course that is being changed to a server side process now, where a new service in servers at the Lab will do the bake and send out the composite image. Kitsune would like to see something similar to that for the Mesh Deformer.
White Rabbit points outthe difficulties with attempting to cache the deformation calculations. White Rabbit has done some testing and finds the CPU time for the Deformer calculation is consistently small. She speculates that the long calc times come from the thread being a low priority process.
White Rabbit
The chances that Deformer calc’s will be cached server side is, in my opinion, slim to none. We do not have any statistics on the type of hardware being used with Second Life™. We know there is new stuff, way old hardware, and everything in between. But, AFAIK, we have no information on how much of each.
We have been told that number of users staying with SL Viewer 1.23.x is only 2 or 3%. Third Party Viewers that do not use SSE2 CPU commands is small. Read the SSE2 thing as meaning viewers that support really old computers. Their user bases are so small they fit within the 2-3% too. So, I’ll speculate that the Lab is not going to put much effort into something as complex as caching deformation data.
If you are following my coverage of viewers, you know that most Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developers are NOT releasing production viewers, but instead release Beta or test viewers to save on paper work. So, I am not surprised that Exodus has another Beta version out.
Exodus Viewer gets the Navmesh
The Exodus blog lists the New, Fixed, and Changed features in this release. See: Beta 9 (12.11.24.1).
The release comes in both a 32-bit and a sort of 64-bit (LAA) version. The download file size is about 37mb and the download is quick. The install is simple and typical. I installed it over the top of my previous 8.1 install and it seems to work OK.
I don’t keep up with Kokua and Imprudence as much as I might and certainly not as much as I used to. Imprudence Viewer was for some time my favorite viewer for both SL and OpenSim. Soon it slipped to being my choice just for OpenSim. Then it fell so far behind I stopped using it. I still have it installed… I’m not sure why.
There is a small effort to update Imprudence. But, I think it is so far behind it is no longer usable.
[youtube jPpbTB9tKDI]
Kokua was to be the primary OpenSim viewer. I had hoped to see Aurora and Kokua offer some competition to Second Life™ by providing combined viewer and server features creators could use. I got the impression there was a goal to develop viewer and server dependent features more quickly and lower the wall between the viewer and server.
A new release of the Dolphin 3 Viewer is out. It has been updated to have the latest changes from the Linden Lab® Viewer and Marine Kelly’s updates to RLV 2.08.03.04.
The Lab’s updates include the code for Large Group Editing, handling the object properties Creator when there are multiple creators, and Maturity functions.
I’ve written a lot about the Large Group Editing so I won’t repeat that. The Creator thing seems self explanatory. The ‘Maturity’ things need a bit of explanation.
WARNING: A malicious freebie is making the rounds in second life. If you receive an object called “[L4L]-Gestures & Walkers (Freebies) <3”, delete it at once. DO NOT Rez, or wear it! This object will rez replicating micro cubes in YOUR name filling up a sim, which could cause it to crash, inadvertently making YOU … Read more
