Second Life

Things about SL

#SL Materials System Information

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There isn’t any new information, so I won’t call this an update. But, there is probably some information you have not seen.

Geenz Spad, a developer of the Materials System, has a web site with information about the Materials System. See: Geenzo.com. The article outlines the process that started in February 2012 and went public about July or August 2012. It is worth reading if you have something you wanted added to the viewer or Second Life™ or have any other proposal for Linden Lab to consider.

In the article the features environment intensity and specular exponent are mentioned. We hear little about these in most discussions. Without the features in the viewer to demonstrate them it is harder to explain them. I’ve linked to a couple of page I hope will help.

I’ve mentioned that Maestro Linden spoke of the server side of the project being in testing on ADITI. There once was a code repository where people could pull and compile a viewer with the latest viewer side version of the project. That seems to have disappeared from public view.

We have no ETA on when the project will go into open Beta, meaning when we get a project viewer.

#SL Large Groups Edit Rolled Out

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Builder’s Brewery sent out an announcement about the Large Group Edit Change (SVC-4968 – readable by all) that rolled out this last Tuesday (week 46). The new code should be on all regions now. The Beta viewer has the code to take advantage of the change.

Whoever wrote the announcement wasn’t quite up on what the changes do and how they affect you but, for practical purposes they are close enough. If you have followed the coverage here, I think you’ve heard better details.

A quick recap of Large Groups, somewhere over 10,000 to 15,000 members, is they could not be loaded for editing. If you fiddled enough you might get a 20k or so group to load. The actual size of a list that could be loaded depended on how well SL was performing and your connection. This made it generally impossible to edit large lists. So, members that hadn’t logged into SL for a year or more could not be pruned out of the group. Roles in the group could not be changed. That has been fixed.

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Second Life World Map Borked

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You may or may not have noticed that the world map has some problems. Depending on what region you search for it may or may not show up and may not show a map tile (image). 

Missing Map Strips

The image shows Sunny Point failing to rez an image of the region. If you jump out of the viewer and try to find the region in http://maps.secondlife.com/, you will find it does not come up at all.

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Second Life Griefing

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Griefing is an ongoing problem in Second Life™. I am seeing a new round of user complaints regarding griefing. Most of the recent complaints I’ve seen involve free sandboxes. The most recent notable example is VooDoo’s complaint that I mention in: #SL Adult Content Problems.

Bullies – Image by: Chesi – Fotos CC

About five days after my article posted a thread started on SLUniverse. See: LL looks like idiots when they can’t keep griefers out of thier own info hubs. The ‘colorful’ title pretty well says it all.

It is pointed out that Linden owned sandbox regions in the LEA Project are user moderated. Allowing users to moderate regions has possibilities. The use of user-moderators also has special problems. Darrius Gothy wrote a really good article on those problems back in 2011… (sounds like my grand dad). See: Griefing: User Sponsored Enforcement Groups.

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#SL News 2 Week 45

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Some interesting things are happening. The Server Beta User Group met Thursday in Morris, ADITI. This was Oskar Linden’s weekly meeting. Oskar is gone, it is fact. Maestro Linden is taking over the meeting… or may be Coyot Linden. I’m not sure it has been decided. But, it is the intention to keep the meetings going. Also the Deploy threads in the forum will continue.

First Server Beta w/o Oskar 11/8/2012

I think it looks like Maestro Linden will run the meetings. Maestro hopes to get more developers from the server project attending the meeting. There are a number of server enhancements and features moving forward. We hear very little about them. Getting more developers involved may give us more information.

In News 1 I covered the roll out packages, so I won’t repeat that information.

They have found a new crasher bug in the code running in Magnum. Maestro says they have already found a fix for that problem.

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#SL Mesh Deformer Update

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Whirly Fizzle has been doing some poking at the Deformer. She He sees it as working very well with avatar physics. She He has made some new Collada files and uploaded them to test with the Deformer.

We still need more clothes to test with. The lack of test items is slowing the QA process for the Deformer. Apparently the testing clothes in the closet were uploaded with a previous version of the Deformer Project Viewer. So, they don’t deform. Oz Linden is going to clean the closet out. So, there will be just about nothing in it.

For weeks we have been trying to get people to provide test clothes. This is an old problem in Second Life. People like to complain about the Lab not getting things right, but when people are asked to help, they don’t. They will however be quick to rave and rant about what the Lab SHOULD have done.

The best we can do is send notices to our favorite mesh designers and ask them to help and more responsibly provide something ourselves.