Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life Rod Humble 2011 Keynote

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Each year the CEO of Linden Lab addresses the residents on the future direction they plan to take Second Life. This year Rod Humble gave the address. I like to get the audio of the address and summarize the key points. I think people can read faster than most people can talk. Plus later when I need to remember what Rod said, I have a searchable summary of the address. So, here are the key points as I see and understand them.

If you want the bottom line, jump to my Summary at the end.

Rob Humble’s Keynote Address

UStream

The events and meetings are being streamed through UStream.com. The first meeting I went to, Future of Mesh, they changed the stream. We had to scramble to find the correct stream. In Rod’s keynote it was a bit easier. But, in both cases those attending in-world had problems. So, I suggest if you are planning to attend any of the meetings, watch via UStream in your browser. The URL’s are in the schedule. See: http://schedule.slconvention.org/. Also, the videos should be archived there.

The crowded regions were crashing my SLV 3.0.1 and Dolphin 2 viewers. Bummer.

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Remember the ARC Nazi?

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ARC is of course Avatar Render Cost. The lindens introduced it as a way to encourage more sensible avatar attire. What some residents did with it is to try to force others to conform to their idea of what is an appropriate ARC value. We call them Nazis.

Mesh ARC? - Pic by: amandabhslater @ Flickr

One of the things I suspect ARC Nazis have not considered is that different viewers give different ARC values. Nor have they considered that the current ARC values have little to do with reality. The numbers are a bit faked. It might have been better if the Lindens had ARC shown as; Good, Fair, Poor, Bad, Awful, and Disaster. Sometime after mesh roll out is complete the Lindens plan to revise the ARC numbers.

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What Mesh Means

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I have seen many people asking what difference mesh will make in Second Life. Others want to know what the difference is between mesh and sculpties. The best answer I’ve seen is in New World Notes article: What Mesh Will Do for Second Life Fashion – Illustrated.

The source for Hamet’s article is Damien Fate’s blog. Damien is showing many of the differences between mesh, standard SL clothes, and sculpty clothes.

I’ll point out again that the clothing textures people make for their mesh clothes will be unique to their clothes. If you do not have the clothing template for a particular maker, it will be hard to make clothes for that brand. But, will creators want more people making textures for their clothes?

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#SL Server Update Week 32

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Mesh seems to still be the top priority. Two of the release channels are running Mesh Enabled versions; Le Tigre and Magnum. Blue Steel is running a Server Maintenance upgrade. The Lindens have posted in the Wiki what changes are coming over the next few upgrades.

State of the Art?

Main Grid

The upgrade called Improved HTTP Service made it to the main grid last week. One of the items is improved texture fetch. As more users pile on HTTP Texture Get a problem was found in the servers and routers that handle the requests. Lately I’ve seen the time needed for textures to download go up. I’ve also seen more textures simply not download. I’ve also been in crowded places where I’ve changed groups 2 or 3 times to all the avatars to render. I still think changing groups to rez avatars sounds silly, but I see it work. This fix should correct the problem, but I can’t say I have seen improvement.

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Second Life’s August Update

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It looks like the Lab is going to do consistent monthly news updates. This month we got a new update Monday as to what is happening in Second Life. August Update If you regularly read this blog, you’ll probably find you know most of the things announced in the blog post. But, there are some things I did not know about, so you won’t have found out about them here.

The New Splash Screen

Splash Page

I think everyone is now seeing the new Second Life Splash page. This is the one a wrote about: New Login Screen Arrives a few days ago.

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Hiding Avatars in Second Life

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Rand Linden posts a blog article about how to use the new privacy feature in Viewer 2.8.1 and newer.

See the article here: Hiding avatars and restricting avatar sounds

The change is a new land control. If you don’t own land, you can’t do much with the feature. Understanding it will help you understand the differences between what you see rendered on your screen and what the mini-map tells you.