Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
If you are new, the Snowstorm Project is about developing the Second Life Viewer. There is a mix of things going on in the project. Mostly boring bug and user interface fixes. There are a few things the Lindens need help with. read on to see if you can help.
Button Placement – some buttons are getting covered up by overrunning text and others by options pushing things around. There are JIRA’s on these. If you notice it, add your information to the appropriate JIRA.
It is getting a little complex keeping you clearly informed about KirstenLee’s viewer releases with terms that accurately convey a viewer’s status. It is hard to be clear about which is a production viewer, test or Beta viewer, and a Release Candidate. The problem is some of the code is Linden Lab code not yet in the SL Beta or Standard viewers, which sort of makes all the Kirsten viewers pre-beta viewers. The distinctions are blurred. Suffice to say to say, the Kirsten viewers are as bleeding edge as they come.
The S21(3) is KirstenLee’s official current release. It is available for download.
KirstenLee’s current release announcement is about S21(4) Release Candidate 1 or Kirstens S21 2.6.0.4 RC1, which is available as of 2/7.
I sort of enjoy shopping at Bare Rose. I like the variety of things to be found there. Plus it tends to be cheap. However, if you are looking for something specific, it can be a pain.
Today New World Notes has an article, Ophelia’s Gaze: Iris’ Favorite Second Life Shopping Experiences, that mentions Bare Rose’s web site. I had no clue they had a site.
The web site is an index to the Bare Rose store. The site’s menu allows you to select categories and view items in the categories. One can see the package image and when enlarged displays the price and creator. One can’t buy the item online, AFAIK, but one can teleport via SLURL to the item in the Bare Rose store. It is quite novel. Check it out.
Friday 2/4, Rod Humble, CEO and known as Rodvik Linden in SL, along with Pete Linden held a by-invitation-only meeting to talk with selected residents. One of those invited was Chestnut Rau, author of the blog Second Life of my Dreams and writer for New World Notes. Chestnut posted a transcript of the meeting for those that want to read it, link later. Following is my summary and comments on the things I found interesting.
After introductions and a statement of the meetings purpose, not a press conference for Q&A (a later description of the meeting by Garmin Kawaguich is ‘an exchange of courtesies’), Pete as the meeting facilitator setup Rodvik’s initial talking point, ‘what has Rodvik found most exciting about SL.’ The answer:
The Beta Server Groups minutes are out. Here is some of the things I found interesting.
Asset Delivery – A new Linen, Log Linden, is working on improving asset delivery from the backend side of SL to the region servers. Most everything in SL is an asset. So, this makes for a big possibility for speed improvements.
It seems the delivery process from asset servers to sim servers is HTTP protocol. However, only textures are delivered to the viewer via HTTP.
We are getting closer. In Oz’s office hours meeting Gez Linden, the project owner, explained the next steps for moving forward on Group Chat. Soon a Group Chat Project Viewer will be out. Code will be available. An in-world group will be started for the project. The first testing will be on the ADITI (Preview) Grid in a couple of weeks.
Some ADITI sim’s are already using XMPP group chat. Once the Project Viewer is out the next level of testing can begin. The first release will be trying to achieve parity with existing chat. Once the new chat is doing everything the current chat can, the code can be rolled to the grid. We should see a big reduction in chat lag. Plus, the new XMPP chat will be separate from the SL SIM servers. So, we should see less region lag too.