Second Life

Things about SL

Emerald Viewer Scandal Erupts… Again

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Updates at end of article.

On July 13 a post appeared on the Emerald Modular blog. Concerning recent activities.. Sounded like a bit of drama. Not uncommon in connection with the Emerald Viewer.

Now another post appears. Recent News, August 14. Both of these seem like they are part of the ongoing drama we see related to virtual world and online communities. But then we start seeing other blogs and forums picking up the story and expanding on it. So, what is the story and who do we believe?

Trust Turns To Rust
Trust to Rust?

Another problem is that some of the detractors of Emerald are lose wing nuts. That has to a great degree numbed the community to complaints about the Emerald viewer and dev team. This latest scandal is more fact based than drama based. There seems to be a real problem.

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SL Viewer 2.1.1 Released

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This viewer has a texture download fix that should greatly improve performance. If you even just barely pay attention to SL technology you have likely heard of HTTP Texture Get. What you likely have not heard is there was a bug in SL viewers 2.0, 2.1 and the 1.23 series that cause texture caching to fail. This meant every time you visited a place you’ve been before; all the textures had to download again. So even with a faster download, we were not getting as much performance gain as we should have. Now the textures should cache and greatly reduce rez time.

The problem has been fixed in 2.1.1 (207998) Aug 11 2010.

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Second Life and Linden Lab Dying?

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Update: 2010-08-14 (at end of article) – I’m depressed. Gwyneth Llewelyn wrote Good-bye, meshes! Gwyneth works in the RL virtual worlds service fields and apparently has contacts among the Lindens. She writes about the status of the supposed coming Collada meshes. Seems they may not just be delayed but canceled for the foreseeable future. Bummer. (Her blog changed appearance, a nice new look.)

Second Life Dying
Is Second Life Dying?

Gwyneth describes why this is likely to become a major disadvantage for Second Life’s ability to compete with other virtual worlds. I think it is so important that it may mean the end of SL, not tomorrow or next year, but…

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Emerald Viewer 2439 Update

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Update: 2010-08-11 6:45 PM SLT – A new post appeared today explaining a bit more about the 2439 update and the removal of the 2439 beta release post being removed. Fracturedcrystal posted:

Posting to clear some confusion, I unpublished the previous post with beta 2439 because we are working on a new beta which fixes several security issues with some of the new features introduced in that version. There has however been unexpected technical difficulties in the 1.5 port, some of the other features in trunk, and our dedicated build servers, which we are working to fix at the moment.

The post has links to older beta releases, the 2226 being the newest. See: Re: Beta 2439

Original post: Today I find that the blog link to and article about the Emerald Viewer 2439 build have been removed. A post showing statistics of Emerald Viewer use seems to replace it. Presumably when the 2439 problems are fixed the post will reappear.

There is a thread in the Modular Systems forum titled Where is the 2439 release post?

AleiaSerenity Sapphire of the Emerald Support Team posts:

there were some issues with the avatar texture feature on the pie menu  so the dev’s removed 2437 [I think Aleia meant 2439?] from the blog

I suspect it was more than just a pie menu problem, but who knows? Read Emerald Viewer 1.4.0.2439 Released – Review and look at the bugs we know of… I suspect the inventory problems we have been seeing has placed a load on the LL servers as people clear cache and reload inventory. But, that is speculation. Not the inventory problems… the server load.

Update 8/15/2010 – Be sure to read Emerald Viewer Scandal Erupts… Again

Qarl Linden Departure/Layoff – Second Life Issues

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(Update 2010-08-10) After Phillip Rosedale’s July 30th meeting many of us, while cautious, were more optimistic about the future of SL. Many things in this latest round of layoffs are puzzling and shaking our optimism. But, none are more puzzling and disconcerting than the layoff of Qarl after the 30th meeting. In this article I’m writing about what I have learned about issues in and changes coming to SL and comparing Phillip’s talk with his walk.

Much of what was said Friday the 30th comes under questioning with the subsequent layoff of Qarl. The reason for that is the contribution Qarl was making to SL. How can a company that has a highly productive employee, that apparently consistently solves complex problems with innovative solutions, be released if the company is about fixing problems? This is sort of like a coach with the best pitcher in the league claiming he is going to concentrate on a pitching game and then trading off the pitcher… everyone is going, “WTF?”

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