Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
For those of us that script in Second Life the LSL Editor is a time saver. The author of LSL Editor, Alphons van der Heijden, has donated the program to the public domain, it’s now open source. Reference: LSL Editor
LSL Editor allows one to work off-line and to debug scripts outside SL. This can be a huge time saver. Plus the editor has lots of handy features. The latest release is 2.40. It runs only on Windows machines.
In August of last year I wrote about meshes coming to Second Life. We have a type of mesh in SL now, they are called Sculpties. But sculpties have lots of limitations. Placing textures on them and controlling LoD (Level of Detail) is complex and they tend not to show their real shape until we get close. They are also slow to render, starting out as a sphere.
The meshes we are about to get are what I’ll call free form meshes. T. Linden is telling us today that we will get them some time in Q2. Yay! See Second Life Blog: Q2 Coming Soon: What’s Ahead For Second Life
Linden Lab is going to roll out a replacement for XStreetSL this summer. Merchants can get-by doing nothing. Transfers to the new system will be automatic. You can read about what is coming, the timing, and see screen shots of the new system via links from Pink Linden’s blog post: Announcing the Second Life Marketplace Beta
This update will tie SL Market Place and Second Life more closely and make transferring funds between the two much easier.
Pink Linden has placed screen shots of SL Market in Flickr: Pink Linden’s Photostream
On Tuesday they will have office hours to discuss the coming changes with residents. Office Meetings in world are on May 4, 2010 at 10 AM, 4 PM, and 8 PM SLT or Pacific Time. SLURL to the location: Meeting Location
Today I see the Modular team has release an alpha version 1.3.2.1839 of the Emerald Viewer. It sounds like this release is both an advance and a step backwards.
In the advance part MOAP (Media on a Prim) and faster rez’ing have been added. I am one of those seeing slower rez’n with Emerald 1634. But, I like the features and build 1634 is more stable than Kirsten’s latest, so I use Emerald most of the time.
For use on OpenSim grids Emerald 1634 is giving me problems. I have to see if I can find out why it is not allowing me to log onto OSGrid. The error message is SL related…
On the regressive side… several Emerald features have not yet been ported over. I’ll report more on that once I get to use the viewer.
Of the hundreds of thousands that downloaded Emerald, only 40,000+ have downloaded the new 1634 TPVP compliant viewer. Obviously Linden Lab is not blocking earlier version viewers.
On another note, Hippo and Imprudence have released updates to comply with Linden’s Third Party Viewer Policy. In general, for now, that means the export features of the viewers have been crippled until they can be updated to comply with object permissions to restrict what one can export.
Most of the features I use are in the Alpha viewer. It also seems to rez things much faster. I didn’t look hard but the MOAP didn’t work. Probably needs to be turned on somewhere… Help Chat is not working, yet. Menus remain pretty much as in 1634. The new 2.0 menu arrangements have not been adopted, which doesn’t mean they won’t be. I got 35 to 60 fps on my Dual Core 2 with an 8800 nVidia.
A new Imprudence viewer is out, version 1.2.2. The Imprudence blog in a post by Jacek Antonelli states the only real change is the removal of the ability to download textures from Second Life using export. It seems it does not matter whether you created the texture or not. However, this only affects you while connected to Second Life.
So, if you are only using the viewer on grids other than SL’s, you DO NOT NEED this download. Only if you use the Imprudence Viewer in SL will you want this download. They are looking to enable permissions compliant texture download in the future.
Linden Lab gets sued often enough. A recent one is from the maker of the Rez Tool for use with the Emerald viewer. See Weird in Emerald Viewer Fast Rez Tool.
But this new suit could touch us all. It could go class action. A serious attorney that has made his case before is in action. Over at Massively see: Evans et al vs Linden Lab: The new lawsuit on the block.
If you own or have owned land, currency, things, made products, and essentially in some way had ownership in something within SL, you will want to follow this law suit. The claim is LL has taken properties without due process. The attorney, Jason Archinaco, of Pribanic, Pribanic, and Archinaco LLC of Pittsburgh, has made this point before and LL settled out of court.
Those that have had accounts closed and lost money or other materials of value may recover some of that loss. It will be interesting to see how this progresses.