Things about SL
Monday was a US holiday, Labor Day. Many business are closed and that includes Linden Lab.
Je Vis Dans Ma Grotte
Last week in anticipation of the holiday the server news was posted. There would be no roll to the main channel and on Wednesday we get a roll to the RC channels.
The description of what it contains is brief: logging changes. Continue reading
Saturday 9/3 is/was Firestorm Viewer’s sixth year out. Well, Phoenix-Firestorm. They announced it this morning. They tend not to say much until just before they open doors. I think that is to keep the region they invite people to for a party from being over run.
Happy Birthday Cake!
See the announcement: Happy 6th Birthday Firestorm Project.
Congratulations! Well done.
Every so often someone figures out a new way to scam those in Second LifeTM. Seems a new scam has popped up.
After The End
Links are placed into comments in group chat. Most of us just paste a URL (http://www.someplace…) in and keep going. BUT… SL chat has the ability to make text links (link), text hiding the URL. Seems those are being used to mislead people to a hacking site. The bait is some promise of free or cheap goodies in the marketplace. Continue reading
There was no Project user group meeting this week. Some of the users showed up and there was some discussion. Not much of substance was related while I was there, about 30 minutes. Also, no one was using voice. Conversations were in local chat.
Since there was no voice used I sped up the video by 100% (x2). I also added some of the Server Scripting user group meeting. It too is in local chat without voice… x2.
It is looking like several people expect Project Bento to go into RC status this month. I expect the project to stay in RC status for longer than most candidates do. We have to wait for AvaStar and MaysStar and possibly MaxStar (?) to stabilize, people to learn to use them, start uploading animations, and reporting bugs.
Once the project has an RC my interest jumps up. I’m not a good enough animator to deal with the mechanics of how it works and be helpful. My ‘why does it…’ questions with ‘because you did or didn’t…’ answers would slow things down.
I like to have a collection of tutorials to which I can send new Second Life™ users. Every so often I update my in-world note card list. I give that to new players I meet.
Strawberry Singh has a series of introductory(?) videos and she is adding to and updating her collection. Her post Introduction to Second Life is pretty much an outline of those videos. She has done a good job of answering questions new users have. Including signup, downloading, and installing the viewer, something often missed by tutorial makers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t3tNQ_53us
I find 1 or 2 posts a month in the Second Life Forum asking how to get into SL. These are people that signed up but somehow didn’t realize they needed to download the viewer. It has been a while since I signed up a new avatar. So, I don’t really understand how they miss understanding they need to download the ‘game’. I just know they do. And these are people that write well when posing their question. So, they aren’t mentally handicapped or simpletons. Continue reading
Tapple Gao is providing a free tool for those doing movement animations, e.g., walking. You’ll find a copy in the marketplace here: Walking and Turning Test Treadmill. It is free.
Animation Tool
The idea for the tool was to provide a way to eliminate skate from animations you create. With some walking and running animations my avatar appears to skate across the floor/ground.
With this tool you can play the animation, as opposed to wearing and having to ‘move’ to play it, stand in place, start the treadmill, and see if your feet and the treadmill are in sync. If not you’ll need to adjust the time scale of your animation.
Handy.
I’m into math. So, I think it would be nice to have a control that would let me speed up or slow down the treadmill by a known percentage. While there aren’t any buttons for that. Apparently I could do that via the chat interface.
By knowing how much to speed up or slow down my animation I would be able to eliminate a lot of trial and error testing.
A day after I publish my server and viewer updates the Lab releases a new version of the Visual Outfits Browser (VOB) viewer: 4.0.8.319143.
New Visual Outfits Browser Project 2016-06-07
You can download a copy from the Second Life Alternate Viewers page.
This viewer adds a tab to the Appearance Outfits panel. In that panel an image is associated with each outfit. You can take a snapshot, upload it, and use it for a thumbnail of the outfit. Yes, you do have to pay for the image upload, L$10 (US$0.04+/-). But, you can use an existing snapshot and save the L$10.
It is a nice feature. I have just under 300 outfits (today – I have demos in my want-to-get folder that will become outfits). Something like 150 are older classic avatar outfits (those will get converted to outfits using my mesh body or likely be deleted). But, 300 x L$10 = L$3,000 or US$11.50 for the photos. So, provided the Lab makes a profit on image storage, this could add a bit of income.
I did create the outfits over the 2+ years we have had the outfits feature. So, I’ll probably spend US$2 to $5 per year on outfit images.
Not everyone will do that and some will already have done it. There are those that have been storing an image of their outfits in inventory along with their outfits. But, the possible income from one additional outfit image per week per user… 52 images per year times say 600,000 users (31 million images) times say 50% (15.6 million images) being interested in how they look enough to be into outfits would give the Lab a gross income from Outfit Images of 15.6m x L$10/L$260/US$1 = $600k. From that we have figure out what percent of the Lab’s labor, electrical bill, hardware cost, any additional hardware cost, bandwidth cost… should be subtracted from that income.
I doubt this is a big money maker for the Lab… It is going to save me a bunch of time picking outfits.
Now… if I could have folders for outfits…
No rollouts this week, main or RC channels. Caleb Linden says they will be returning to the regular schedule of rollouts next week. It is vacation time.
Bianca II
I think this is the third week the main channel region I live in has not been restarted.I think the last restart was 8/9. Caleb has posted that if you region is having problems contact support and ask for a restart or file a JIRA describing the problems.