Second Life and Virtual Worlds
I’ve been missing User Group meetings. Yesterday I was finding a work-around for a business class HP Laserjet Multifunction Printer that kept forgetting where to send document scans. I decided HP has totally destroyed their driver & software download site. Frustrating. It used to be simple.
But, even if I had been at the meeting, there isn’t much news. As there was no package for the RC server channels last week there is no main channel roll out this week.
Not much development news this week. I’ve tried to fluff it up with interesting news.
No update to the main server channel.
Jo Yardley has posted about the graphics available when world builders use the Unreal Engine. See: Stunning demo shows what is possible in VR graphics with Unreal Engine.
I am sure it will be pretty awesome to use the Oculus Rift HMD in a world like this.
Ciaran Laval has an article up on his site that gives a good summary of recent changes in Second Life and coming changes. See: Linden Lab Ask Us To Check Out Improvements To Second Life. I’ve mentioned some of these weeks ago but he goes into more detail and collects them into one place.
Daniel Voyager has a similar article: Linden Lab publishes upcoming improvements to Second Life.
Directly from the Lab: Check Out the Latest Improvements to Second Life.
There was no Beta Server UG meeting this week. The Lindens were meeting to decide on which projects would be planned for implementation in 2015. With any luck we’ll hear what they decided, at least to some degree.
I am hoping they decide to work on the viewer’s caching system. I’m tired of coming home to a grey house, something I can do several times per day when I am in Second Life.
I am also hoping they get the Avatar Render Cost feature working. My hope is they will flash a value on screen when you add any new attachment to the avatar. I think it would be great to have that happen when trying on mesh demos. I think it would put pressure on designers to make more render efficient items.
The main viewer is now version 3.7.24-297623. (Release Notes) This is the viewer with reduced pipelined texture and mesh fetching timeout. So stalled connections fail quickly, allowing earlier retry. The timeout value changed from 150 seconds to 60 seconds for textures, and from 600 to 240 seconds for meshes.
PrimPerfect has an article up on photography. It talks about Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan, and Wildstar Beaumount being interviewed in a ‘first’ show on Second Life Photography. They say a second show will look at post-processing of Second Life images.
The first show was this past Monday at 2 PM in Garden of Dreams at the Designing Worlds studio. Next Monday they will air the second show. You can catch the replay of the shows at the Treet.tv web site, on the SLArtist.com channel, the Aview TV Designing Worlds channel or on the Designing Worlds blog.
Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix is aware some people are having problems getting Sparkles 50% discount. To help them out she has posted: Troubles getting Sparkles Discount.
This week the main channel gets an update. It is the Experience Tools permission fix update. Release Notes.
In last Friday’s meeting all the Linden news was covered in 8 minutes. The entire meeting was only 30 minutes. Not much in the way of new information or to talk about. There are even fewer things of interest for general users.
Brooke Linden spoke about Viewer Managed Marketplace project and their progress. She says they are still incorporating user feedback. A new viewer is coming with the feedback implemented, probably in week 6… or 7. There will probably be another round of user feedback before the project goes to beta. The timing is definitely that beta will only start sometime after the Valentine’s holiday. How much after is undecided and depends on user feedback.