Second Life News Week #40 & 41

Flickr

There are new changes over at Flickr.

Ebbe

Ebbe Altberg, the Linden Lab CEO, talks about what investors should consider and ignore when investing in virtual reality. See Three Things to Focus On, Three Things to Ignore (Podcast).

Third-Party Dev UG Meeting

There are 4 viewers out. Plus, the main viewer. The Ordered Shout Down RC is looking good. From that I would gather it is the current likely bet for the next promotion. The Maintenance RC is doing OK. The project viewer for EEP has a couple of bugs yet to fix. New employees specializing in graphics now available to work on those. So, hopefully… A Voice RC viewer should be out next week, maybe.

Voodoo Moon

Voodoo Moon

From the Firestorm peeps, the Firestorm release is going fine. No real problems found yet. Adoption is good.

There was a discussion about BoM adoption and use. The opinion seems to be things in the fashion community are still way disorganized.

Blogger Awards

If you are looking for people that blog, vlog, or photograph Second Life then you just hit found the pot at the end of the rainbow, Ballot for the 2019 Bloggie Awards. The ballot is 38 pages of categorized URLs.

Voting is open until Oct 19, 2019. But, you have to vote in every category… tedious… before you can submit any vote.

Also included is ‘best’ at photo-friendly. So, if you are looking for places that provide interesting backgrounds and gorgeous scenery this is a handy list. Continue reading

Second Life News Week #37

Destinations Video

Experiences

Many of you will know Experiences have been borked. The Lindens have a fix, sort of… See their SL Blog post on their fix. See Experience Scripts Experiencing Trouble.

The bug is BUG-227526Issue with compiled experiences being lost when a script is copied in-world.

The Shrek Ears Thing

If you used Places Pages in 2017 then you noticed a problem back then. They were suddenly gone. Seems a developer ran a clear & reset script on the live database of Place Pages. Then they found out the database’s backups (plural) were scrambled.

The result was the database could not be restored. That data was gone. So, Place Pages had to be rebuilt by the page owner. It also meant ALL the SL backups were tested to make sure they would work if needed.

It was purely human error. A bummer. But, I bring it up now because from it we learned about Shrek Ears in the Linden offices. You’ve likely seen the movie or at least the trailer so you know what Shrek’s ears look like. But what they mean in Linden circles is unique and SL lore now. The full story is here, “Re-experience the fun of customizing your Place Page!” A Tale of Oops from Ops. Check it out to learn what the Shrek Ears thing is about. Then you’ll understand why some Lindens were recently wearing Shrek Ears… the recent problem with Experience scripts. Continue reading

Second Life News Week #36

General News

SL Travel

Ever wonder how the SL travel and places blogs find those awesome places?

It seems the Blogger & Vlogger Network has a list of them. (here) They also have a form one can fill out to add to the list. So, they find these places when people stumble-on or otherwise find them and add them to the list.

Only those who dream learn to fly

Only those who dream learn to fly

The list is titled Photogenic, Rezzable Sims. Rezzable? My first thought was griefers will LOVE this list. However, many of the locations require membership in a group to get rez-rights and a number of those groups have a Join Fee. About 20 of the 37 locations are listed as free. If there is a cost it is referenced in the listing. They also have the region’s maturity rating, PG, Moderate, and Adult. Nine are rated Adult, but not all 9 are hook-up places. And even those that are, look good.

The list apparently has some age. Several of the links landed me at places other than the obvious intended landing point but the correct region. However, a couple of regions were gone or repurposed.

I found Backdrop Cove (Map URL) in the list. Got some pictures. This place is not as crowded as Backdrop City. So, posing and setup was nicer. Also, you can rez stuff without having to join a group. They use a 60-minute return. It is a moderate region and the pose and animation stuff I saw was PG. Donations are appreciated. Please help out. Continue reading

Second Life News Week #34

General News

At the Server and Scripting UG meeting, Simon Linden tells us there are several server updates in the pipeline. This means we are likely to see a steady series of updates rolling out.

Oz Linden tells us that soon the server Release Notes will be moving to the new release notes system now used by the viewer’s release notes. Not everyone is happy about that. But, release notes are being moved out of the Wiki.

N552 Family Breakfast

N552 Family Breakfast

The SL Wiki has an update planned. When asked if the SL Wiki was to be phased out, Oz replied, “[2019/08/20 12:07]  Oz Linden: if I proposed killing the wiki, there a[re] Lindens who would show up with pitchforks…rest assured that it is well defended.

One of our background-priority projects that is getting some attention is updating the wiki software, actually … no predictions when that might happen, but Someday™”

So, the wiki is to remain.

There is and has been some discussion about some way of adding script cost… something like Land Impact. The idea is to push people to write more efficient scripts and to wear fewer of them. Rider tells us that is a BIG project and unlikely to happen any time soon. Plus, it is only a popular idea with landowners.

Slink @ Hair Fair – See the announcement here. The hair Slink made available at the fair has an interesting coloring HUD. Lots of coloring control. Continue reading

Second Life News Week #32

General News

The Third-Party Dev’s meeting was a couple of weeks ago. We learned the BoM and Render viewers are very close to release. The EEP viewer was/is not quite ready.

So, file your JIRA’s on BoM.

The Render viewer would have released except for it being Linden Summit Week. But… it got an update this week and did not release…

No new rendering projects until the current ones are released.

Parcel Voice has some problems the Lindens are considering solutions for. See BUG-227350. The JIRA was accepted for its value as a problem statement more so than its presented solution.

Topless Cruisers has a new hangout, Eden Naturopolis. There are 7 boat slips for rent in the area. Also, this location is often the destination point for Tuesday’s cruises. Bouncing boobies parties.

Topless Cruising Map for August 6, 2019

A number of Lumiya Viewer users showed up at the Server-Scripting UG. You probably know the UDP turn-off for assets killed Lumiya for anything but chat text use. I expect they will show up at Oz’s Wednesday morning UG for Open Source.

There is a mobile viewer in the works. But, don’t expect a Lumiya replacement this year or probably not even next year. WAY MORE people are going to have to show up at meetings asking for help.

Servers

Last week the Linens were having their Summit Meeting. We don’t get to know everything going on in those meetings. There is usually a bunch of planning going on. I suspect we will hear a bit of that news in the coming meetings. Otherwise, there has not been much news.

There is no Deploys post today.

My Zindra region has not restarted as of 11:00 AM SLT.

Simon Linden told us at the Server-Scripting UG that we will get a new RC release next week, maybe two. Continue reading

Second Life News Week #31

General News

XXX Original Event – This is an adult event… shocking, I know you wouldn’t have guessed… All sexy stuff and a load of free stuff (it all lands in the Objects folder) for Maitreya and Slink (both O & H). Plus, some of the free gifts have Standard Size versions included. There is a good percent of guy-stuff there too. And a few gag-gifts that are funny.

Aline Passiflora over on Fabulously Free caught my attention and I followed a link to the event, which ends August… something. The events are on-going. Only this event set of stuff will disappear. You do need to join the free XXX Event Group (SLURL) to get the free stuff.

Nal - Watching You

Nal – Watching You

Blender 2.8 ReleaseRelease is planned for the end of July, which is today Tuesday.

You will be able to get the new Blender here.

Hangars Liquides – Seems the sims have been saved, at least for a time. The crowdfunding effort has made over 55% of the goal. So, the sims will live past the end of July.

However, the full goal has NOT been reached. So, if you can, donate. Continue reading

Second Life News Week #27

SL News – General

Windows 10 Build 1903 – This is the current significant update from Microsoft. For now, it is an optional update.

In the SL community, a number of people have had issues after installing 1903. NVIDIA users have to use one of the newer viewers to avoid video issues when exiting the SL Viewer. The Lindens latest default viewer (6.2.3.527756) has a fix for the problem. The viewer will automatically install the update. You don’t need to do anything.

The What’s New video for Windows 10 is here…

Windows 10 1903 Optimization – This is another video that is an extensive guide. If you are trying to squeeze the most from your computer, this is the guide you will want. The changes he recommends are reversible. Continue reading

Second Life News Week #26

Getting the news out took a bit as I decided to include my own Meet the Lindens video. Pantera Północy posts his videos more quickly than I do. I get bored with his single camera angle. I also process the video to improve the audio… since my camera is moving around have to capture audio at my avatar’s location, not the more easily controlled camera location which has the audio level is all over the place if I move around. That single spot audio is not the best, so I think it still needs some help. But it is serviceable.

Other News

I’ll start off with this alarming bit of news showing where RL government is going with climate change, Climate Apocalypse? Ireland To Ban Private Cars, Import 1M Third-World Migrants. Whatever you think about Climate Change, make sure you aren’t just drinking someone’s Kool-Aid.

SL16B Crowd – The Meet the Lindens Tuesday event was attended by close to 200 people, 11 were Lindens, spread over four regions. Max per region was about 55. I didn’t crash and things worked well. People were a bit slow rendering, textures lagged, but no regions crashed. My FPS was in the 7 to 11 FPS (i5, 32GB, GTX-1060 High-Ultra Shadows + Projectors). – April’s mic was cutting out. – The video is a bit jerky. At 7FPS that happens.

Video Abstract

The video starts with Oz and April telling us about their history with Second Life™. Both were residents before they were hired by the Lab. I found this part of the video INTERESTING… Saffia is a good interviewer.

When we can get Oz or other techy Lindens talking, they always have interesting stuff to say and we learn things about the SL system.

In this Meet the Lindens meeting, April Linden confessed that 2 to 6 months ago they moved the SL inventory to the cloud. Not every detail has moved, but basic inventory (database) now runs in the cloud on much faster computers. And no one noticed, which is what the Lindens want. Continue reading