Second Life and Virtual Worlds
CtrlAltStudio has released a new version of their Oculus Rift Viewer: SDK 0.6: 1.2.5.43397. The announcement is here: CtrlAltStudio Viewer Updated to Oculus SDK 0.6: 1.2.5.43397. You’ll find the viewer works in Direct and Extended Rift modes. There are lots more little details discussed in the announcement. I find this interesting, quoting David Rowe: I … Read more
There are some dates for Rift delivery, a SDK 1.0 December 2015. Don’t confuse the DK1 and 2 with the SDK’s that have been coming out. The consumer CV1 Rift will finally be delivered, sometime in Q1 2016.
David Rowe believes the Lab will finalize their Rift Viewer when the consumer Rift has a release date. When that happens he plans to stop development of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer. Until then he says;
Simon Linden Tells us:
Yes some of the chat servers have been having troubles in the last few days. I’ve been looking into that … the code running there isn’t super new, and the outages might be timed with some of those [hardware update] restarts.
In any case, there is an update soon for the chat servers, and already another in the pipeline.
This week there are no rolls for either the main channel or RC channels. Next week is a no change week. So, I expect no roll outs that week either.
We can expect tweaking to the CDN system. This week whatever they are doing that requires multiple restarts is ongoing.
The main reason for no updates is the hardware updating requiring the restarts scheduled for this week. Estimating time for any individual update or the group is difficult as Simon says, “We also have to actually open up the server box and look inside to see if it needs an update, so it’s random how long each one takes.
This shouldn’t do anything grid-wide, aside from extra region restarts.”
There is a new article up on the Firestorm Viewer site. See: Be Careful What You Wish For. I can read a lot into the article. That doesn’t mean I have it right. The things I am pretty sure of follow.
We have known for some time that the FS Team planned a viewer release for November. It seems the release date is sliding. I am guessing Jessica is feeling pressure or anticipating blowback from users when the release goes out and thus posted the article. We know from her own words blogging is not a thing she really enjoys. Thus we can assume something is motivating the post.
Jessica is explaining the difficulties of releasing a viewer and deciding what is and is not going to be in this release. Her estimated release date is ‘a few weeks’… the word ‘few’ is ambiguous. Dictionaries define ‘few’ as a small number of things. As examples they give 2 to 5. But, in my family 2 to 5 was a ‘couple of’ and ‘a few’ was closer to 10. We have no way to know what ‘few’ means to Jessica. But, I suspect this puts a viewer release nearer to the end of November and possibly into December.
There is a roll going to the main channel this morning. The Deploy thread in the forum describes it as ‘minor improvements’. Not much to go on.
There is no package ready for the RC Channels. Caleb Linden says there will be no roll of the RC Channels.
I am seeing more people complaining about texture loading and render stalling and things remaining gray or blurry. It is still a small number of people, which means the Lindens are not going to turn their attention to the problem. They are watching for problems from Pipeline and CDN changes. So, that may reveal the problem.
If you are consistently running into the problem, file a JIRA. To helpful the Lindens needs lots of detail and a way to reproduce the problem. If this is a timing issue, the Lindens may not be able to reproduce it from within the Lab, they are sitting on the servers and miss out on some of the problems we see.
I suspect most people know there is a lot of CG in moves these days. This is an interesting video showing some amazing CG work.
Have you heard of #GamerGate? I suppose it has been growing for days. The long and drama filled story can be found here: GamerGate: A Closer Look At The Controversy Sweeping Video Games.
#GamerGate is drama just as we see in Second Life™. Only on a larger scale. It is a story complete with sex, vigilantes, hacking, rage quits, and all the rest.