Firestorm

Second Life News 2014-44

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Servers

The Deploys of Week post is up. The big news is CDN.

Oops! Don't Panic 2014
Oops! Don’t Panic 2014

CDN

The Content Delivery Network upgrade will roll to the main channel, the entire grid, this week. That will be happening Tuesday morning.

RC Channels

All three RC channels will get the same maintenance package. The detailed release notes are not out yet. All the Deploys post says is there are ‘some improvements’. We’ll probably see more information coming out tomorrow (Tuesday).

Snack Channel

The Snack channel is a small pre-test RC channel. It is used when the Lindens want to start out with a very small sample for testing. It was used for the initial testing of CDN. It is no longer needed and the regions in the Snack channel will be rolled back into the channels they were previously in and the Snack channel will disappear until it is next needed.

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Second Life News 2014-41 #3

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Viewers

The main viewer is 3.7.17-294959

Server Scripting 2014-41
Server Scripting 2014-41

RC Viewers

A Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.17.294943, which is on the Alternate Second Life Viewers page. You can read its release notes here: 3.7.17 Release Notes. Fixes and improvements are:

  • Voice – These updates fix a number of problems. Oz is encouraging dev’s to get the updates for voice into their next releases.
  • privacy
  • rendering
  • texture animation
  • avatar distortion (Avatar distorted when changing outfits)
  • inventory management
  • sounds
  • mouselook in Mac
  • scripting crashfix
  • multiple UI fixes in script editor, Pay flow, chat, stats floater, edit menu etc.

Login Viewer version 3.7.17.294959 – Release Notes – This is the viewer with the new login screen. 

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Second Life Viewer Tips + Firestorm

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I’ve been attempting to do more video/machinima in Second Life™. I also make tutorials from time to time that can be improved by the use of video. And just the other day read Jo Yardley’s Comparing the official Second Life viewer with Firestorm. While reading I realized both she and I need to know more about our alternate viewers. She uses the Firestorm viewer as her main viewer. I tend to use the SL Viewer more than Firestorm. I am switching back and forth between the two more often these days. The Photo Tools in Firestorm are the enticement that draws me to Firestorm.

Server-Scripting UG 2014-39
Server-Scripting UG 2014-39

I am more familiar with the SL Viewer. But, I have used Phoenix or Firestorm off and on since the great viewer purge… when Emerald was excommunicated.

Chat

If you do machinima you want to kill chat and notices. Depending on the type of video you plan to make you may want to still have the user interface showing, like tutorials. Both viewers have a load of chat settings. A big difference is Firestorm puts most them out in the User Interface (UI) where users can more easily get to them and remember where and what they are. 

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Second Life News 2014-35 #3

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We have a bit of news from the Third Party Developers Meeting from Friday, 8/29. Chakat Northspring videos the meetings. You can follow him on YouTube and catch those meetings a few hours after they happen.

Loki's Experience - 2014
Loki’s Experience – 2014

Viewers

Viewer news from Oz Linden is pretty thin, his word. I’ve covered most of the viewer news earlier in the week. Oz basically said at this Friday’s Third Party Developers Meeting that projects discussed at the previous meeting are still ongoing and there is no new news on them.

I think this is basically the lull in feature development and bug fixes that comes from the Lindens stopping to work on development tools and upgrade to the new compilers. It is an analogy to car manufactures that stop production of cars to retool for production of the next model year cars.

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Kokua Viewer Released for OpenSim

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The Kokua team made an announcement. They will be spitting development of their viewer, forking in geek speak. They will make a viewer for OpenSim and one for SL.

Pathfinding and various other things work only on one grid or the other. Now that Linden Lab is going to a CDN system the incompatibilities between is such that OpenSim servers and hosting system will have to change. This is going to be significant incompatibility. The OpenSim host will have to think about how they will handle it. Will OpenSim grids move to CDN? I have never looked into the cost of CDN service, but it is a cost. In the low income realm of OpenSim any additional cost is a problem.

So, as of Kokua Viewer 3.7.8.35024 the Kokua team will be putting out an SL and an OpenSim version of the viewer. This latest one is for OpenSim.

There was a duel use viewer released, I think, as 3.7.12. But, it was having problems on some grids. The numbering indicates a bit of a regression for the OpenSim versions.

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Second Life Bits 2014-35

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Skill Gaming

Ciaran has an article up on what Skill Gaming is. If there is any confusion on your part check it out. See: LL Issue Reminder And Warning On Skill Gaming Policy. His information is based on Linden Lab’s latest: Reminder: New Skill Gaming Policy in Effect September 1, 2014.

Be sure to check out the comments below that article. It seems they are a bit one sided… Where do all these negative people come from?

Video for Noobies

Purdie Silkmour made a video that popped up on YouTube today: How To Improve Your Appearance in Second Life. (11 minutes) This is much better than your typical SL How To. Purdie does a great job of showing how to change avatar appearance and gives a good taste of the verity in Second Life. Plus they get to see search in action and learn how to find shapes, skins, etc. It isn’t just about the technical details of using SL. Nice!

[youtube j0vwEfO8O44]

I think the big problem is how to get this video in front of new SL users. This would be a good URL to save and give to new peeps you meet.

It seems there is a series of these videos… well two. 

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