Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
Hamlet breaks the news this morning as does Jo Yardley. See: Official Second Life App for Mobile Finally Here: Full 3D Experience on Tablets Via OnLive Cloud Streaming Could Herald New Era of Second Life and Second Life goes Mobile.
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You can comment in the SL Forum here: Second Life goes mobile!
We don’t often get any insight into what Lindens are thinking about going on’s in the Lab. Today one gave us a glimpse.
I’ll wrap up and say that there’s a lot of good talking [in the Lab] going on about what works in SL, what doesn’t, what we’ve tried before and all that … as you know some changes take a lot of time and work, others can be done quickly. But overall I’m more optimistic than I was 6 months ago, and I like that.
Ciaran has an article up promoting Penny Patton’s ideas about building things to scale in Second Life™. See: Second Life Content Creators Should Pay Attention To Penny Patton.
Ciaran is focusing on a June 2013 article that Penny wrote: Building a Better Second Life. I covered it at the time it was published: Best Building Practices in Second Life.
If you haven’t read any of these articles, please do before you start building your dream home.
Have you ever wondered if your viewer and computer were rendering Second Life™ correctly? Do you see what other users see? And if you compiled a viewer, is it rendering things correctly? The answers to those questions can be found at Bug Island.
Of course showing up there and looking to see what you viewer shows you is only half the answer. You also need to know what things are supposed to look like. The SL Wiki shows you the pictures and behaviors, in movies, of what you should see. SL Wiki page: Bug Island Test.
Bliss Couture is having a closing sale. Most things are 90% off. That was a costly shopping trip.
The Second Life™ Wiki’s information on building vehicles has been updated a bit. See Linden Vehicle Tutorial and VEHICLE_BANKING_EFFICIENCY.
It is the first of the month so FaMESHed is having their monthly event. Teleport to FaMESHed.
The Google Breakpad RC Viewer is back. The Lab has found that most of the problems they had with Breakpad were caused by Windows XP. The Lab will take a new tactic with XP. But Breakpad is going to be in use for Win7, 8, and Mac… I think Linux too, but I am not clear on that.
In machines with limited memory there tend to be more inventory problems because of a crash while the viewer is closing. Latif Khalifa, Singularity & Radegast TPV Dev, explained that as the viewer closes it compresses the inventory list and saves it in the SL cache folders. (Those are the files with names ending in inv.gz.)
I’m not that into what this part of the viewer is doing or how it does it. Hopefully I have this mostly right.
If the system is almost out of free available memory, the task crashes as runs out of memory needed for the compression process. The result is not noticeable until the next login when parts of the inventory are missing. Of course the files can be rebuilt from the SL server and the inventory is not really missing, the viewer just thinks it is.
At the Beta Server User Group Baker Linden did a recap of the coming Group Bans feature. You can read that recap on Inara’s blog: SL projects update week 9/2: group bans update. She is pretty much quoting Baker, which is what I would do, so I’m not going to repeat the quotes here.
Group Bans is moving into testing on the Preview Grid. We’ll hear when the Lindens have a test viewer ready and are ready for testers to help. We will probably hear something next week (10). Third Party Viewer Dev’s will be testing their viewers as soon as the test package is on ADITI, which is expected to be next week (10).