Second Life: Introduction/Beginner Tutorials

I like to have a collection of tutorials to which I can send new Second Life™ users. Every so often I update my in-world note card list. I give that to new players I meet.

Strawberry Singh has a series of introductory(?) videos and she is adding to and updating her collection. Her post Introduction to Second Life is pretty much an outline of those videos. She has done a good job of answering questions new users have. Including signup, downloading, and installing the viewer, something often missed by tutorial makers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t3tNQ_53us

I find 1 or 2 posts a month in the Second Life Forum asking how to get into SL. These are people that signed up but somehow didn’t realize they needed to download the viewer. It has been a while since I signed up a new avatar. So, I don’t really understand how they miss understanding they need to download the ‘game’. I just know they do. And these are people that write well when posing their question. So, they aren’t mentally handicapped or simpletons.

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Second Life VOB Update

A day after I publish my server and viewer updates the Lab releases a new version of the Visual Outfits Browser (VOB) viewer: 4.0.8.319143.

New Visual Outfits Browser Project 2016-06-07
New Visual Outfits Browser Project 2016-06-07

You can download a copy from the Second Life Alternate Viewers page.

This viewer adds a tab to the Appearance Outfits panel. In that panel an image is associated with each outfit. You can take a snapshot, upload it, and use it for a thumbnail of the outfit. Yes, you do have to pay for the image upload, L$10 (US$0.04+/-). But, you can use an existing snapshot and save the L$10.

It is a nice feature. I have just under 300 outfits (today – I have demos in my want-to-get folder that will become outfits). Something like 150 are older classic avatar outfits (those will get converted to outfits using my mesh body or likely be deleted). But, 300 x L$10 = L$3,000 or US$11.50 for the photos. So, provided the Lab makes a profit on image storage, this could add a bit of income.

I did create the outfits over the 2+ years we have had the outfits feature. So, I’ll probably spend US$2 to $5 per year on outfit images.

Not everyone will do that and some will already have done it. There are those that have been storing an image of their outfits in inventory along with their outfits. But, the possible income from one additional outfit image per week per user… 52 images per year times say 600,000 users (31 million images) times say 50% (15.6 million images) being interested in how they look enough to be into outfits would give the Lab a gross income from Outfit Images of  15.6m x L$10/L$260/US$1 = $600k. From that we have figure out what percent of the Lab’s labor, electrical bill, hardware cost, any additional hardware cost, bandwidth cost… should be subtracted from that income.

I doubt this is a big money maker for the Lab… It is going to save me a bunch of time picking outfits.

Now… if I could have folders for outfits…

 

 

Second Life News 2016 w/35

Servers

No rollouts this week, main or RC channels. Caleb Linden says they will be returning to the regular schedule of rollouts next week. It is vacation time.

Bianca II
Bianca II

I think this is the third week the main channel region I live in has not been restarted.I think the last restart was 8/9. Caleb has posted that if you region is having problems contact support and ask for a restart or file a JIRA describing the problems.

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Second Life: Third Party Viewer Meeting

Second Life: Third Party Viewer Meeting (video)

Current RC viewers are all having elevated crash rates. We’ll see new releases of them with various fixes as the Lindens try to get the crash rates down to what we have with the current default viewer, which dropped the crash rate significantly.

So, we very likely won’t see a viewer promoted to main status this coming week 35.

Under the Pumpkin Moon Hunt
Under the Pumpkin Moon Hunt

There is a new maintenance viewer coming. It should appear this coming week, but may be not. It could get hung in QA.

Oz Linden is expecting to get the 64-bit version of the viewer out as an RC soon. Oz says it is coming along and they are spending more time on it. There are some ‘corners’ to clean out according to Oz.

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Second Life News 2016 w33

Servers

Is there a roll to the main channel this morning? There was a release candidate running on the RC channels this last week. But, my in-home restart tracker and the Grid Status page do not show a restart on the main channel this morning (7:25 AM SLT/PT).

2016.0816
2016.0816

There is no update in the Second Life Server – Deploys thread.

Grid Status shows a schedules restart for the RC channels tomorrow, Wednesday. But, is this a real event or just an automated post from a standing schedule? No way to tell.

My guess is something didn’t work as expected in the RC package running last week. It will get a revised version tomorrow. And there will be no roll to the main channel.

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