Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
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.
This Monday is a Holiday in the USA, Labor Day. The Lindens are off, so not much happening at the Lab today.
Maestro Linden posted Friday that because of the holiday there would be no roll of a new package to the main channel. They are postponing it until Wednesday. Then the maintenance package running on the RC channels will roll to the main channel.
This week there will be no roll outs to the RC channels. All regions in the main grid will be running the same package.
No changes in the Linden made viewers since I posted Saturday.
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.
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.
Sovereign Engineer let me know they have released a new version of the Alchemy Viewer. That put this viewer at version: Alchemy Viewer Beta 3.7.14 – TPV Celebratory Beta. There is a nice write up on the page.
This release comes out with 64-bit versions for Windows and Mac. The 32-bit versions are available too.
This version uses a new font on the UI. It has feature to allow use of legacy profiles, but those panel have been redesigned to conform with the rest of the UI. It includes a region tracker, which I assume lets you track the online status of a region from anywhere in SL.
The download file for Windows is about 33mb. Today’s download was a bit slow. But, I was trying to download about 2:30PM, peak usage time for the Internet in my area.
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.
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?
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.