Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Linden made series of viewers
This past Friday was the Third Party Developers’ User Group meeting. This one was longer than recent ones and lots was discussed. Video:
Project Managed Marketplace Viewer (VMM) version 3.7.25.298865 – A new version of this Project Viewer was released Friday. A blog post about it was being prepared Friday (2/13). A feedback meeting is planned. Brooke sounds like a politicians when talking about the meeting. It is going to be about explaining the feature and getting feedback.
Jo Yardley has posted about the graphics available when world builders use the Unreal Engine. See: Stunning demo shows what is possible in VR graphics with Unreal Engine.
I am sure it will be pretty awesome to use the Oculus Rift HMD in a world like this.
Ciaran Laval has an article up on his site that gives a good summary of recent changes in Second Life and coming changes. See: Linden Lab Ask Us To Check Out Improvements To Second Life. I’ve mentioned some of these weeks ago but he goes into more detail and collects them into one place.
Daniel Voyager has a similar article: Linden Lab publishes upcoming improvements to Second Life.
Directly from the Lab: Check Out the Latest Improvements to Second Life.
It seems some Kokua users have had some problems with the 3.7.24 (previous) version of the viewer. Also, some on third party grids have seen the viewer crash. But, Kokua does make an OpenSim version that is more compatible with OpenSim grids. See: Kokua-3.7.25.35124 Released
There was no Beta Server UG meeting this week. The Lindens were meeting to decide on which projects would be planned for implementation in 2015. With any luck we’ll hear what they decided, at least to some degree.
I am hoping they decide to work on the viewer’s caching system. I’m tired of coming home to a grey house, something I can do several times per day when I am in Second Life.
I am also hoping they get the Avatar Render Cost feature working. My hope is they will flash a value on screen when you add any new attachment to the avatar. I think it would be great to have that happen when trying on mesh demos. I think it would put pressure on designers to make more render efficient items.
The main viewer is now version 3.7.24-297623. (Release Notes) This is the viewer with reduced pipelined texture and mesh fetching timeout. So stalled connections fail quickly, allowing earlier retry. The timeout value changed from 150 seconds to 60 seconds for textures, and from 600 to 240 seconds for meshes.
PrimPerfect has an article up on photography. It talks about Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan, and Wildstar Beaumount being interviewed in a ‘first’ show on Second Life Photography. They say a second show will look at post-processing of Second Life images.
The first show was this past Monday at 2 PM in Garden of Dreams at the Designing Worlds studio. Next Monday they will air the second show. You can catch the replay of the shows at the Treet.tv web site, on the SLArtist.com channel, the Aview TV Designing Worlds channel or on the Designing Worlds blog.
Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix is aware some people are having problems getting Sparkles 50% discount. To help them out she has posted: Troubles getting Sparkles Discount.
This week the main channel gets an update. It is the Experience Tools permission fix update. Release Notes.
Last week a new maintenance viewer became available in Alternate Second Life Viewers – Download: Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.25.298030. According to the Release Notes there are over a dozen fixes: (Note MAINT JIRA items can only be accessed by Lindens. So, I omitted the links.)