Second Life News 2014-23 #3

We did get some news from the Third Party Viewer meeting.

RC & Main Viewers

The Memshine RC Viewer is the one the Lindens are hoping they can promote next. But, of the four current RC Viewers it is a tossup as to which will actually be promoted. By next week they will have enough data to decide which viewer can be promoted.

Classic Starting Avatars - 3rd of 3 sets

If the Memshine RC can be promoted that will open three RC slots as the Memory, Sunshine, and Memshine would all be considered as complete.

As of this morning (Saturday) the 3.7.8 version is still the main stable release. 

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Second Life News 2014-23 #2

ADITI Grid Fixed?

For weeks… well months… we have had problems with the Preview/Beta Grid (ADITI). Logins and inventory updates were not happening. A password change would show up everywhere in the SL except the Preview grid. Which mean all of a sudden people could not login, unless they tried their old password.

Also, inventory updates were not happening. In the recent couple of weeks fixes were made. The Lindens did get the password problem resolved. But, the Lindens tell us an unrelated prevented the inventory updates from happening.

Those are now thought to be fixed. I plan to give it a few days before changing my password and trying for an update.

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Second Life Viewer 2014-23

There is a new RC Viewer out: MemShine Viewer version 3.7.9.290582. This viewer is a combination of versions; MemPlugs Viewer version 3.7.9.290405 and Sunshine Viewer version 3.7.9.290131, I have been writing about for 3 weeks or so. I think this version has new fixes for each of the parent versions.

Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo
SL Viewer
SL Viewer

This combining of RC versions appears to be an attempt to speed up the release of changes made to the viewer. It seems once again viewer release speed is holding things up. Limiting viewer releases to two per month is a basic guideline the Lab adopted to avoid annoying users with too frequent updates. It would seem the result is things are backing up. 

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Second Life Bits and News 2014-22

The Memorial Day holiday is over in the United States. I’m back and staff is back to work at the Lab.

Content UG 2014-21
Content UG 2014-21

Servers

This week there are no server rollouts.

I’ve seen a couple of comments about unusually intense griefing. But, I haven’t seen it happening in my travels, but SL is a big place. I know there are some places that get lots of attention from griefers. Other regions like mine seem to seldom see a griefer.

I do get noobies coming from a landing hub that get trapped in my house and can’t figure out how to get out. It is sort of like having flies in the house… they fly around bumping into the walls.

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Second Life Bits 2014-21 #3

Blender – Baking Normals

I came across a simple to the point video tutorial on baking normal maps in Blender 2.6, which is enough like 2.7 it doesn’t matter. He manages to crash Blender before the end. But, the important part is complete by then.

[youtube bck1eU4e8xo]

SVVR

We are seeing more videos of the SVVR conference. The sound in the current batch is awful. Rumor is some professional grade videos are coming. I am waiting.

Second Life Down Time

The Thursday down time is being postponed. See: Scheduled Maintenance. Presumably the problem from Tuesday that stalled the main channel’s rollout and pushed the RC channel rollouts to Thursday are the cause of the postponement. 

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Second Life Bits & Pieces 2014-21

The basic SL News is here; servers and viewers. But, there isn’t much to say about those so I’ve mixed in the bits an pieces of news from around the grid.

Second Life will be down for an hour on Thursday, 22 May beginning at 7am PDT. If you are in-world you won’t be ejected. But, you won’t be able to do much. Avoid pulling things out of inventory or changing outfits. Of course don’t attempt any Linden$ transactions. Building is probably out of the question.

This has something to do with the assets database and backend systems.  Firestorm will have the grid status on screen as usual. I’m not sure how many people will notice. I’ll have to see if the SL Viewer’s splash says anything about it.

If the SL Forum is working (I suspect it will be), we’ll see a load of people asking why they cannot login.

Server Rolls
The main channel will get a roll Tuesday. This will be the maintenance release that was running in Magnum this past week. This is a fix for a network issue occurring in busy simulators.

Server RC’s
The Blue Steel and Le Tigre channels will continue to run the AISv3 update package for Server Side Avatar baking. The Sunshine viewer is getting updates and hopefully went into QA today. 

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