Second Life Forum Cover Photos

I spend time helping people in the SL Forum, mostly in Answers. A question came in about making a Cover Photo… a what?

SL Forum Profile with Cover Photo

When logged into the forum open your profile. There are a couple of ways to do that. Up in the upper right click your name and select Profile. Or on any forum page where you have posted click your profile image. Continue reading

Second Life News 2016 w/49

Servers

The main channel got the RC package Tuesday. This is another of those packages with “minor internal” changes.

Homo Faber 3

Homo Faber 3

The RC channels got a new package too. The release notes tell us:

  • Adds Feature: BUG-6377 llGetObjectDetails(id,[OBJECT_ATTACHED_SLOTS_AVAILABLE])
  • Adds Feature: BUG-40871 Add new llGetEnv() constant “region_object_bonus”
  • Internal Changes

These features haven’t made it to the wiki yet. They are at this point beta versions of the functions. The SLOTS_AVAILABLE item is for those working with Experiences. It is handy to know if an avatar has used up all the attachment slots before trying to attach something else to the avatar. Continue reading

Second Life’s Not So New News

Yesterday Linden Lab posted  in their blog about new improvements coming to Second Life. If you follow my blog, Ciarans’s or Inara’s, you already know most of what they wrote about.

Snapshot_029

Snapshot_029

Project Valhalla is the project viewer where they are changing from Webkit to Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). I’ve been writing about this change since 4/2014 (Reference – speculation). They Lab started talking publicly about the coming viewer change in early 2015.

Rendering Complexity / Quick Graphics – I’ve been writing about doing something like The Avatar Render Complexity feature since late 2014. I filed a feature request in December 2014 (BUG-7928). I doubt mine is the reason we got the feature. I suspect the reason for getting the feature was mostly discussion in Oz Linden’s Monday morning Open Source meeting. Whatever the case, it is close to being added to the main SL viewer.

Notifications – This viewer feature is a change in how we will receive notifications. This feature came on the radar in July 2015.

Mesh Importer – This improvement has been in discussion for a couple of months and made it to the main viewer a couple of months ago.

Inventory Robustness – It is hard to say when work on this change started. The Lab has worked on and been adding inventory improvements for a long time. This particular problem of losing no-copy-items that failed to rez is more recent.

If you follow the Server Deploys notices in the SL Forum, you probably had not have realized this feature rolled out.

HTTP Project – this is actually a much larger project than they convey in their post. It has been on going for a couple of years and appears will be continuing for some time. Parts get added as they are completed.

SecondLife.com – The SL Web Site is changing. They are removing Flash and if any QuickTime was used then likely that too. They are moving up to HTML5. CEF is how HTML5 handling is added to the viewer. These changes sort of go together. Parts of the web site are used by the SL Viewer, i.e., search, profiles, etc.

Since the viewer will real soon now be able to handle HTML5 via CEF it makes since for the web site to abandon Flash.

Not So New

Between Inara, Ciaran, and myself there are a few thousand SL Users that keep up on SL Development news. That is out of several hundred thousand monthly users. The SL Blog doesn’t show how many people have read a post. The forum does. It is rare any post in the forum gets a thousand readers. But, as the blog articles are in the splash screen of the SL Viewer, more people may read the blog.

So, while the news may be old to you, for most SL users their post is news.

#SL Follow Me Coming?

Today I had an email coming from secondlife.com saying someone from SL was following me… O.O

/me looks around…

New Follow Button

I checked a friends profile to see if I could follow them. I used the https://my.secondlife.com/nalates.urriah URL. The new button is not there.

I only found the Follow and Friend buttons on the https://my-demo.secondlife.com/nalates.urriah

I guess this is an ‘in developement’ feature for our profiles.

 

 

 

SL Community Help

Some of you know about the changes that have been going on in the resident run and volunteer help groups. Some months ago Linden Lab disbanded the existing Linden run help groups because stats were showing new users getting help from the group were less likely to stay in Second Life. So, some other type of user support was/is needed.

With the forum changes we are seeing an effort to reshape the community and support systems. We have a new knowledge base and an answers section in the community forum… blogrum… wikrumog… whatever that thing is we have now. Also the team responsible for getting it working is having open meetings, office hours. You can find them at: Community Tools User Group

Continue reading