Second Life and Virtual Worlds
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Linden Lab (LL) has said this quarter we would see the release of the new meshes. (Second Life Meshes Update) May be for Second Life’s 7th birthday we may see the new meshes. Those working with them have been under NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) and not talking. The rumor is LL released them from their NDA and then re-imposed it. During the time they were released quite a bit of information made it out.
Updated 2010-06-14 – 2 Added
Tateru Nino at Massively wrote an article on why she thinks the layoffs are an indication of a cash crunch at Linden Lab (LL). See: The Virtual Whirl: The bottom line
The Second Life cash supply is very much like the real world cash supplies of nations. They all print money as they think it is needed… or to serve their various agendas. But cash supplies are not absolute control. One can print lots of money, but if no one buys/takes it then nothing happens. Citizens have a say… or at least an effect on cash supply.
Both Second Life (SL) and OpenSim (OS) are advancing; changes, updates, events, people. Several are small things that I doubt deserve their own post but are worth noting. Also, I’m part of a Myst-Uru fan community. So, some things come from far outside the normal SL/OS circles.
In August of last year I wrote about meshes coming to Second Life. We have a type of mesh in SL now, they are called Sculpties. But sculpties have lots of limitations. Placing textures on them and controlling LoD (Level of Detail) is complex and they tend not to show their real shape until we get close. They are also slow to render, starting out as a sphere.
The meshes we are about to get are what I’ll call free form meshes. T. Linden is telling us today that we will get them some time in Q2. Yay! See Second Life Blog: Q2 Coming Soon: What’s Ahead For Second Life
Linden Lab gets sued often enough. A recent one is from the maker of the Rez Tool for use with the Emerald viewer. See Weird in Emerald Viewer Fast Rez Tool.
But this new suit could touch us all. It could go class action. A serious attorney that has made his case before is in action. Over at Massively see: Evans et al vs Linden Lab: The new lawsuit on the block.
If you own or have owned land, currency, things, made products, and essentially in some way had ownership in something within SL, you will want to follow this law suit. The claim is LL has taken properties without due process. The attorney, Jason Archinaco, of Pribanic, Pribanic, and Archinaco LLC of Pittsburgh, has made this point before and LL settled out of court.
Those that have had accounts closed and lost money or other materials of value may recover some of that loss. It will be interesting to see how this progresses.
This morning Linden Lab released Viewer 2.0 and opened the new resident Help Island. New World Notes gives you a glimpse of the new user experience. We old residents can’t visit there. It is supposed to be better and should help retain more new users. We’ll see.
The new Second Life viewer is very much like the Beta 2.0 viewer. The Lindens say lots has been fixed and changed. Other than the side panel not messing up my HUD’s I didn’t see much in about 30 minutes of use.
In announcing the new Second Life 2.0 T. Linden tells us what Linden Lab has learned from their research and what they are focusing on. See: Unveiling An Improved New Resident Experience
KirstenLee has released another update on her S20 viewer now version (12). It has the new MOAP (Media On A Prim) feature. Her user interface makes more sense for existing residents. I still get those slow motion freezes where the Frames per Second (FPS) drop to 1 or 2 and ping goes to 50,000ms… If I get the region IP address I can ping it from out side the viwer and get a good ping, 80ms to 200ms. So, I doubt it is my connection. The previous version of Emerald and Snowglobe were doing the same thing.
She has fixed the chat and IM’s so they are more usable. In general it’s a nice viewer… and of course it does shadows.