Second Life and Virtual Worlds
YouTube is a fun site and offers lots of handy features. When we start to build things in Second Life ™ we run into some challenges. YouTube gives us some help.
See: YouTube Embedded Players and Player Parameters. As you scroll down the page you’ll eventually find the commands to add to a URL to get the video player to do what you want.
There are people that have figured out lots of tricks that can be done with the YouTube player. For instance, see: 10 YouTube URL Tricks You Should Know About.
Just a couple of days ago RC1 was released. About 2 hours ago RC2 was released. See: Avastar-2 RC2 is available. There is a download link on the announcement page to the new version.
This version has a fix for an export problem.
As the Second Life™ system advances more of the content will be transferred to the viewer by HTTP protocol. This takes load from UDP and the region server-simulators and moves it to the Content Delivery Network (CDN).
We expect some degree of region performance improvement, especially in crowded regions with lots of avatars. But, there may be a cost for those on slow Internet connections. It is hard to estimate the impact on those with slow connections. But, there are things they can do if they see performance degrade.
You may not realize that US$1.9 billion of NASA’s 2016 budget (US19+ billion) was going to climate study. If my sources can be believed. The 2017 NASA Transition Authorization Act (S. 442 – link) supposedly reallocates the funding. Figuring out exactly how is unclear, at least to me. But, the words ‘climate’ and ‘weather’ do not appear in the text of the bill. Nor are all dollars assigned a place other than NASA.
Following this bill gets bit confusing. Sen. Ted Cruz introduced a bill prepared in the Obama days: S.3346 – National Aeronautics and Space Administration Transition Authorization Act of 2016. It got tabled as the 114th session of Congress (2015-16) ran out of time.
Ben Lang at Road to VR has written: ‘Sansar’ Will Open to All in First Half of 2017 with a New Approach to Virtual Worlds.
Ben repeats the Lab’s emphasis that Sansar is NOT Second Life 2. Ben explains the Second Life (SL) was a single large persistent world. He never mentions that SL was originally intended to be a virtual world platform for game prototyping. Users changed that idea.
Sansar is explained as being a platform more than a virtual world. Sound familiar? Go back and read some of the 2004 to 2008 promotional information.
Ebbe Altberg, CEO Linden Lab and director of Sansar, says the Lab never decided if SL was for developers or users. That has changed in Sansar. It is for developers and developers will deal with attracting users… right.
Today I see AvaStar has a release candidate out: AvaStar 2.0-RC1. This version is available to all AvaStar owners that have a current subscription. I’m unsure how that affects AvaStar 1.7 owners without a support subscription.
The Plan is to have AvaStar 2.0 out in March 2017.
Gaia is promoting this release a hot potato with some likely rough spots. It’s hard to know if she is just lowering expectations or if there are known problems. Whatever the case, this is the update you’ll want.
Discussion is active in AvaStar Support – 13:15 SLT.