Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This is not the week for news. Because of the US holiday Thanksgiving Second Life™ is in technical lock down, no changes. So, there are no server upgrades this week, main or RC channels.
Viewers are included in the tech freeze. So, the main viewer at version 4.1.2.321518 will remain there until Monday 11/28 or later. Word is it is much more stable than the previous version. It has a lot of fixes.
I like science and math. Science is the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. To practice science one needs observations and experiments.
On the observation side, Nov 19th the NOAA GOES-R weather satellite was launched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_k637XQUOM
Launches and later positioning are not as simple as one might imagine. Getting into a geo-stationary orbit at the correct place is no simple thing. It is expected to take 16 days to maneuver and test the satellite before it is in the right place. Then a year of testing follows. Depending on the results and the health of other GOES satellites this new satellite will park over either the east or west coast of America.
Daria of Mesh Body Addicts blog has a video explaining Bento. It is great for the person that is just interested in knowing enough to understand what it is about and what the difference between the classic skeleton we have not and the new Bento Skeleton,
Daria promises to provide more information in a future animation.
The people working with mesh clothes will notice Daria’s ideas about collision bones is a bit off, not as precise as one would need for a tutorial. But, for a light weight explanation she is accurate.
Awesome. Thanks.
I’ve put what I consider the big news from the meeting in the post: Peace Comes to Second Life… Really?!? If you are having problems with things that use mouselook, read that article.
The Maintenance RC Viewer was promoted to the main viewer: 4.1.2.321518. There are a lot of fixes in the update. But, it includes the fix from previous versions that broke mouselook weapons and other mouselook stuff. For details on the bug read the Peace Comes article.
A bit of trivia…
When Catwa released their beta mesh head membership in the Firestorm Preview Group shot up to about 4,800. So, the Firestorm team has been getting feedback on their viewer’s changes and Bento features. That is a good thing. It isn’t solid technical information but, problems are being noticed and …complained… about. So, the team can track them down.
Seems the Catwa people posted a link to the Firestorm download. You may have noticed I’ve never posted a link. I told you you can find it by joining the Firestorm Preview groups and becoming a tester. The links are there. The Firestorm people apparently weren’t happy with Catwa. So, when they released a new version they changed the link URL, it would change in any case, and blocked the old preview viewer that Catwa linked to. I am sure a large number of people were complaining to Catwa about not being able to log in with he preview version they got.
The Intel HD Graphics 2000 and 4000 series chips have a driver problem. This has been a thorn in my side the last 3 months as clients want it fixed and Intel has yet to resolve the problem, AFAIK (Nov 2016). It is known to be in their driver… or what Microsoft has Windows 10 do with it.
I keep hoping for a fix and update. If not soon, I probably will put cheap video cards in the desktop machines and tell the laptop users they are pretty much screwed until Intel or Microsoft fixes it.
The problems on the MAC/Apple side are bad enough the Lab has been holding up release of a 32-bit version of the MAC viewer.
The latest information I have seen is here (Nov 2016):
I’ve been trough every fix I can find for machines using HD 4000 series video chips. Some machines continue to have problems. Restarts help.