Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
We were not expecting any updates this week. But, we got one. The RC channels have been updated in a surprise roll out. We will likely see the package roll to the main grid as soon as the Lindens are confident the software is working well.
This departure from schedule is due to a security exploit.
As of now the Lindens are not talking about the exploit. But, they seldom do. We might hear a bit after it rolls to the main channel. But, I won’t be holding my breath.
As expected, there are no server updates this week, probably next week. My home region has not been restarted since 2/2/2016, two full weeks. The region seems to be working OK. The server stats shown in the Viewer Statistics Panel all look good.
Not much visibly happening with viewers. But, we may see a viewer promoted this week.
I’ve been using the Linden, Firestorm, and Catznip (R10) viewers recently. I have less problems and better performance with Catznip. That is not a test result. I haven’t done organized testing. But, my subjective experience is Catznip is behaving better right now.
I do see texture thrashing when using Catznip… less of that with Firestorm. It takes some time to get there, generally over an hour for me.
Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.
Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.
You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.
This meeting ran a little over 20 minutes. It was mostly status updates.
RC Second Life HTTP update Viewer version 4.0.2.310660 – This version has the HTTP, Co-routines, and Vivox updates. The HTTP updates were driving up the crash rate so in this version they are disabled.
Cathy Foil sent me a note explaining the Project Bento updates to MayaStar. I copied, modified, and paraphrased what she sent.
The MayaStar 4.5, I’ll call it BETA version, addition runs on PC and Mac. It works with Maya 8.0 through 2016. While most of MayaStar works with Maya LT, but Maya LT is lacking some abilities and that limits what can be done with MayaStar. Cathy asks you contact her for more information if you are working with Maya LT.
Gaia Clary has been putting more of the Machinimatrix/AvaStar videos on Vimeo™. There are good reasons for doing that. Vimeo offers better monetization and distribution control. Unfortunately Vimeo has to compete with YouTube.
As best I can tell, not that many of the Second Life™ community use Vimeo. If I search on ‘secondlife’ at Vimeo, I find 6,373 videos. Doing the same at YouTube I get 572,000 hits or about 90 times more videos.*