Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Monday was a US holiday, Labor Day. Many business are closed and that includes Linden Lab.
Last week in anticipation of the holiday the server news was posted. There would be no roll to the main channel and on Wednesday we get a roll to the RC channels.
The description of what it contains is brief: logging changes.
Blender 2.78 Release Candidate is now available! Download links are on that page. This is an RC release and is not for production. They hope it is good as is. But, no one knows…
The Blender 2.78 Release Notes are here.
This in 2.78 (RC), or so I am reading.
Saturday 9/3 is/was Firestorm Viewer’s sixth year out. Well, Phoenix-Firestorm. They announced it this morning. They tend not to say much until just before they open doors. I think that is to keep the region they invite people to for a party from being over run.
See the announcement: Happy 6th Birthday Firestorm Project.
Congratulations! Well done.
Every so often someone figures out a new way to scam those in Second LifeTM. Seems a new scam has popped up.
Links are placed into comments in group chat. Most of us just paste a URL (http://www.someplace…) in and keep going. BUT… SL chat has the ability to make text links (link), text hiding the URL. Seems those are being used to mislead people to a hacking site. The bait is some promise of free or cheap goodies in the marketplace.
There was no Project user group meeting this week. Some of the users showed up and there was some discussion. Not much of substance was related while I was there, about 30 minutes. Also, no one was using voice. Conversations were in local chat.
Since there was no voice used I sped up the video by 100% (x2). I also added some of the Server Scripting user group meeting. It too is in local chat without voice… x2.
It is looking like several people expect Project Bento to go into RC status this month. I expect the project to stay in RC status for longer than most candidates do. We have to wait for AvaStar and MaysStar and possibly MaxStar (?) to stabilize, people to learn to use them, start uploading animations, and reporting bugs.
Once the project has an RC my interest jumps up. I’m not a good enough animator to deal with the mechanics of how it works and be helpful. My ‘why does it…’ questions with ‘because you did or didn’t…’ answers would slow things down.
I like to have a collection of tutorials to which I can send new Second Life™ users. Every so often I update my in-world note card list. I give that to new players I meet.
Strawberry Singh has a series of introductory(?) videos and she is adding to and updating her collection. Her post Introduction to Second Life is pretty much an outline of those videos. She has done a good job of answering questions new users have. Including signup, downloading, and installing the viewer, something often missed by tutorial makers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t3tNQ_53us
I find 1 or 2 posts a month in the Second Life Forum asking how to get into SL. These are people that signed up but somehow didn’t realize they needed to download the viewer. It has been a while since I signed up a new avatar. So, I don’t really understand how they miss understanding they need to download the ‘game’. I just know they do. And these are people that write well when posing their question. So, they aren’t mentally handicapped or simpletons.