Second Life and Virtual Worlds
I’ve seen and played a little with Black Desert’s character creation tool. I speculated about character creation in Project Sansar: What will Character Creation be like in Project Sansar? with a video of the character creation from Black Desert.
Massively Overpowered points me to the release date announcement for Black Desert. Word is: March 3rd, 2016 – a Thursday… Much sooner than most anticipated.
https://youtu.be/v6rmBCMBJWs
Learning to play…
There are no rollouts this week to either the main or RC channels. As there are no RC updates this week there will be no update to the main channel next week (7). There is no information I am aware of about new packages for the RC channels for next week.
You may remember that last week’s server updates were about fixing problems that appear when server run for more than a week. I was speculating that this week they would be testing those fixes. They have already had QA and testing on the RC channels that make up about 20% of the main grid. Now they are getting a test as the ‘production’ software.
By this time next week we will know how well they did.
Comments in various places have me thinking the majority of the Lab’s effort on Second Life is now on the Project Bento. But, I suspect some changes will be needed on the server side. After all, the project only runs on certain servers in the ADITI (preview) grid. So, it could be that all server changes and fixes are being built for the Bento capable packages. As they need a break in the rollouts to test long term server stability, it may be saving them some work. Rather than build changes for the pre-Bento servers just build the fixes for Bento capable packages.
Some time ago the Lindens added the ability to enable and disable new features in the servers. So, our next server rollouts could be Bento capable, but with the feature disabled… or not. We’ll have to wait and see.
This got released Friday (2/5) and I didn’t catch it until today. The post is here: Drax World Makers Episode 36: Project Bento.
There was a preview released Wednesday (2/3). I think after watching the two the plan changed at some point.
Both are neat videos in their own right…
Occasionally a project takes me off on an unusual tangent. Researching for a recent project I came across Harvard University’s The Inner Life of the Cell. A medical illustrator David Bolinsky spoke at T.E.D. about the video he was working on in 2007. (A better copy of the video than I show here is at T.E.D., but I can’t embed that one.) I thought these too neat not to share.
The collection of animations created by Harvard for their project can be found here: Harvard Multimedia. The 8 minute video The Inner Life of the Cell can also be found at YouTube, which is what I have below. It is a poorer quality than you’ll find at the Harvard site. If you watch from the Harvard site I recommend you use Internet Explorer.
Over on SLUniverse Han Held quotes Prokofy ripping on the idea of Project Sansar® being a democratizing force in Virtual Reality (VR). I would send Prokofy glasses, but I doubt she’ll ever see the world anywhere near the way I do. But, she does raise the question of whether Project Sansar can democratize VR. That is worth addressing.
So, first what is democratization? Merriam-Webster defines the word as; to make (a country or organization) more democratic, an alternate defintion: to make (something) available to all people or said another way: to make it possible for all people to understand (something).
I think the Catznip viewer for Second Life™ has been around since about the time I joined SL, early 2008. Inara Pey has been covering viewers since before then. Her earliest article on Catznip, that I found, is September 2011. I suspect there were earlier ones. My earliest is February 2011, back when I was looking for the best viewer and doing reviews.
In my 2011 review I was noting that Catznip had not updated for about a year. At the time Catznip was not listed in the Linden’s 3rd Party Viewers list. It is now, as 1 of 8 full feature viewers.