Second Life TPV News Week 23

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Last week’s TPV user group had lite attendance. But, the meeting ran just over an hour. We got some new information about Second Life™ and a tiny bit on Project SANSAR (published separately).

Ready to roar
Ready to roar by Leonorah Beverly, on Flickr

You may also have noticed that Inara and I both are breaking the news coming from the TPV Dev’s meeting into multiple articles. That lets me get them out faster. You also don’t have to wade through long articles with parts of less or no interest to you.

Oz Linden was having trouble with the settings in the viewer he was using during the meeting. The Firestorm peeps were putting some good natured trash talk on him about being able to save settings. If you use Firestorm you know it has a save settings function. 

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Fashion and Political Correctness

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Fashion is big in Second Life™. I am never sure if SL is leading RL trends or following them. I think I can provide examples of both cases. But, I’m not that big into fashion, so I would be arguing the point with limited knowledge. That is usually a popular path that leads to disaster.

Izzie's - Geanna Frostbite Skin fair for C88
Izzie’s – Geanna Frostbite Skin fair for C88 by Lila Quander, on Flickr

I am politically active and I am seeing lots of liberal/progressive writers coming down on fashion designers and bloggers. The new politically correct term dividing people is now “Cultural Appropriation”. Writers like Taylor Bryant have bought into the idea and are helping out by promoting aversion to Cultural Appropriation. 

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Second Life: Chrome Embedded Framework Update

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Linden Lab is apparently making lots of headway on putting CEF support in the Second Life™ Viewer. They will have a project viewer out ‘real soon’. The Lab will need someone in the Linux community to step up and move that new code into the Linux viewer. If not, the Linden Linux viewer will go way out of date.

Chrome Girl
Chrome Girl by Stuart Williams, on Flickr

I think this will be an awesome change in the viewer. WebKit is used now and it is a bit of an orphan.

This will allow developers to use more HTML5 to develop panels in the viewer. It will also affect many parts of the viewer. There are also possibilities for what can be done server side.

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Second Life: Calling Card Bugs

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Linden Lab has found and is in the process of fixing Calling Card (CC) bugs in Second Life™. Recent work has found some CC problems affecting performance. One fix LL will likely put in is a feature to remove duplicate CC’s.

_Second Life__091
_Second Life__091 by Jo Yardley, on Flickr

Having a CC triggers lookups at login and other times during a secession. With some people having 50k calling cards that puts a heavy load on viewer and server. An older but common tip for improving viewer performance is deleting all your Calling Cards. If you are not using them, there is no point having your viewer doing the work to update CC status for those avatars. 

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SANSAR and Open Source

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You probably know that Project SANSAR aka SL 2.0, is going to use a proprietary viewer. If we were really lucky, there would be no viewer. The new world would be web ready. But, I get the impression that is out. More and more I think it will be via app only.

ISTE22april2010_006(b)
ISTE22april2010_006(b) by Chris Smith, on Flickr

In any event an open source viewer for SANSAR  is not currently in the cards, at least for the initial release and probably for sometime after the main release. 

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Firestorm Viewer Update

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The Firestorm Viewer Team is deciding whether to go into feature freeze in 2 weeks and release a viewer version 2 weeks after that. They want to avoid having a viewer out without Viewer Managed Marketplace when the Lab starts their 30-day countdown clock on VMM implementation. That could leave FS users out in the cold on VMM. The real issue with VMM is for those using MagicBoxes. But, the team is anticipating FS users would not be happy.

poche doughnut
poche doughnut by Estella Thereian, on Flickr

If you do nothing with your Marketplace items then auto-migration will eventually run and migrate you. That will eliminate anything you are still selling via magic box. There is no longer a need for magic boxes. The new system does all the things that MagicBoxes did. 

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