Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Massively Overpowered has an article by Bree Royce, I think she wrote it, titled SEX, LOVE, AND MMOS in the Working as Intended column. Second Life™ is mentioned but is not the focus. The image used for the article is from Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Maria Korolov has written: Bright Canopy’s viewer in a browser supports voice, uploads, OpenSim grids. She is talking about the Bright Canopy beta that is in progress now. This version runs in an Internet Browser using the FRAME system. She explains how it works.
One of the challenges in using a streaming service is that the actual viewer is running on a remote server. Your computer is sort of doing remote control of that viewer. So, saving files (pictures) can be a problem as the local drive the viewer sees is on the server, not your home computer.
The financial people think it is Facebook and Apple that are positioned to win in the Virtual Reality War. But, it won’t be a fast war. It will last years. Quoting Chris Ciaccia :
[A] Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster stated that virtual reality is likely the next key trend in technology, writing, “We liken the state of virtual and augmented reality today as similar to the state of mobile phones 15 years ago. It likely will take a decade before mainstream adoption as necessary improvements in displays and applications as well as lower pricing are needed to drive demand.”
They expect new virtual everythings to open up; gaming (obviously), live sports, concerts, immersive cinema and social experiences will have a VR version. The article, Facebook and Apple are Poised to Win the Virtual Reality Wars, gives us, at least me, some new ideas about VR can be used.
This morning (Wednesday) Linden Lab rolled a new package to the RC server channels. This afternoon, about 4:30 PM SLT, they rolled the RC channels back to the previous version.
This happens when something goes side ways and crash rates, complaints, or server metrics show a problem.
We have no word on what the problem was. Expect word to come in the Beta Server user group meeting Thursday.
Simon Linden gave out a note card at Tuesday’s Server-Scripting user group meeting in Second Life™. It gives us the Debug Settings we can change to improve performance at events with lots of avatars.
To get to the viewer’s Debug Settings you need to have enabled the Advanced menu. There are a couple of ways to do that. In the SL Viewer open Preferences – top menu: Me->Preferences then select the Advanced tab. Enable Show Advanced Menu. This will reveal ADVANCED in the top menu. Click Advanced->Show Debug Settings.
No roll for the main channel of Second Life™ this Tuesday.
Second Life’s three RC channels all got the same package, a maintenance release. This one has a change in how large groups are handled. I think meaning the member list downloading. There are also more changes to the server log reporting process.
At the Server-Scripting meeting Simon Linden talked about adding a setting to allow them to change the number of avatars a region will allow in before locking access. But, I doubt that change made it into this package.
The idea being worked on is how to get more people in a region and not over load the server or viewer. This new server/region setting allows easy changes to max population for the purpose of testing. That might hint at what the additional changes to logging are about.