Second Life and Virtual Worlds
At Friday’s Third Party Developers meeting Oz Linden was asking from some specific help and changes in behavior from the Third Party Developers. I’ll get into the what and why with this post.
The Lab is making new ways of doing things and working to make all the Second Life™ system’s processes more robust, which I take to also mean more efficient and reliable. One way of accomplishing that is changing more and more processes to use HTTP and CDN (Content Delivery Network).
The fate of the Second Life Linux version viewer is now up to the Linux community of Second Life. In the Third Party Devlopers’ meeting Oz Linden spoke about the Lab’s Linux support for the near term future. Basically the Lab is going to provide less Linux support.
There are two reasons; one is the Lab’s limited resources and second the new projects they will be starting in the next months or so, which I take to mean late May or early June.
Oz Linden in the Third Party Developers’ meeting mentioned that the Tools Update Viewer made it to main viewer status. That means the Lab is now fully committed to building viewers with VS2013.
Since the Tools viewer got promoted the main viewer is less crashy then previous versions 2% less. That is a significant improvement. While 2% may sound like a small number, it is a significant improvement.
At this weeks Third Party Developers’ (TPD) UG meeting Brooke Linden provided an update on Viewer Managed Marketplace (VMM).
The VMM beta has launched on the main grid. They are limiting access to the beta for now. Also, VMM is currently only in English. In a couple of weeks the localization (multi-language support) will be in place. You can get more information about VMM in the wiki’s VMM FAQ. Additional information is in the Knowledge Base: VMM. And there is technical information on the VMM API here.
Looks like we have another mesh body out, EBody by ABAR. The Mesh Addicts blog has a review of the body. See: New Mesh Body Review – EBody by ABAR. The actual review is on another page, I’m not sure why they did that, unless it is the nude avatar…
They show the nude body, HUD, and list compatibilities. But, they include no ARC comparison, which is a shame. I got the demo so I could look to see how dense the polygon mesh of the body is.
I started with my nude base avatar with hair, ear rings, Slink hands and feet. It has an ARC of 54,127. Adding the EBody and alpha layer the ARC jumps to 131,391. In my article Second Life: Mesh Body Revolution I used a bas avatar with an ARC of 44,571 (9,556 less than the current base). A Slink body pushed that to 59,251. Maitreya’s mesh body pushed the ARC to 94,381. On this 44k avatar EBODY would come in at 121,835. So, EBody is the highest ARC of the four.
VMM or Viewer Managed Marketplace, is getting close. There is a recent wiki page that was created in November 2014 that has just updated. The beta testing information is still there. It instructs one on how to get involved in testing and refers people to the LS Knowledge Base for more details on using VMM.
