Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Hypergrid Business keeps many of us up to date on happenings in the OpenSim side of virtual worlds. They currently have an article up on expansion and contraction in the OpenSim worlds: Regions, grids hit new record highs.
It is a good headline. In the first paragraph Maria, author, points out that active users on public grids fell by 909 to 30,000. So, even though I consider Maria a bit of a fan-girl for OpenSim, I consider her reporting accurate enough to give us the good and bad news.
Strawberry Singh has a meme called What’s Your Digits? It is about shape and mesh bodies. So, what can I add to that?
If your new to Second Life™ you may not know the viewer’s appearance editor reports the wrong height for avatars. You can check this yourself by rezzing a cube and stretching it to whatever height you think you are. Make it phantom and walk into it.
Various games made in Second Life™ are showing up in the news. I think the reduced news flow coming out of the Lab has bloggers looking for things to write about. There is a lot inside SL to write about.
Honour has an article up about a build in SL named: End of the World as We Know It. See her article and pictures here. Some regions just can’t be done justice in a still photo.
Flying through with via camera and walking through are different experiences. I suggest walking.
Wednesday a new package rolled to the RC channels, all three. This page has a couple of changes:
The OBJECT_BODY_SHAPE_TYPE flag returns the avatar gender type, 0=female and 1=male. Basically <1 = female. Values in between are permitted… but, I’m not sure what good they would be.
The idea is that scripts can now detect avatar gender and play the correct animations.
The OBJECT_HOVER_HEIGHT flag returns the Hover Height value, between -2.0 and 2.0. This is the value in the shape, not the newer Hover Height slider accessed by right-clicking the avatar. I have no idea how this might be used.
One of the Lab’s people is speaking at April’s HackbrightPRO event on Thursday, April 16, 2015 (6:00pm – 8:00pm) hosted at the Linden Lab office in San Francisco. I suppose all are invited. Register/RSVP and get more information here.
There are two featured speakers; Julie Russell, IT Manager, Medium an online publishing company, and Tara Hernandez, Director of Systems & Build Engineering, Linden Lab.
New streaming services are popping up to replace OnLive. Soon you should be able to once again stream Second Life™ to your device of choice… at least for a time.
Ciaran Laval has an article up about possible replacements for SL Go, the app and service for streaming Second Life™ to mobile devices. Bright Canopy is one of those working to take the place of Onlive, SL Go’s creator. See: Bright Canopy Beta Testing Frame For Second Life Streaming In A Web Browser.