Second Life in the News Week 14 #2

Another article on Second Life has popped up. It seems this one is spawned by the video promoting Remnants of Earth. You have likely seen it on several SL related blogs. (5 min video)

If you were starting to imagine the media was becoming more… accurate, balanced, truthful, and actually researching their thinking before writing, give that idea up. This writer seems to have formed most of his opinion of SL from watching the video.

See: Players Build An MMO Within Second Life, Looks Amazing.

At least there no erect noob photos… So, this article while not as accurate as it could be, doesn’t present SL in a false light. …if omitting comments about lag in a game like this isn’t a concern.

I am curious how gamers, the EVE and WoW type gamers, will review Remnants after they try playing it.

 

Second Life: Who is Using Which Viewer?

We seldom get stats on how many are using which viewer. But, there is a post over on Gaming World about the Imprudence Viewer and they include the most stats I’ve seen in a long time. Or so I thought. This page just popped up in my reader, but it is dated 2/23/2015… and the data seems to be much older.

It Can Be So Nice
It Can Be So Nice by Mr S. is looking at you, on Flickr

See: Gaming World Imprudence Viewer. (read on before you click) If you are clicking to the page, WARNING: be careful where you click. The page is full of ads and most clicks will speed you to someone’s ad site. 

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High Fidelity: No Chat? How To Install

For those that just want to get chat installed and go, scroll the end of this article. For those that want to know why there is no chat in High Fidelity and how people are handling that, read on.

High Fidelity Open Alpha
High Fidelity Open Alpha by Daniel Voyager, on Flickr

As one starts to look at the documentation for High Fidelity (HF) they will come across the interesting bit of news from March 3: Announcement: High Fidelity is not going to host a text chat system. Well, that could explain why there is no apparent way to text chat in the current Interface (viewer). There once was, but it has been removed.

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Second Life: Crap… SL Go Closing

They could not announce this yesterday. No one would have believed it. I still chased down the announcement just to be sure. It is on the SL Go site.

SL Go Closing
SL Go Closing

It seems SL Go was bought out by Sony. There has to be some tech there that Sony wants for their VR. But, they aren’t interested in continuing the SL Go services. So, we have a number of users that are screwed.

However, SL Go is free until the end of the month, April 30, 2015. Click.

Tech Crunch has more details. See: Sony Is Buying OnLive’s 140 Cloud Gaming Patents.

Second Life Server & Viewer Update

Viewers

A new version of RC Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.27.300323 is out as of 3/31. I am running it. I have had had little time with it. I can’t tell if it is a problem or if the Second Life™ servers were just lagging. Whichever it was, rendering was painfully slow. Every time I moved or turned my head FPS would drop to 5 or 6.

♥ Bubbles Life ♥
♥ Bubbles Life ♥ by cry wolf, on Flickr

Yesterday 3/30, RC Tools Update Viewer version 3.7.27.300242 appeared. This version is about the build tools related to Visual Studio 2013, Xcode 6.1 compilers used to build the viewer. 

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High Fidelity: Marketplace How To

Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity Virtual World now has a Marketplace 1.0. A blog post made yesterday gives us more details on how to use it and its current purpose. See: Marketplace 1.0.

Second Life founder Philip Rosedale talks about his new company High Fidelity during OpenCo
Second Life founder Philip Rosedale talks about his new company High Fidelity during OpenCo by Steve Rhodes, on Flickr

About payment systems Philip says, “we will probably initially tie asset payments to credits earned sharing computing resources with others (which is not yet enabled but also coming soon).   Then real-world currencies.  And yes, we are thinking about crypto-currencies and blockchains.

This suggests that if you are running a Stack Manager and sharing your computer’s computing power, you will earn in-world credits/currency. Eventually the funds will likely be exportable as real dollars.