Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Aka: Second Life™ 12th Birthday… its coming around again. Daniel Voyager has a post about the regions for SL12B opening. See: SL12B regions have arrived.
His picture of the World Map view shows 12 regions. Otherwise there are no announcements from planners or the Lab. In recent years the birthday celebrations have become more of a user organized thing than a Linden sponsored event.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.