Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Second Life Wiki is editable now. That changed a week or so ago. But, in the process we lost a lot of newer wiki pages. Plus lots of people were waiting to update information on various subjects in the wiki. So, far the last few days I’ve seen a lot of activity in the wiki. In the last 24 hours about 600 pages have been added or edited.
Release Notes for the Experience Tools Viewer (3.8.0-298001) popped back up today. The page includes a link for the viewer.
I came to Second Life as part of a group of Myst fans migrating when Myst Online: Uru Live closed, again. That was 2008. By 2009 some of us were attempting to unite Myst fans across numerous games and platforms. There was a lot of contention about playing Uru Live anywhere but on official Cyan Worlds servers. But, as there were no official Cyan servers, fans were building parts of Uru in various games.
One of the efforts was titled Devokan. Dot and Paislee were the main movers and shakers of that effort. I got to play in Devokan and enjoyed the RP and beautiful regions.
MadPea has made an announcement about their coming game/hunt that starts February 1st. An interesting aspect of the game is Geo-Caching, commonly now written as: geocaching. In RL these games are taking advantage of the GPS in the new generation phones of the last couple of years. GPPS coordinates are used to hide and find ‘geocaches’, things hidden somewhere on the planet.
MadPea is working out some way to have geocaching in Second Life. They will have an early opening for bloggers January 30th, a Friday. Not a good time for me. So, plan to check Inara’s blog. I am guessing she’ll make it to the RSVP event.
The main server channel was updated today with a maintenance package. Release Notes.
The three RC Channels will be updated to a single new package, another maintenance release. This one has fixes for the Experience Tools package. It is planned to roll out Wednesday. Release Notes.
The project requires a number of viewer side changes to see and use the new tools. Those are in the RC Experience Viewer version 3.8.0.298001. The download link is here: Alternate Viewers Second Life.
Seems everyone is blogging something about photography in Second Life and how wonderful it is with SL Go. I’ve used SL Go and it is a great way to go, if…
If your computer is old, under powered, has a weak video card, or you need to be mobile then SL Go is the solution. You can get faster rendering and run on Ultra graphics settings. But, if you have a good desktop, SL Go offers faster scene rendering and that is about it. Textures load quickly and while I was using SL Go I never saw a texture fail to render leaving me with a gray something in the scene. These are big pluses and I am certain improve the SL experience for many.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6XiUkyPQ-w&list=PLU0zXG43b-07gSjWjGPWbkt2XGbsQiQ7S&index=1
However, there are two things that have made my photographic experience in Second Life more enjoyable and neither of those are available for SL Go users… well, actually one. The Firestorm Photo-Tools and SpaceNavigator are the two things that make my photography easier and better. Firestorm is available for SL Go (reference – Dec 2014). So, the Photo-Tools are available for SL Go users.
I’m just getting around to looking at last Friday’s (1/16) Third Party Developer’s meeting. See the video here.
The viewers in the RC pipeline are; VMM, Maintenance, and Experience Tools.
The Experience Tools Viewer is somewhat held up by backend issues, which are being worked on now. So, there are no changes to this RC Viewer.
Viewer Managed Marketplace – nothing new in this RC Viewer.
Hover RC Viewer – (download) Vir Linden was telling the group 1/16 this new Project Viewer was in QA. Vir was thinking it would be ready in week 4 and the RC test version of the server side did make it to a main grid RC channel in week 4. Due to Wiki changes and fixes the RC downloads page does not yet have this viewer available for download. Inara in her coverage has a link in: SL project updates 2015 week 4/1: Avatar Hover Height along with examples of the features and instructions for using it.
You must be in a region that supports the feature for it to work. For now that is only Blue Steel regions. If the region does not support the feature the controls will be grayed out.