Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This past Friday was the Third Party Developers meeting. Chakat NorthSpring has a video of the meeting: Second Life: Third Party Viewer meeting (21 November 2014). These meetings are consistently getting shorter. This one is down 30± minutes or so.
A couple of extra Linens were in attendance Friday; Brooke, Xiola and Bazz.
Oz Linden did his usual recap of viewer devlopment. He says they have lots of stuff in progress.
We have known for a short time that a revised Market Place tool is coming to Second Life™. Yesterday the Lab posted that they have a Beta Version running in ADITI, the preview grid. The announcement is here: Viewer-Managed Marketplace Available on Aditi. (VMM)
There is a JIRA Project for reporting bugs and requesting features. More information on using the new Market Place is available here: VMM Beta Knowledge Base.
The Merchant Outbox is out. We will now have a new management tool that opens from within our Inventory panel.
If you’re like me you are wondering how this affects existing items we have in the market place. According to the KB there is a way to migrate listings in the Market Place to the new system. It appears we are basically finding the UUID, or some kind of ID, of an existing listing in the Market Place and matching it to a folder in our inventory.
For information on how all this works, see the KB article.
The Lab posted The Hardware Issues Behind Recent Region Restarts yesterday.
This is an excellent description of the problem. If you are unfamiliar with how rack servers are setup you may want a little more explanation.
The image above shows a classy looking rack server. If you have ever used a docking station with a laptop, you have an idea of the way they can work. Not all servers are so easy installed or removed from the ‘rack’.
Letter 19 was hard. The cookie was not bad. The hiding place for the clue was not surprising. The hint in the letter is right on. The problem was having to be supper zoomed in on the clue to see it. I looked at that the clue’s location a dozen times before I asked for a hint and a couple of times after. Then I finally opened up the Build Tool and started doing area selections and counting the items selected until I saw an anomaly. Then I started deselecting things until I had one item selected that I could not see. I finally got zoomed in close enough and it rezzed when my camera was in the right place. Frustrating.
The Mysterious Letter was hard to find. I spent a lot of time looking for it. It is well hidden. There is no problem with it not rendering, it is just very well hidden. But, as with most of the important clues, it is visible if you are looking in the right place.
Inara Pey has written a good rebuttal to a rather retarded article appearing on MoviePlot.com by Marlon McDonald. You’ll find that article here: These Strange Stories Prove Second Life Isn’t The Dreamworld You Believed…
Inara’s rebuttal appears on her blog and to MoviePlot.com’s credit they have posted a version of the article. See: A rebuttal to one-dimensional writing and The Strange Stories about Second Life that Totally Miss The Mark!
Main stream writers are producing less and less information that is accurate or connected to reality. Much of what is written and published is to serve one agenda or another. We are seeing more and more non-journalists correcting matters. I am not saying that Inara isn’t a journalist or reporter. I am saying that the majority of journalist/reporters are not doing the job we expect from them.
I congratulate Inara on an awesome rebuttal with supporting references. Please visit the her article on MoviePlot.com and leave a comment. This is a good page to save a link to for future reference and to hand out when some other lame article appears.
Philip Rosedale the current CEO of High Fidelity and former CEO and founder of Linden Lab/Second Life was interviewed. Ciaran Laval has an article up on the interview. See it here: Philip Rosedale At Gigaom Roadmap – Sci-Fi, Virtual Worlds And Beards. The original Gigaom interview video and article are here: The gap between virtual reality and sci-fi is shortening. This is mostly video, 30 minutes. At the beginning it comes across more as a setup promo than an interview, IMO. But, becomes apparent they are explaining HiFi to an audience that likely doesn’t understand virtual worlds or Second Life(TM).
Ciaran has done a good summary of the interview video. So, I’m not going to redo it here.
An interesting point to me is Philips take on people being able to self govern. In today’s world people are taught it takes a strong central authority to govern. About 240 years ago the American founding fathers thought people could self govern and built a structure to limit the power of government. Seeing similar thinking in this day and age is surprising.
Another interesting concept is the idea of creating a system that is open as possible. This means open source, open content format, and very much a free market.