Second Life Bits 2014-46

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Radegast Viewer

Ciaran and Inara quote from a post on the Radegast Viewer Blog. Radegast is a light weight viewer handy for the visually impaired. The developer is Latif Khalifa. For health reasons he is no longer able to develop the viewer. It is open source, so someone may take it over.

Sad… I wish the best for Latif.

Server Scripting Meeting 2014-46
Server Scripting Meeting 2014-46

Ebbe Altberg at Engadget

As noted in an earlier post Ebbe was on a panel in New York at Engadget’s get together discussing virtual worlds in apps beyond gaming. There is little in the discussions about SL2 other than closed beta will likely start mid 2015. Both Ciaran and Inara have more to say about what was discussed. I still see most of the VR talk as hype about what great things they are GOING to do. I am waiting for it to solidify into something we can touch and do. But, knowing how people see VR developing is good for perspective and has some predictive value.

For a summary see: Virtual reality has a future beyond video games, and it’s already started. 

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Second Life Main Viewer Failing

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There are a number of people reporting (11/11/2014) that the update to the now default/main viewer Second Life Viewer 3.7.20 (296071) Oct 29 2014 10:40:27 (Second Life Project Snowstorm) has created problems. The viewer will not run. In most cases it crashes at VFS (Virtual File System) initialization.

Blood Letters - Letter 10 - Not these. The hint says 'canvas'
Blood Letters – Letter 10 – Not these. The hint says ‘canvas’

I am running Second Life 3.7.20 (296355) Nov  3. It does not have the problem. It runs. But, we do not yet know if version 3.7.20 (296071) crashes on all computers or just some. Judging by the size of the response in the forum, a dozen or so, I would say just a few.

It is possible to run other versions of the viewer. The basic trick to being able to install a different version of the viewer is to enable automatic update and  ‘Willing to update to release candidate.’  If not enabled, the viewer will attempt to download and install the main viewer ASAP. The setting is in Preferences->Setup. The setting is also the default setting.

The active thread about this error is: Second_Life_3_7_20_296094_i686_Setup, is anyone else having an issue with this like me? The related JIRA is BUG-7776.

A Clean Install does not fix the problem. Dump version 3.7.20 (296071). Install a different version. You can find the Second Life RC (Release Candidate) Viewers and Project Viewers here. 

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Blood Letters Play – Second Life

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This is sort of a spoiler… I won’t be revealing the things one really has to figure out, no puzzle answers. But, I will be explaining the mechanics of the game and some experiences. I feel my experiences are not going to spoil the puzzles. But, they may. So, read at your risk.

Blood Letters is a hunt through various shops in SL. Many you will know. There are two items to find for each letter/clue in the hunt. The hunt has a story, which is the adult part. Thus most all of the hunt is visually safe for work.

Blood Letters 2014
Blood Letters 2014

Day 1 – Letter 1: Not quite what I expected. This is where I learned it was more ‘hunt’ than game. But, so far it is fun and safe for work, but decidedly adult. Her panties were getting wet… that qualifies as adult.

The first puzzle to solve is getting the HUD (L$400), which is way easy. Find a vendor, purchase, and wear the HUD. The rest is not so intuitive. Getting the letters is the next step. I was told we can only get one letter per day. Well, sort of true. 

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Blender 2.73 Planning

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Ton Roosendaal regularly shares his Blender developers meeting notes. Blender Nation summarizes them and links to the notes.

A feature being added back into the workflow is Mesh Transfer or Data Transfer. I’m not at all clear on what it is. The details are here. This seems like some type of attribute copy-paste… I don’t see how it will help me with my designs for SL.

Blender 2.72 - 2014-10-06
Blender 2.72 – 2014-10-06

They are planning to add support for Chinese/Asian complex characters.

A Dependency Graph is in the works. This would let you see how all the parts of a scene relate and which objects require which resources. Not something I’ll need in my simple files.

Various improvements are being made as part of the Gooseberry project. We will see viewport and asset management improvements that will likely help SL designers.

Currently Blender 2.72b is the current Blender release. The fixes and improvements list (release notes sort of) are here.

 

Second Life Bits 2014-45 #2

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CDN

The Content Delivery Network is used by all viewers. No viewer update was needed for CDN to work. It is a pure server-side thing.

Meauxle Bureaux 2014
Meauxle Bureaux 2014

Ciaran wrote about the problem he and others run into in: CDN Teething Problems & Meauxle Bureaux Should Be In Destination Guide. Some regions just refuse to render. Lots of textures fail to load. The usual leave and return tricks are not working. When these textures fail to load they FAIL to load and there seems little we can do about it.

The Lindens are aware of the problem and have posted on the SL Blog about the problem, what they think is causing it, and the hope it will pass with changes being made by both the Lab and the CDN provider. See: An Update on the [Second Life] CDN Project.

If you run into this problem, please file a JIRA report. Add your RL location (City, State, Country) and ISP name.

And like Ciaran I encourage you to check out the mole abode: Meauxle Bureaux. 

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Second Life News 2014-45 #3

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This past Friday was the Third Party Developers’ meeting. This is usually the best source for information about developments in the pipeline at the Lab. This week there is not a lot of news.

Viewers

Benchmark RC Viewer – I been talking about this one. It is the one that ends the use of a GPU table to figure out the default video settings for a new viewer install.

Maintenance RC Viewer – This one is a collection of fixes and feature improvements.

Meauxle Bureaux 2014 - Frost Mole
Meauxle Bureaux 2014 – Frost Mole

AISv3 Fixes aka Attachments RC Viewer – This is a viewer version created to fix problems with AISv3 that were holding up Firestorm Viewer development. The problems were Linden Lab problems and we could see them in the SL Viewers. But, the bugs were a reason the FS Team was not merging the code into their viewer. More on this later. The AIS fixes were moved into this RC Viewer and the code changed to solve issues and make for easier merging into third party viewers.

Oz says this set of code changes are relatively easy to merge and this is the RC Viewer now seen as most likely to promote soon.

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