Second Life Market Place CHANGING

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Last Friday was the Third Party Developers User Group meeting. We often have a wealth of news coming from this UG meeting. This week we learn of a Market Place (MP) project that has been in progress via closed alpha/beta since January 2014. We don’t get much news about the Market Place and commerce.

Viewer Managed Market Place

Brooke Linden spoke at this meeting about how the market place will be changing. The Lab is going to move us from the current Direct Delivery system to Viewer Managed Market Place. I expect for customers little if anything will change. But, for merchants this will be a big change and involve migrating the current Market Place to a new backend system.

Server-Scripting UG 2014-41 - Halloween Nears
Server-Scripting UG 2014-41 – Halloween Nears

I did not hear anything about changes in how the Market Place will look to customers or how it will operate from the customers’ side of things.

The problems the Lab is seeing with Direct Delivery, a feature that starts in the SL Market Place and ends in the viewer in-world, is merchants are having problems managing their Market Place (MP) inventory. Also, the Market Place engineers have not been able to fully complete Direct Delivery. Magic Boxes are still used for selling items the merchant does not have COPY rights to. 

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Second Life news 2014-41 #2

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Viewers

EXCITING NEWS! The HTTP Pipelining Viewer will be going to RC Viewer status as soon as it completes the Lab’s internal QA. Expect it SOON, but not this week. And expect some impressive changes. Monty Linden is calling this viewer the Drano Viewer.

Whirly Fizzle is in Europe and ran some tests. She cleared cache (between each test), and then logged in. With the standard non-pipelining viewer the 105k item inventory took some time to load.

Second Life 3.7.16 (294015) Sep 10 2014 11:08:26 (Second Life Release)

  • Session 1: 16 mins 28 secs
  • Session 2: 17 mins 53 secs
  • Session 3: 17 mins 18 secs
  • Session 4: 17 mins 51 secs

Then again clearing cache between each run and switching to the new pipelining viewer:

Second Life 3.7.17 (294571) Sep 26 2014 12:32:36 (Second Life Release)

  • Session 1: 2 mins 29 secs (I literally had a holy shit moment here lol = Whirly)
  • Session 2: 2 mins 17 secs
  • Session 3: 2 mins 11 secs
  • Session 4: 2 mins 27 secs

If you are measuring load time, you can get exact numbers from your viewer’s log file. Look for “LLInventoryModelFetchDescendentsResponder::httpSuccess: Inventory fetch completed” in older viewers. In the pipelining viewer look for 2014-10-08T23:00:22Z INFO: idle_startup:  Inventory and 2014-10-08T23:25:38Z INFO: LLInventoryModelFetchDescendentsResponder::httpSuccess: Inventory fetch completed. 

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Bits of Second Life 2014-41 #2

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PS CC 2014 Color Panel

The new Photoshop has a new color picker. It isn’t different as much as how handy it can be has improved. See: The Improved And Enhanced Color Panel – Photoshop CC 2014.

Sightline: The Chair

Indigo Mertel has been pointing me to an article on Road to VR about a holographic VR interface. For whatever reason I was missing her subtle hints until she contacted me and sort of asked why I was ignoring it. Oops. I have no idea why I wasn’t picking up on it. I follow a lot of her links from Plurk.

There are a number of articles out about Tomáš “Frooxius” Mariančík creating:  SightLine: The Chair.

This is pretty impressive. I can see why people are excited. It is the best use of the LEAP Motion Controller that I have seen to date.

Experimenters can download his ‘Chair’ experience: Download The Chair. (300mb) The link jumps to Sightline’s home page. There you can link to places to support him, Facebook and Steam. He says a Kickstarter is coming. 

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Myst Game to be a TV Series

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I came to Second Life from Myst Online: Uru Live (MO:UL), my first MMORPG. I still like the game but the community playing in the game remains so dysfunctional it keeps me out of the game except for rare occasions. There is almost no game master moderation within the current free online game, leads to complaints like we hear in SL.

The Great Zero Machine in Second Life - 2009
The Great Zero Machine from MO:UL in Second Life – 2009

Recently something happened to the MO:UL game’s data base. All player status was lost. Devoted fans have returned to replay the game to restore their game status and lock in their player names. Activity on the Myst forum has almost tripled. 

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Bits of Second Life 2014-41

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NVIDIA and VR

I have seen a little about nVidia’s new graphics cards, the 970 and 980 cards. The Road to VR has a good article on the new video cards. For those thinking about Oculus Rift this is an informative article. See: Big News for VR: Nvidia’s New Graphics Cards.

NVIDIA 980 - 10/2014
NVIDIA 980 – 10/2014

For 3D to work, whatever type, the system needs to render the world from two camera positions. This literally doubles the work the card must do. Fortunately, the texture handling, loading and unloading, doesn’t double too.

The article points out how the new cards are optimized for duel image processing.

Top 10 Hunts

Fabulously Free has their list of the top ten hunts out. See: FabFree Hunts. Most have a Halloween theme. 

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Blender 2.72 Released

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On Oct 4 a new Blender version was released. Get it here.

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

It is an 86mb download, assuming you get the Zip file for the stand-alone install. I highly advise using the Zip file over the install program. It is much easier to have and run muiltiple versions of Blender using this install method.