Second Life News 2014-36

by

This Monday is a Holiday in the USA, Labor Day. The Lindens are off, so not much happening at the Lab today.

Servers

Maestro Linden posted Friday that because of the holiday there would be no roll of a new package to the main channel. They are postponing it until Wednesday. Then the maintenance package running on the RC channels will roll to the main channel.

RC Channels

This week there will be no roll outs to the RC channels. All regions in the main grid will be running the same package.

Viewers

No changes in the Linden made viewers since I posted Saturday.

 

AvaStar Changing

by

AvaStar is Second Life’s handiest tool for animators and clothing designers. It comes as an add-in for Blender.

Loki's Experience - 2014
Loki’s Experience – 2014

The next release of AvaStar will have several changes in the menus. It is always a pain when a designers moves things and changes labels in a program we use. We users have to relearn the menus and adjust our work flow to deal with the changes. Ugh! 

Read more

Second Life News 2014-35 #3

by

We have a bit of news from the Third Party Developers Meeting from Friday, 8/29. Chakat Northspring videos the meetings. You can follow him on YouTube and catch those meetings a few hours after they happen.

Loki's Experience - 2014
Loki’s Experience – 2014

Viewers

Viewer news from Oz Linden is pretty thin, his word. I’ve covered most of the viewer news earlier in the week. Oz basically said at this Friday’s Third Party Developers Meeting that projects discussed at the previous meeting are still ongoing and there is no new news on them.

I think this is basically the lull in feature development and bug fixes that comes from the Lindens stopping to work on development tools and upgrade to the new compilers. It is an analogy to car manufactures that stop production of cars to retool for production of the next model year cars.

Read more

Alchemy Viewer Release 3.7.14

by

Sovereign Engineer let me know they have released a new version of the Alchemy Viewer. That put this viewer at version: Alchemy Viewer Beta 3.7.14 – TPV Celebratory Beta. There is a nice write up on the page.

This release comes out with 64-bit versions for Windows and Mac. The 32-bit versions are available too.

This version uses a new font on the UI. It has feature to allow use of legacy profiles, but those panel have been redesigned to conform with the rest of the UI. It includes a region tracker, which I assume lets you track the online status of a region from anywhere in SL.

The download file for Windows is about 33mb. Today’s download was a bit slow. But, I was trying to download about 2:30PM, peak usage time for the Internet in my area.

Read more

Second Life News 2014-35 #2

by

Servers

Thursday we found out what happened to the RC channel rollout that was to happen Wednesday morning. It got postponed to Thursday. The reason was the rollout software hiccupped. By late Wednesday the problem was found and fixed. The rollout proceeded Thursday morning.

[youtube R4I6anWluGY]

For information on the packages rolling out see: Second Life News 2014-34-35.

We did find out the problem fixed by the roll to the main channel had to do with a region crash. Under a special set of circumstances, not that rare to happen, sending a TP to someone would crash the region they were in. 

Read more

LEAP Motion Controller 2014-35

by

This hands free controller is thought by many of us to be the answer to how to deal with hand movement while wearing a HMD (like an Oculus Rift). Jo Yardley has an article on the progress LEAP Motion is making with their VR effort. See: Leap motion announces VR related progress. She includes a video LEAP made (1:30 min) and a link to the source article at LEAP Motion’s site.

Oculus Rift - Image by: Franklin Heijnen - Flickr
Oculus Rift – Image by: Franklin Heijnen – Flickr

Like many LEAP Motion controller owners, Jo does not use the controller often. Mine mostly sits in the box too. You can find LEAP controllers on eBay cheap. I am hoping that changes when the Oculus or another HMD unit go retail. 

Read more