The current release of AvaStar is RC3. It includes Sparkles.
[youtube UmZBkleBB28]
OSGrid Down
Hypergrid Business has an article up on problems over at OSGrid, my favorite OpenSim grid. It seems that Tuesday or maybe Monday some time the asset servers went down. The word coming from OSGrid peeps is that the RAID drives in the asset system failed.
The content of the asset servers will have to be restored from backups. There is typically a huge amount of data in an asset system for a virtual world. So, this will take some time. They are giving no estimates of when they think OSGrid will be back online.
Not knowing how big the data collection is for OSGrid or what the backup media is or how it is connected we can’t guess at the time needed to move the data. But, it could be days, hopefully way less.
Second Life Bits 2014-34
India on Second Life
There is an article in India Times’ Economic Times on a company making US$16k/month from virtual animals, Fennux. It seems there are 1.2 million of the little guys in SL.
We find they think there are about 4,000 users logging into SL from India. I am not sure how they know that. Also, that they spend 67,000 hours in SL. I wonder if the Indian government is logging their Internet activity?
See: A Tumkur start-up VentureNext earns Rs 10 lakh a month by creating virtual creatures.
New TPV on Linden List
I see that Oz Linden added the Alchemy Viewer to the Third Party Viewer list. They describe it as: An experimental Second Life™ viewer striving to be at the forefront of stability, performance, and technological advancement in the open-source metaverse viewer field.
Sovereign Engineer is the lead in this viewer’s development. The blog is here. The downloads are here. The blog still lists the viewer as a beta version. There are only 32-bit versions, AFAIK.
The list of people working on the viewer is shown as:
Drake Arconis (sovereign.engineer) | Project Manager | Lead Developer
Cryo (luminous.luminos) | Linux Developer
Cinder (cinder.roxley) | Mac Developer
Lirusaito (inusaito.kanya) | Feature Fox
The blog appears to have started in June 2013. Inara did a review of the viewer in April 2014: Alchemy: cooking up a TPV.
Myst-Uru Update 2014
The Myst™ series of games peaked, I think, with the creation of Myst Online: Uru Live® (now free to play), an early MMORPG and contemporary with then startup Second Life™. Since peaking Myst is heard from less and less with almost no news coverage now. The core fans still love it and post 20 to 50 comments in the forum each day.
In-game play will see a few concurrent players but there are times with maybe 50 concurrent players. That may change soon. For years fans have wanted to build ages (game play areas like SL’s private regions) and add them to the main Uru Live play. At this year’s Mysterium, an annual fan get together, Cyan Worlds, Inc., the creators of Myst, announced they plan to add some fan ages to the main online version of the game and possibly some content from other episodes of the Myst series.
Second Life News 2014-34
Servers
Not much going on here. The Deploy post arrived on Sunday. No rollout to the main channel this week. The RC Channels will get an update that eliminates a crash condition.
Viewers
The main viewer is now 3.7.14-292638. This is the Library Refresh Viewer. There is a fix in this version for gray avatars. If you have gray avatars, look in your log file for Transferred a partial file errors. They think they have it fixed, but cannot know as they have not been able to reproduce the problem in the Lab.
You can find the list of updated libraries in the viewer’s release notes.