Bits of News 2014-28 #2

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Iris Ophelia has an article up on New World Notes (NWN) about her experience in the as yet unreleased SIMS-4. It is a long article for NWN. See: The Good, the Bad, and the Unclear: My First Impressions of The Sims 4 Create-a-Sim Demo. (Translating for non-SIMS people, Create-A-SIM means create an avatar.)

She writes about what she liked and didn’t. For instance the SIMS developers are going for a CG look not a photo-realistic look. Hats can be worn over hair… apparently any hat over any hair. I wonder how they did that? I would love to be able to wear hats with any of my do’s.

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OMG! Second Life Changing Gaming Rules

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Ciaran has an article up on the changes coming to gaming (gambling) in Second Life™. These changes will affect ‘SKILL’ games.

There will now be Skill Gaming Regions… oh, and tier for those is US$345, up from the standard $295. PLUS… a $100 fee for asking to have a ‘Skill Gaming License’ … non-refundable if your app is rejected. And your RL self has to be in a country where the Lab can exercise legal control… where you can be easily sued, I suppose.

Read the details on Ciaran’s post: Coming Soon To Second Life – A Licence To Skill.

Gaia Asking for Help

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Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix.org is making a new video tutorial on weight painting for Second Life™. A new post is up on her blog asking for input. See: Weighting with Blender.

The actual tutorial part being worked on is here: Course: Weight Painting (Blender&Avastar).

AvaStar is not required. Plain Blender (2.70+) can be used for the tutorial.

One handy thing is the free ‘blend’ file with example clothes. There is also a free OBJ file with the same models. The models are licensed via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 with accommodation for the current Linden Lab TOS. The models are not yet weighted, that is for a class activity.

Education in Second Life

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Virtual reality/worlds have extensive possibilities for education and training, we all know that, I think we do… But, I suspect most are like me and think little on the problems educators have using virtual worlds as their classroom.

SLeducate - University of Western Australia (UWA)
SLeducate – University of Western Australia (UWA)

If I think about it even a little I realize the first problem is just getting a student into the world and to the right location. The University of Western Australia (UWA) has an article up about those challenges. See: Eliminating a headache faced by all SL virtual educators!

Experience has taught us over the years that existing Learning Islands in Second Life™ don’t really get people new to Second Life to a level of usability needed to take a class. Often people are still figuring out how to use the viewer rather than focusing on the lesson. 

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Bits of Second Life

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Second Life™ Market Place

Hamlet has an interesting bit up in the article Update, Emily Short’s Blood & Laurels: From Linden Limbo to New York Times Feature in Four Months. Have you noticed he likes long titles?

MistyMountains_020
Misty Mountains – 2013

The Market Place has seen some odd happenings. This was announced:

[Posted 3:46 PM PDT, 07 July 2014] We are performing unscheduled maintenance on the secondlife.com maturity filters that is causing some Marketplace listings to be listed under the wrong maturity rating.  It is also causing event creations and Classified ads to fail due to the maturity filter. Please check back here for updates as we have them. 

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Experience Tools Update 2014-28

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Today Dolphin Linden was at the Scripting-Server User Group meeting answering questions about the Experience Tools (XP Tools) and how they will work. The made for an interesting meeting. I posted about this meeting’s coming Q&A last week.

Dryland Mado - 2014
Dryland Mado – 2014

The current request for Beta Testers is for experience creators, Madpea or Loki Eliot type people. Latter they will be asking for experience participants (users) to join the beta testing.

There is a knowledge base article up: Experiences in Second Life. This is mostly for users not scriptwriters. We are told by Oz and Dolphin Linden that wiki documentation is in the works. The current draft is being reviewed by those Lindens that do the reviews. Scriptwriters check the last line of this post.

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