Second Life and Virtual Worlds
On Sunday Machinimatrix announced the release of AvaStar 1.1 Beta. Gaia Clary is saying there will be no more test releases as the last one is not drawing any big reports. This suggests AvaStar is near completion for the Fitted Mesh addition.
The announcement is here: Avastar-1.1 Beta is Out. The download is via your personal link for AvaStar.
I am guessing that with the exception of minor changes this beta will be the final release.
Friday’s Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developer’s meeting was long, 2 hours. The last hour is covered in Second Life 2.0 Coming. That is the exciting news, SL 2.0 is coming!
As of Friday there were two RC Viewers; SL Share and Snowstorm. SL Share has been in the cue for some time. It is the likely candidate for promotion, probably late in week 26 or in week 27. The Snowstorm RC has a bug that is in the process of being fixed. I expect a new version to make it out to RC in week 26.
The Project Viewers haven’t changed since I last wrote about them.
The code for the Group Ban viewer is here: https://bitbucket.org/baker_linden/voorhees_groupban. With the code released to the wild TPV Dev’s are integrating it into their viewers.
Jessica of Firestorm says they are integrating ‘Interesting’ and hopefully SL Share features for their next release. The Sunshine AISv3 changes probably won’t make the next release. Experience Tools may make it. But, the team has not had time to examine the changes needed for Experience Tools.
Ebbe Linden spoke at the TPV Meeting 6/20. We learned that Second Life 2.0 is in development and will likely go into Closed NDA Beta late this year. EARTH SHAKING! I’ll relate the comments below in the order as Ebbe did. He did not seem to be at the meeting to announce the news. But, it has gotten out.
Ebbe, the Linden Lab CEO was at the Friday TPV Meeting. He says he is enjoying popping into the various meetings. I think in general the users meeting him are happy with him.
Ed Merryman asked about Ebbe’s plans for player retention. See: TPV Meeting. I’ll touch on the things I think are interesting. But, listen to the video/audio for a sense of Ebbe.
Ebbe clarified what he means by making Second Life easier. He definitely does not mean making it dumber. He wants to keep the power and find ways to make things easier for new users to understand and learn.
We have been hearing a bit more about the Advanced Experience Tools Project (AETP). Some have found the region in ADITI where Advanced Experience Tools (AET) test code is running. Friday in the Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developer’s Meeting Oz Linden told us that within about the next month an Experience Tools Beta will be opening up. He also expects it to last several weeks. So, these tools are close to release now.
We were talking about these tools back in 2011 when they were called Linden Realms Advanced Creator Tools. Tiggs Linden was talking to us at the LSL Scripting UG (disbanded now) in early 2012 about what was coming. See: #SL Linden Realm Tools. The Linden Realms (See: Linden Realm Tools – 2011)was a Linden Lab project to reveal to staff the problems in developing games and places in Second Life™.
The first roll out of these tools was in May 2012. See: Greifer Monday. That was a disaster. Since then AET has been in development.
The second release candidate of Blender 2.71 is not out. You can get it at Blender.org.
The release notes are linked to from the main page.
Not much new news came from Thursday’s Beta Server UG.
As we knew the Group Ban feature has spread grid wide on the server side. This means when you ban someone from your group, they are effectively banned. There are currently no known ways around the ban.
We need a Group Ban Project Viewer to ban people. Currently there are some problems with the project viewer. Whirly Fizzle has been testing it and filing JIRA bug reports. Those are being looked at. Serious bugs will be fixed before the viewer advances. Minor bugs will likely be fixed post-release, but may before. It depends on time and the complexity of the fixes.