Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Gaia Clary has posted that someone is selling a ripped off of AvaStar in the SL Market Place for L$8,000. The rip-off is an old version of AvaStar. The rip-off is here (so you know which one NOT to buy).
The real AvaStar is available at: http://blog.machinimatrix.org . AvaStar sells for US$27 or about L$6,750.
Gaia filed a DMCA June 5th. As of this morning the rip-off remains on the Market Place.
There is no roll to the main channel this week. Last week the channel was re-rolled to fix a security issue that slipped through. But, there are no feature additions or changes.
Blue Steel was rolled to the same software as the main channel last Wednesday to fix the security issue mentioned above. This week the channel will get an updated version of the Inventory Update package. This is the AISv3 updated made as part of the Sunshine server side avatar baking project.
Le Tigre will get the Group Ban project with the security updates.
The test build of Blender 2.71 is out. The release notes are here.
While 2.70a has some Cycles baking ability, 2.71 extends Cycles to include most of the abilities in the materials system associated with Blender Render. There are possibilities here for Second Life™ users.
There are some improvements in modeling and sculpting that may help those modeling for SL.
I see several changes in animation. I doubt those improvements will transfer into SL. But, they may improve our work flow.
See Blender.org for details and the release notes foe specifics.
We did get some news from the Third Party Viewer meeting.
The Memshine RC Viewer is the one the Lindens are hoping they can promote next. But, of the four current RC Viewers it is a tossup as to which will actually be promoted. By next week they will have enough data to decide which viewer can be promoted.
If the Memshine RC can be promoted that will open three RC slots as the Memory, Sunshine, and Memshine would all be considered as complete.
As of this morning (Saturday) the 3.7.8 version is still the main stable release.
For weeks… well months… we have had problems with the Preview/Beta Grid (ADITI). Logins and inventory updates were not happening. A password change would show up everywhere in the SL except the Preview grid. Which mean all of a sudden people could not login, unless they tried their old password.
Also, inventory updates were not happening. In the recent couple of weeks fixes were made. The Lindens did get the password problem resolved. But, the Lindens tell us an unrelated prevented the inventory updates from happening.
Those are now thought to be fixed. I plan to give it a few days before changing my password and trying for an update.
Ciaran Laval has an article up that covers the history of Second Life™ groups and his suggestion that things change to break a pattern present in SL since it started. See: Second Life Group System Still Needs An Overhaul.
SL users always want more groups. We are limited to 42 now. Originally it was 10, before my time. I started with the 25 limit.
A major part of groups is chat. Adding more groups increases the server load exponentially. Chat lag and not being able to post to a group are common problems we all deal with now as we use groups. I have no idea how many times I have had to send an IM to someone in the group because I could not get a comment into a group chat, connection fail…
Ciaran is suggesting that we shift from the chat we have now to something web based. I suppose something more like IRC, but with more persistence.