Second Life Bits & Pieces 2014-21

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The basic SL News is here; servers and viewers. But, there isn’t much to say about those so I’ve mixed in the bits an pieces of news from around the grid.

Second Life will be down for an hour on Thursday, 22 May beginning at 7am PDT. If you are in-world you won’t be ejected. But, you won’t be able to do much. Avoid pulling things out of inventory or changing outfits. Of course don’t attempt any Linden$ transactions. Building is probably out of the question.

This has something to do with the assets database and backend systems.  Firestorm will have the grid status on screen as usual. I’m not sure how many people will notice. I’ll have to see if the SL Viewer’s splash says anything about it.

If the SL Forum is working (I suspect it will be), we’ll see a load of people asking why they cannot login.

Server Rolls
The main channel will get a roll Tuesday. This will be the maintenance release that was running in Magnum this past week. This is a fix for a network issue occurring in busy simulators.

Server RC’s
The Blue Steel and Le Tigre channels will continue to run the AISv3 update package for Server Side Avatar baking. The Sunshine viewer is getting updates and hopefully went into QA today. 

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New ‘Starter Avatars’…

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New Avatar - Interesting Mesh Density
New Avatar – Interesting Mesh Density

OK everyone is posting about these.  If you haven’t already heard, you have to be hiding. They are far better than the Ruth and Roth avatars from earlier times.

They are interesting and noobies will look much better. However, noobies will still act like noobies . They won’t be all that hard to recognize.

However, Saturday when I was trying to play with the new avatars the SL system was acting up. The Choose an Avatar panel did not want to load. I kept getting an empty panel. I left the panel open and relogged, that got it working, or it may be just the relog did it. Or my region may have been having difficulties.

Once the panel was loaded then some avatars would not load. I would get what looked like an LOD4 version 0f the avatar only, very bizarre looking up close but ok from a distance. Switch to another one and later retry the one with loading problems, seemed to work.

When you wear one of these avatars a folder is created in the Clothing folder of your inventory. The ‘Lucy’ avatar is of course in the Lucy folder.

These avatars completely replace, well are worn over, your system avatar and a full body alpha mask hides the system avatar. They are complete mesh bodies and clothes. I am not sure why they made them No-Mod. 

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Fire

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Too many things to worry about…

San Marcos Coco Fire Burning into Escondido
San Marcos Coco Fire Burning into Escondido

At least the wind has let up. They seem to be getting ahead of the fires.

9 fires in different places. All but one has suspicious beginnings. Its arson…

The large building on the skyline right of center is the new Palomar hospital. Looking west over Hwy I-15 from the east-side frontage road near the Valley Parkway exit. Over the mountain in the center is the University of California at San Marcos. It and thousands of homes to the west were evacuated yesterday. Over night the fire came over the mountain. Many homes have burned, but it is not as bad as a few years ago… Lots of tragedy.

The air is horrible from all the smoke.

Second Life News 2014-20

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Servers

This week there is no roll to the main channel.

Fantasy Fair 2014
Fantasy Fair 2014

RC Servers

Blue Steel and Le Tigre will remain on the inventory update package, Sunshine/AISv3.

Magnum will get a new maintenance package that fixes some network issues affecting busy regions.

Viewers

The main viewer this morning is 3.7.7-289461. No change since last week. This version has lots of code clean up work. It is the Interesting Viewer promoted. It should render a region faster and more intelligently.

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Firestorm Viewer Release 4.6.5-40833

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Firestorm Update 2014-20
Firestorm Update 2014-20

A new Firestorm viewer is out. I gather it was released this weekend while I was off doing Mother’s Day stuff. See the announcement: Firestorm Viewer Release 4.6.5-40833. Also, Inara has a nice review of this release up here: Firestorm 4.6.5: steady as she goes.

This release addresses a number of the complaints that users of the prevision have made. Mac users get benefits from this update too. So, if you use Firestorm and have been having problems, you will want to update to this version.

Some Mac users are complaining about typing in chat. That can still be v e r y   s l o w. Others are pointing out that an update to a new OS fixes the problem… I’m not sure what the complete story is. As I’m not a Mac user, I can’t research it.

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