New ‘Starter Avatars’…

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

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

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

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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Second Life News 2014-19

Some big news today… almost… see Group Ban below.

San Diego First Pitch T-Rex
San Diego First Pitch T-Rex

Servers

There were no rollouts to the main or RC channels this week. But, a T-Rex was pitching baseball in San Diego.

Chat Fix

However, the backend servers for chat got an update. These are the updates Simon Linden has been working on and that several of us have been testing in ADITI over the past few weeks.

People are probably not going to notice much difference. Any difference will be subtle. But, the code adds more analytics to the chat system. The new information should give the Lindens a better idea of what can be fixed to improve performance. 

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