Nalates' Things & Stuff

Firestorm Viewer 4.4.0 To Be Blocked

2014/04/08 by Nalates Urriah

Firestorm Logo

You may remember a time when there were something like 1600 different versions of viewers in Second Life on any given day. The problem with that is it so dilutes crash stats developers are hampered. There isn’t enough data on any single version to provide a developer good information for tracking down a bug.

The Firestorm Team decided they would do something to help their developers. The decision was to limit the number of versions of Firestorm on the grid at any one time to 3. They block their old viewers and prevent users from logging into Second Life with old viewers. I’m not sure if that blocking includes use on other grids.

In this case ‘old’ means not one of the current three newest versions. Currently version 4.4.0 is the fourth running version. The team is announcing that on Thursday they will block that version. There are about 5500 people using that version. They are encouraged to update now rather than wait until they’re blocked on Thursday.

See: Blocking Version 4.4.0 – 33720.

Firestorm: A Joke… Not So Much

2014/04/08 by Nalates Urriah

Firestorm Logo

The Firestorm Viewer Team is thinking. Their recent April Fool’s Joke about the Dynamic User Interface (DUI), the detachable control panels, has been the goal of many developers for some time. Now Firestorm Team member Nicky Dasmijn has built a proof of concept version of the viewer with those detachable panels. In this version window and panel layouts can be saved for later use.

There is no release version of this viewer, beta or otherwise. But the team is releasing the code some other developers can work on the project. The Firestorm Team is hoping the code will inspire developers to come up with new innovations for the Second Life viewer.

See the official announcement here: The real joke… DUI is no joke!

Second Life Money Exchange

2014/04/07 by Nalates Urriah

In August of 2009 I wrote an article on the Linden Currency Exchange for Second Life™. See: XStreetSL Currency Exchange Tutorial and Second Life Currency Exchange Extended. Back then things were a bit different. There was competition in the Second Life money market. The US government has ended that. Now, Linden Lab is the keeper of L$ and the only company officially converting L$ to RL currencies. There are black markets in Lindens and there is a reason they are called black markets.

What has not changed is people not understanding currency or currency markets. Someone in the Answers section of the SL Forum was asking why their Sell L$1/US$1 order had not been completed when other similar orders had been.

Dwell On It: Marketing

2014/04/06 by Nalates Urriah

Tateru Nino has an article up on Marketing and PR: Whatever happened to marketing and PR? If you have been around awhile or study marketing, you know things have changed.

I’ll suggest a couple of significant changes have come to our culture that have forced change in both Marketing and PR. First people coming out of our public education systems are much more poorly educated. Our education system is being politicized and whole fields of study are being nerfed. A year or so ago the ruckus was about educators wanting to omit teaching American history prior to Lincoln. Citizenship classes were a thing in my parents day. I now talk to many US born people that have no idea how the government is supposed to work or why.

Second Life News 2014-15

2014/04/06 by Nalates Urriah

Viewers

The main viewer is version 3.7.4-288138.

This is the version that got the FMODEX fixes that solved a race condition. For the less geeky, a race condition is a common problem in multi-threaded programs. You can think of the threads as separate processes or programs that run at the same time. Once up on a time computers had only one CPU running programs and race conditions were not as common. Now with 2 to 8 cores (CPU’s) built into a single CPU chip the computer can do more than one thing at a time.

Oculus Competition

2014/04/05 by Nalates Urriah

A company named True Player Gear, based in Canada, is making a competing or what will be a competing VR headset. They call theirs Totem, which is a name taken from the movie Inception.

It looks neat. The show Road to VR has an interview with the companies CEO, Bertrand Nepveu. Check it out here: Exclusive: ‘Totem’ VR Headset to Compete with the Oculus Rift, CEO Shares Inside Details.

The specs for this head set are similar to Oculus’ DK2. However the field of viewer is only 90 degrees. We have recently heard developers talking about how important it is to have a wide field of view. So, that may be a slight disadvantage.

They are going for the 1080p screens. That should give good resolution. Still, it is at the limit of what Michael Abrash thinks is acceptable for a good immersive feel. They say they are low persistence, but they don’t put a number on it.

They are planning to do a Kickstarter and put out a development kit.

Their claim to fame right now is they are not owned by Facebook. Those that are abandoning Oculus because of the FB purchase now have a place to run to.