Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The news in Second Life™ this week is there is no Second Life news today, at least not much.
There are no roll outs this week, main or RC channels.
I covered the viewers this weekend in: Second Life News 2014-11 #3. Today the main viewer is: Second Life 3.7.3 (287491).
I also see the wiki has updated (Mar 17 2014) for version 3.7.4.288045… this is the Google Breakpad version that has been added to the RC Viewers List, giving us 6 RC Viewers.
Of course the day I write AvaStar is not working right Gaia comes out with Breaking news they have it fixed… figures.
So, check out the latest announcement from AvaStar: Breaking news on Avastar-1.1.
The fixes are in test version Avastar-1.1-1022, available for download now.
There is some Second Life™ news regarding AvaSta™, which has been changing almost weekly. Not big changes, but changes. People have also been figuring out Fitted Mesh. Gaia Clary the mover and shaker of AvaStar is in that group of figuring out what works for Fitted Mesh and getting Blender to work with it.
For Fitted Mesh many things are a bit confusing. Whether we use 3DS, Maya, Blender, Blender & AvaStar, or some other modeling tool most people are NOT getting the result they expect. Gaia has tried to clear up some of the confusion with a blog post. See: The state of Avastar-1.1.
Her first point is that contrary to popular belief AvaStar 1.1 has not been released nor is it complete. There are test versions available for those that purchased AvaStar 1.0. The keyword there is ‘TEST.’
Hot Fix Viewer 3.7.4.287875 – Monty Linden is doing most of the work on this one. Fixes include problems with a FMODEX (sound) race condition and other problems. The working fixes in this one are important but are not the problems they hoped to solve.
The main emphasis here is getting the SL Viewer crash rate down. If this version can accomplish that it will move to the top of this for promotion to the main viewer.
Interesting Viewer 3.7.3.287127 – This is the viewer that has better caching and scene loading. This iteration has 12 fixes to previous versions.
Merchant Outbox Viewer 3.7.3.287344 – This has about 8 fixes, one being A Windows 7 crash when exiting the viewer. So, if you have been losing settings made recently, this may be the fix.
I haven’t been taking the time to listen to Drax and Jo’s Drax Files Radio Show. Just too many other things to do. But, the information about the Oculus is of interest and I wanted to hear it. Waking up far too early this morning I took the time.
As always this synopsis is what I heard. Before reacting to anything written here take the time to listen to the original audio of the show: Show #10: Oculus!!!
Time marks are approximate, but they should get you into the audio before the subject’s start point.
00:00 Intro and description of the show contents: Oculus Rift – SL Oculus Viewer version goes to Beta. The Show gave away a LEAP Motion controller. They are giving away another. You need to answer a question to win. Instructions are related between time marks 03: 00 and 04:00.
04:00 More discussion about show content to be covered in this episode.
05:00 Discussion of the ToS. It is apparent from this part of the audio that Jo and Drax are accepting of the verbal position the Lab has stated: ‘We do not intend to steal your stuff and sell it.’ It is obvious that for Jo, Drax and many others this is believable and the problem is with the legalese of the ToS, which I think is a reasonable position.
The show moves forward and presents what I’ll call the state of the industry/things, showing this is the way things are and the Lab is conforming to a generalized behavior of the industry with its ToS.
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A clip from South Park and clips from the movie Terms and Conditions May Apply (movie trailer above) is played.
At 07:00 at the end of the clips they start talking about Emily Short, of Versu, being in a future show. ???
I am finding that I can’t stay logged into SL for more than a couple of hours, if that long, before the viewer starts to lag out. I have mini freezes and periods where the frame rate (FPS – Frames per Second) drops to 2 or 3 and PING jumps up into the thousands of milli-seconds.
Testing with the OS ping to the SL servers at the same time I am not seeing those long times. Nor with the SL Viewer am I seeing those long ping times. Also, I had occurrences of the screen going black then coming back. There is some kind of video problem happening.
I just added the 335.23 driver to my GTX560. So, it should be good. But, doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem.