Nalates' Things & Stuff

Second Life News 2014-6

2014/02/04 by Nalates Urriah

Servers

Late yesterday, after 7PM PST, the Deploys post appeared. We did get a server update roll to the main channel today (2/4). Tomorrow, Wednesday, we will get a roll to the RC channels. There’s nothing earthshaking in either of the releases.

The package that made it to the main channel is the one that includes the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) function: llModifyLand(). Inara has more on this change. See: SL projects news 6/1: Server, viewer, SSA and AIS project viewer.

The package going to the RC channels is a package with a crash fix. The package is going to all three channels. And that’s about all we know about.

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Bits and Pieces of Second Life 2014-6

2014/02/03 by Nalates Urriah

Materials – Prim Perfect has an article up on the surprise they experienced when moving to a new viewer that was Materials capable. In their words: “The difference is stunning.”

If you aren’t running with the Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) enabled, you are missing out.

Exploring Banana Island - 2014 — Exploring Banana Island – 2014

In the Firestorm viewers only the BETA version has Materials capability, for now. If you are a Firestorm user you may want to check out the Beta. If you are leery of Beta versions, you may want to try the main release SL Viewer.

OpenSim eBook Questions

2014/02/03 by Nalates Urriah

Maria Korolov has a post up on Hypergrid Business titled: One-Question eBook Survey. It looks like Maria is planning to publish a couple of eBooks that deal with setting up an OpenSim grid and another on using OpenSim grids.

If you have an interest in OpenSim, click over and place your vote for which you think is a more important and useful book.

I will also point out that OpenSim is a great place for having a test sim. The SL Preview Grid is great for last minute testing just before uploading into Second Life™. For most of us the areas of the SL Preview grid we can use have short ‘return times.’ For some testing that can be a serious limitation. Having a region in an OpenSim grid can give one a permanent base for long term testing. Running a grid on your personal computer is basically free.

uRiven = Starry Expanse Project

2014/02/042014/02/02 by Nalates Urriah

Update: 2014/02/04 – Added a video, below the fold, showing a portion of Ercana, a part of Uru Live, that was moved to Cry Engine 3. This is no where near a finished product. It was just a quick move to extract it from Plasma to Blender to 3DS and finally to Cry3. It is a very rough video, but it shows the possibilities.

By now you know I am a Myst-Uru fan and somewhat active in that community. I have Myst-Uru sites included in my Feedly reader and Facebook follows. This popped up in a Cyan Worlds post on Facebook: Unreal Riven. It is an article about the development of a new rendition of Riven, one of the series of games that makes up the Myst games.

I found the article interesting because I have thought the use of the Plasma engine to build fan content was a dead end for years. Now I find out Cyan has been working with a group that long ago abandoned Plasma for the same reasons I have espoused for 5 or 6 years.

Second Life News 2014-5 #2

2014/02/02 by Nalates Urriah

RC Viewers

Interesting Viewer version 3.6.14.285213 – In this version the developers are still hunting for the cause of crashes. The crash rate is still too high, but crash measurement may be erroneously high. Not having clear crash reporting leads back to the Google Breakpad work the Lindens are doing.

Few Third Party Developers have tried merging the Interest List code with their viewers. The Firestorm team is waiting for a more stable release of the code.

Fitted Mesh Viewer version 3.7.0.285669 – Recently this version got a refresh and is likely to get one more next week (6). The fix probably arriving Monday (2/2). A later update will likely only be a merge with whatever viewer is current main version. Then this viewer will likely be in the final RC version before release.

Singularity Viewer 1.8.5 Released

2014/01/29 by Nalates Urriah

This appears to be a significant release of the Singularity Viewer. The release announce is at: Singularity Viewer 1.8.5.

You’ll find the viewer now has a new way to move the avatar around. I am not sure why a new way would be needed unless this is preparation for Oculus Rift. I steer my avatar with a combination of the A, W, S, D keys and the mouse, mostly the W key and mouse. That requires I use both hands.