Nalates' Things & Stuff

Second Life News 2014-3

2014/01/14 by Nalates Urriah

This week there are no updates rolling out to the servers. At this point all we know is Maestro Linden has said they want to allow the existing packages to run for another week. We may learn more at today’s (1/14) Server & Scripting meeting.

There are a couple of speculations that it is from a problem with region crossings or the rash of unscheduled inventory maintenance events we have been seeing. The maintenance passes are happening several times per week. SL has been working pretty well for me, so I have no guesses at this point. I do continue to see people in Answers complaining of being logged out. I’ve run into that problem too. But, only once.

Religious Places in SL

We have an interesting new page in the Second Life Wiki: Religious Places. It seems to be the result of effort from Anaimfinity Resident. Anaimfinity notes the page should be complete this month. If you know of place that is not on the list, you can add it.

Mimes

Strawberry Singh has her Monday Mimes going again. This week’s is about practical jokes. I’m admitting nothing… it wasn’t me.

FireStorm Team Q&A 2014-2

2014/01/12 by Nalates Urriah

The Video

The last Q&A, Jan 11, was recorded by Chakat Northspring and placed on YouTube. It runs about 2 hours. I’ve covered the parts I found interesting. The video is not edited, that would be a big job, so it is hard for me to sit through. Too much dead air. I am happy Chakat recorded it, as these meetings are not announced until shortly before they start, making it hard to know about them and get there. This seems to be the Firestorm team’s way of avoiding an over loaded region for the meeting.

[youtube Hk74R3Dsh_Q]

Firestorm Support

Ed Merryman at Saturday’s Firestorm Questions and Answer secession spoke about their support volunteers. They are not paid. Therefore, they are not assigned shifts. But, they will be trying to provide one-on-one support to those needing help.

Fitted Mesh and Firestorm

2014/01/12 by Nalates Urriah

When is the next Firestorm release? According to Ed Merryman: when it is ready.

The next Firestorm release is waiting on Linden code for the new Inventory API’s. These are changes that improve inventory loading speed and reliability. They are changes that are targeted at fixing the last of the avatar bake fail problems.

Fitted

If you use Firestorm, or any Second Life capable viewer not yet updated for Fitted Mesh (meaning most viewers), and come across someone wearing Fitted Mesh, depending on how it was made, you may see parts of the item stretching off toward the southwest corner of the region.

It is thought there is a fix for the problem prior to the roll out of Fitted Mesh. The problem is caused because the avatar used by Fitted Mesh viewers is different than for non-Fitted Mesh viewers. There are additional bones in the skeleton. If your viewer doesn’t know about those bones, it does not know what to do with clothes that use the new bones. The result is vertices in the clothes are moved toward the 0,0,0 coordinate of the region (the southwest corner).

TOS Action Steps – Second Life

2014/01/11 by Nalates Urriah

Many of us are unhappy with the change in Linden Lab’s® Terms of Service (TOS) for Second Life™ and other Linden services. For those that want to know what steps they can take, join the United Content Creators of SL’s (UCCSL) in world group.

The UCCSL recently sent another letter to the Lab and sent out a note card to residents with the steps an SL resident can take to help effect a change in the TOS. I have posted a copy of the text:

Second Life Tidbits 2014-2b

2014/01/11 by Nalates Urriah

Kitely

Ciaran Laval has an article up, Kitely’s New Pricing Structure, that explains how Kitely pricing changed January 1. Most of the blogs I have read describe the pricing structure as confusing. Ciaran does a good job of explaining the pricing mess. After reading Ciaran’s article it isn’t all that bad.

Few bloggers provide anything other than the raw gross cost comparisons between gris. That comparison makes Second Life™ pricing look really bad. But, it is easy to make raw monthly cost comparisons.

I figure visitors don’t really care about the region owner’s cost. Only those that want a region care. Those operating businesses or trying to sell goods in a grid would care, if they understood free markets… which may not be that many.

Second Life Viewer 3.6.13-284995 Released

2014/01/11 by Nalates Urriah

The main Second Life™ Viewer is now release 3.6.13-284995. Release Notes. This the RC Viewer known as the Package Fix RC Viewer. The primary change in the update is described in the Notes as:

The 3.6.12 release [previous release] changed the Windows executable name from ‘SecondLife’ to ‘SecondLifeViewer’, but did not remove any executable using the old name that was in the install folder. This could cause some problems with old shortcuts (not including the default one updated by the install) running the previous version (which might then insist on being upgraded, but the upgrade would not correct the old shortcut).

This (and any subsequent) release removes any executable in that install folder that uses the old name; using those shortcuts will now cause Windows to display an error message that the program is not there, so the user will need to modify or replace them with one that refers to the new name.

The folder and executable name changes meant that some people were experiencing a continual update loop. They would update automatically placing the new version in the new and differently named folder, the viewer would restart and work. The new version was being run. At the next login the viewer would tell them they needed to update, it would update, and run. But, each viewer start would require another update.