Second Life News 2013-43

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There was a roll to the main channel today. This is the package that ran on all the RC channels. This is mostly a bug-fix package.

The Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed “Group member access to parcels fails when ‘Sell passes to’ is enabled” (BUG-3992[c])
  • Fixed “‘Ghost’ avatars and vehicles sometimes appear to an observer at the sim border” (BUG-3872[c])
  • Extremely high Avatar Render Weights reported to the server are now capped at 500,000 (BUG-4010[c])
  • Fixed “Vehicles which exit a region with a passenger are incorrectly auto-returned and become ‘ghost shapes’ in the physics engine” (BUG-4024[c])
  • Fixed a performance issue with avatar loading speed in the experimental ‘viewer-interesting’ viewer

RC Channels

No new packages will roll to the RC’s. It is not clear if they are going to be restarted or not. The package they were testing is the package rolling to the main channel. The result is both the main and RC channels will run the same version this week. So, a restart is not needed in the RC channels as the package is already running.

Second Life TOS Update 2013-42

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Update: See Strawberry’s Monday Mime.

Last Saturday the United Content Creators of Second Life™ (UCCSL) sponsored a meeting to discuss the Terms of Service (ToS) changes made in August. They put together a panel of attorneys to answer questions. I think it was the Second Life™ Bar Association that provided RL attorneys to form an answer panel. I was able to attend only part of the meeting, but there are audio recordings and Machinima of the entire 3-hour meeting.

A full three-hour audio recording was captured by Toysoldier Thor. You can listen to it from a link on Toy’s blog: Recap & Audio – Inworld Legal Panel Talk on LL TOS. Toy’s opinion is that people should listen to the audio and make up their own minds about opinions provided by the UCCSL panel. I’ll go a bit further and add some opinion.

Inara has a summary of the meeting up. See: ToS changes: Legal panel discussion – audio recordings and notes. She has images of the slides used in the meeting. Plus lots of time marks in the summary. 

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Second Life News 2013-42

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Viewer Status

Second Life™ Viewer 3.6.8 (282367) Oct 14 is a hot fix release for an ATI driver incompatibility problem. The Release Candidates will be getting updated with this change too.

Interest List

Richard Linden says the project is coming to an end and viewer side source code is out. TPV Dev’s are looking at it. The changes have NOT been through QA and are NOT ready for release. But, at least TPV Dev’s can see what they will need to handle. More eyes mean more bugs found and more brains thinking mean more solutions and improvements.

While building the coming Interest List release the Lindens were focused on things not rendering but still having a presence in the physics engine. Sever changes at this point are significant. The viewer is a preliminary version without significant change.

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Cyan Worlds Announces Kickstarter

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Short work break for me. I came across this in my Google+. I had to say smething.

If you caught my articles on Cyan Wolrds and their Myst series, you know they have been talking about a kickstarter project. Well, it is here. Check out the Kickstarter page: Obduction. (That is not misspelled.)

[youtube 4OF9BBc0xA0]

At about the 2:15 time mark Rand Miller begins talking about the project.

The company is trying to raise US$1.1 million to make the project happen. This is a major test of the Myst fan base. For years we, the fan community, have argued about what would work and how easy or difficult it would be to fund a new Myst like game or version of Myst. The project will answer those questions.

The project has over taken the Cyan.com web site. Plus they have a web site up for the project: ObductionGame.com.

There is a thread in the Myst Forum: Cyan Kickstarter Project Open: OBDUCTION

If you are a Myst fan, get the word around.

Back to work…

Oculus Rift and Cloud Party

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Inara and Hamlet have just written about Cloud Party and Oculus. I am happy to see that Cloud Party is thinking Oculus Rift. But… really!?! In a web browser?

If you saw my previous post you know that browser-makers are dropping plugins. Right now they can’t drop all of them because the replacement, HTML5, is not advanced enough to be able to provide the same functionality and performance. So, adding Oculus Rift support doesn’t seem practical to me. After all the system has to render twice as many frames to create 3D display for Oculus. Browser based 3D rendering is just barely performing at acceptable 2D display levels now. And that is with many rendering features dropped to keep performance acceptable.

If you try to use shutter glasses you soon learn that you must have a monitor and video card capable of generating 120 FPS. Sixty frames for the left eye and sixty for the right. The same sort of thing is true for Oculus.

But, there is a huge push to get Oculus to mobile devices. The movers and shakers in the game field think it is possible and that the large money is in mobile. I have my doubts, but lots of money is being thrown at the problem. So, we are likely to see some type of solution emerge. A big question is: ‘When?”

See: Cloud Party Becomes First Virtual World to Officially Support the Oculus Rift; Ex-Linden Cyn Skyberg: “We Are Getting Very Close to the Original Concept of VR”

See: Cloud Party: Oculus Rift support and more.

And with Oculus, I hear performance is everything. Poor performance often results in simulator sickness. May be I could market sim-sickness bag attachments for the Oculus… Money Mouth

Ha Ha