Second Life News 2018 w34

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Servers The main channel will update to version #18.08.10.518612. This version will allow notices you neither accept nor decline to hang around until the next login. Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum channels will continue to run version #18.08.10.518612. No rolls. And no Server-Scripting UG meeting this week. Viewers The main viewer is version 5.1.7.517973 … Read more

Second Life and the Future of Apple Users

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For SL users there is the Apple question, will Second Life™ run on Apple? Or… continue to run on Apple?

In June of this year Apple announced its discontinuing support of OpenGL after macOS 10.14 Mojave (scheduled for release Sept 2018), the core aspect of SL’s render engine. It will take a couple of years for Apple to phase it out. But, updates and support officially stop now. For some time support has been really bad.

● 1325 Colorful Disaster

They explained their reasoning when some game developers declared they would stop making games for Apple.

The reasons;

  • OpenGL was designed 25 years ago.
  • Core architecture is from the beginning days of 3D graphics.
  • Designed is based on outdated thinking.
  • OpenGL is a legacy tool with updates ‘tacked’ on.
  • Hardware GPU work flow has changed.
  • Never designed for multi-threading.
  • Today’s rendering is asynchronous.

On the PC side of things OpenGL is still supported. We can’t know for how long. Khronos, OpenGL’s developer, has introduced Vulkan. (See: State of Graphics: DirectX 12 & Vulkan – 4/2016) Development is exciting and popular. The group is on the forefront of some interesting tech. But, I don’t know that it will be helpful for SL.

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Second Life: Updating AvaStar with Slink Dev Kit

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I happen to like Slink, so I build what I can wear. For me that means using the Slink Developer Kit. Finishing some stuff up I decided it is time to update my AvaStar, Blender, and Slink Kit before moving on to new things. Also, I wanted to try out the AvaStar feature that adds Dev Kits.

AvaStar 2.4-1 and Slink v9

My previous updates I have written about here; AvaStar – Add the Slink 2017 Model – (5/2017) and AvaStar Tutorial: Adding the Slink Model to AvaStar – (3/2017).

Blender Update

The highest Blender I have is version 2.79c. This can get a bit confusing. The official release is 2.79b according to the Blender.org site. The main download provides an MSI file for use with Windows. This is a basic Windows install file. Not what I suspect most developers want. We want the ‘Archive’ file, the one that allows us to have multiple versions installed. You get that from the same download page just look in ‘other versions’ and grab the ZIP file.

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Philosophy Day 6440

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“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.” ― Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) Founder of the Tuskegee Institute, a black school in Alabama devoted to training teachers. In a recent post in the Second Life Forum a person stated 10-15% of the residents ‘obviously’ have less than average intelligence. … Read more

Second Life News 2018 week #33

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We have a bit of news. Most of the interesting stuff I covered yesterday reporting on the 3rd-party Dev meeting. We have new viewer stuff too.

And finally Winter with its bitin' whinin wind and all the land will be mantled with snow
And finally Winter with its bitin’ whinin wind and all the land will be mantled with snow

Posted in Second Life Commerce Merchants Group:

2018-08-10T11:52:23.546-07:00

[11:10] Grid Status Update: Rolling Restarts Main Channel Roll: Scheduled – We will be performing rolling restarts for regions on the main Second Life Server channel on Tuesday, August 14th, beginning at approximately 3:00 AM PDT. Please refrain from rezzing no copy objects and remember to save all builds. Please check this blog for updates.

2018-08-13T11:09:33.169-07:00

[11:13] Grid Status Update: Rolling Restarts RC Channel Roll: Scheduled – We will be performing rolling restarts for regions on the Magnum, Blue Steel, and Le Tigre RC server channels beginning at approximately 7:00 AM PDT on Wednesday, August 15th, 2018. Please refrain from rezzing no-copy objects, and remember to save all builds. Please check this blog for updates.

2018-08-13T11:12:12.296-07:00

[11:19] Grid Status Update: Scheduled Second Life Maintenance: Scheduled – On Wednesday, August 15th, we will be undergoing scheduled maintenance to Second Life starting at 6AM PDT. During this time, residents may be logged off and will not be able to log in until maintenance is complete. Please keep an eye on this blog for updates.

So, we have some down time ahead. Early Monday morning there was a previous bit of planned down time. 

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Blender 2.8 Coming Soon

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A Blender update is coming… soon. The Alpha version and nightly builds are available now, here: Blender Latest. But, I want to know if this is an update I need or want. So, I went looking through what people are saying. The big one for me is… the User Interface is changing. Ugh.

So, here is a video (8/13) that does a decent job of showing us the changes.

The video producer provided these time stamp entry points. I suggest you start at the 2:12 TM. Or if you are only interested in how it affects those of us using it for Second Life™, just read my comments below.

TIME STAMPS
1:22 – Alpha, Beta & Release Candidate
2:12 – UI Redesign
3:24 – EEVEE, the Physical Based Real Time Render Engine
4:43 – New Work Engine: OpenGL
5:19 – Grease Pencil (2D Animation Toolset)
6:38 – Matcaps (Material Capture)
7:48 – Zootopia Hair Shader
8:01 – Pixar Open Subdiv
8:34 – Dependency Graph, Asset Manager, Static Overrides and More
9:16 – Daily Blender Build Download
10:16 – Blender Resources

The new render engine looks to be awesome. But, the User Interface (UI) is going to kill me. They seem to be trying to make Blender easier for new users to learn.  …like 3D modeling and animation can be easy to learn? Still probably a good thing no matter how annoying I find it.
They moved most of the stuff at the bottom of windows to the top… give me a break… That will take a bit to get used to.

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