The Firestorm Team provides the most popular viewer in Second Life™. They provide a new user area training people new to SL. They provide and maintain a JIRA, website, and wiki. There is a cost for all of these things.
Firestorm Logo
About 2-years ago they ran a fundraiser and have been paying for stuff from that effort. Now those funds are running low. It is time for a new fundraiser. See the article Gacha! A Firestorm Fund Raiser!
The Gacha event is happening at the Firestorm Sandbox. You can make a donation in the marketplace and you can pick up a Firestorm Jacket while you are there.
Or… you can make donations directly to Kio Feila in-world.
These funds go toward paying expenses. All labor is from volunteers.
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.
Ceka Genesis
Viewers
The main viewer is version 5.1.7.517973 released in week #32.
Second Life Animesh Viewer version 6.0.0.518579 – Released in week #33.
Second Life Bugsplat Viewer version 5.1.8.518305 – Week #32.
Second Life Love Me Render Viewer version 5.1.8.518751 – New this week. This version focuses on Rendering fixes to the Viewer. Release Notes
Second Life Voice Viewer version 5.1.8.518593 – This is a new update to version 5.1.8.518310, which was released in week #32.
Second Life Project 360 Snapshot Viewer version 5.1.6.515934 – Last updated in week #10.
Second Life Project Bakes On Mesh Viewer version 5.1.7.518013 – Released in week #32.
Second Life Project EAM Viewer version 5.2.0.518362 – Released in week #33. This is the Estate Access Management viewer.
Some points in the listing lead to speculation the iOS and Android support would be a server side render streamed to the devices. A Bright Canopy sort of thing. If that is the direction, would it be a monthly charged service or a Premium benefit?
For SL users there is the Apple question, will Second Life™ run on Apple? Or… continueto 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.
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.
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.
“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. Which of course there is no way to objectively measure. One would have to test all residents. The Lab is not going to give out contact information for all the users. Thus, for practical purposes: it is impossible to know.
So, what was that person actually doing? And what might you think about the speaker’s level of intelligence?
Another pointed out the statistical FACT that it would have to be 50%… which is applying broad generalized stats to small specific groups. Something reasonably educated people know doesn’t work.
There is the probability that the population of SL would be similar to the RL world population. However, we know Internet access and a computer are required to access and participate in the Second Life community. That certainly would skew the numbers based on economic status and geographic location. I could keep adding factors to suggest how the stats are skewed and in which direction. It would still leave us guessing and dealing with opinion.
It is the sayings of those people we admire for various reasons that we often use as a measure of intelligence or wisdom and allow to shape our thinking. From the combined wisdom and knowledge humans have aquired we can build our personal knowledge and beliefs. It is then my belief it is no longer intelligence or the lack of which I see in others, but their level of ignorance being different than mine.
