Second Life News 2013-32 #2

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There is no new news on server updates, rollouts are the same as yesterday. We did get new information on some of the changes to be running in Blue Steel Wednesday.

Stop Animating Me

The fix for VWR-13228 – Object can obtain and retain permissions indefinitely without avatar’s knowledge and no way of knowing who took it. It seems this is getting mixed up with the Viewer’s ‘Stop Animating Me’.

It is key to understand what Stop Animating Me was intended to do. Originally the idea was to fix a problem where you sat in chair and the teleported away or crashed out. Your animation state was saved and when you arrived or reclogged you posed (animated) as setting in a chair without a chair being present. Stop Animating me reset your animation state. But it only did this viewer side… and that is key. It ONLY reset your viewer. Others might still see you sitting even after you corrected the problem as far as you can tell. 

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Viewer Release Pipeline Update

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We have a new release of the Main SL Viewer: 3.6.2-279258. If you don’t have automatic updates enabled get the newest version here: Second Life Download. You can find the Second Life Viewer’s Release Notes here. Look for the version with the 279258 number.

Download Page Changes
Download Page Changes

This version got the Vivox updates. Vivox™ is the service that provides voice chat for Second Life™. We cannot see the JIRA notes on MAINT-2696, so we cannot know exactly what changed. My understanding this only affects reliability of the service. You should have fewer problems with voice chat failing. 

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Second Life News 2013-32

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Maestro Linden is on vacation this and, I think, next week. Caleb Linden is posting the Deploys for the week of… forum post. There will be no new software rolling out to the main grid. It is unclear whether there will be region restarts are not. We will likely know when regions start going down. … Read more

Pathfinding Rumors Persist

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When Pathfinding was in development I had some concerns about how it would affect Second Life™ performance and especially about how hard it would be for region and land owners to implement. I wasn’t the only one. Rumors got started and region owners freaked out. The result is many turned off Pathfinding for their regions.

Surprisingly today, many region owners apparently still turn off Pathfinding thinking it is going to improve region performance. After all, if it isn’t running it can’t use up CPU cycles. Right? Wrong.

Whether Pathfinding is on or off the core functionality uses the same amount of cycles. Enabling or disabling Pathfinding is like enabling or disabling building in a region. The only affect is has on performance comes from whether people add prims or not. It isn’t the enable-disable that affects performance, it is the number of prims added. Otherwise, nothing in the server’s operation changes. This is just another setting that controls what people can do, not what the simulator does.

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EverQuest Next

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Dayset alerted me to EverQuest Next® by Sony Entertainment. Polygon has an article up with comments from Sony Entertainment’s president  John Smedley. There are some interesting comments about games in general that will probably interest you and my Myst friends.

Most festinating is the idea Sony is going to pay fans to make content for EverQuest Next. Pay?

There video is from a Sony Entertainment Online event at which EverQuest Next debuts. It runs 38 minutes in part 1 and 42 minutes in part 2. Whew! Read the index of the video before you start watching it. Beta sign up link is last thing on my second page.

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Index

Glurge alert! The first 10 minutes is user experiences and stories of people’s experiences in the original EverQuest.

From 10:00 to 12:00 John Smedley is talking about how great EverQuset and its fans are…

At 12:00 an artist does a sand drawing telling about the creation Qeynos. Boring…

At 18:00 the artist starts another drawing about the Ring of Scale Attacks… OMG, doubling down on boring… someone in management thought this was a good idea? I guess there are hints to something about the game in the drawings… but 14 minutes?

At 26:30 the sand drawing is over… I am so glad there is a way to skip ahead in YouTube video.

At 26:45 we get to some interesting stuff. The concepts guiding what the Sony team is doing with EverQuest Next is in this area. It includes concept art. Then they get into characters they are adding. 

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State of Game Engines

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I think any one that has been around Second Life™ for any time and taken a look at the engine driving SL realizes the current batch of game engines in the gaming world far exceed the capabilities of Second Life. To get an idea of where the art of games engine design is take a look at Game Thirst’s Count Down of the top 5 game engines.

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If you are not that into the tech of game engines you may be wondering if Second Life will ever catch up. Well, probably not, which begets the question: why not? 

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