Oculus Rift Surprise

by

I think most people that know about the Oculus Rift know that just a few months ago this was a small startup company trying to get crowd source funding. Now I see an article where one of the titans of the game world has come on board as the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

The video here is an older video. 1 hour. It is NOT related to the article about John as Oculus’s CTO. But, it has a load of information about the people involved with Oculus Rift and their accomplishments.

[youtube 8gaqQdyfAz8]

The titan is: John Carmack. Type “John Carmack” into Google and you’ll get about 1.9 million hits. That’s about two-hundred times more than me. John is considered a gaming pioneer, visionary, and somewhat a legend among gamers and game designers. He was the lead programmer on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and others. 

Read more

Blocky Paradise

by

There is an App Review on Kotaku that is about Linden Lab’s Blocksworld. Notice the ‘s’ in the name. There is a Block World that is about a 99% knockoff of Minecraft. Blocksworld is similar to Minecraft, but there are significant differences.

Blocksworld is an Android App. So, don’t plan to load it into your PC. But, it did just recently become available for the iPad. I think August 1st. It is free with optional upgrade packs available for purchase.

[youtube.com/watch?v=89QiP3KV6ZQ]

TechCrunch has an article up on Blocksworld too.

You can get Blocksworld here: Blocksworld Download. Of course they have a Facebook page: Blocksworld.

Following is one of the original promo videos:

[youtube G8W7_SiRPvY]

You can decide if the Lab’s marketing is an improvement… or not. Not…

Second Life News 2013-32 #2

by

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. 

Read more

Viewer Release Pipeline Update

by

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. 

Read more

Pages: 1 2

Second Life News 2013-32

by

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.

Blue Steel

This release candidate channel is going to get a new maintenance package. VWR-13228 is about: an object obtaining and retaining permissions indefinitely without avatar’s knowledge. BUG-3291 is the llListen in linked objects listening at root instead of the linked object’s local position “after re-rezzing the linkset.”

A change added in the package is regions should now block rezzing and entering during the final countdown time before a region shuts down. This should make for a better shut down.

And of course a few crash modes… exploits, have been fixed. That were… Oh Wait! They never tell us.

Magnum and LeTigre

These two channels will continue to run the SSA upgrade. Caleb tells there are no changes to the code. Leaves us wondering what’s up with that? I suppose we may hear tomorrow.

Pathfinding Rumors Persist

by

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.

Read more