Second Life News 2013-30

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I’ve been hoping the SSA feature would roll to the entire grid. The Lindens just aren’t listening to me. The main channel is going to get the Experience Tools package, which is an infrastructure upgrade that is basically invisible to us.

Content and Mesh Meeting 2013-30
Content and Mesh Meeting 2013-30

Blue Steel get the package that ran  on Le Tigre last week. This is bug fixes and a change to Materials handling to improve performance. It gets the Experience Tools upgrade and may be a fix or two.

Magnum and Le Tigre are going to get the SSA package. It updates to include the Experience Tools update and a couple of fixes. The combined region count for Le Tigre and Magnum is near 4,000 regions.

The way this is going we might see all three RC channels running SSA in week 31.

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New Second Life Viewer Pipeline

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As reported before, a new viewer pipeline with various release candidates is coming online. It is mostly in place now. I don’t see where any recent announcements have been made by the Lab. Inara over on Living in the Modem World, has written about it. But, I think we are all a bit unsure how things are going to work. I know I am. I’m experimenting with things now.

I’ve updated my machine to use Win 7-64 in a dual boot scenario. This gives me a clean starting place for experimenting with the new viewer pipeline. Until today the only viewer I had installed was the main SL Viewer. I have all the other viewers on the other side of the dual boot in Vista 32. So, I can get to them. But, not from Win7.

I have clean AppData folders as a new Win7 user. Plus caches and log areas are new and fresh. 

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Second Life Graphics Crashers

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You probably know there is a griefers tool known as a graphics crasher. What you may not know is there is a defense. The blog The Green Lanterns has an article on how to defend against these crashers. See: Debug settings to make graphics crashers obsolete.

I have yet to try these settings. I have not been running into crash problems. So, you are on your own.

The The Green Lanterns site is mostly interested in griefers/anti-grifers and what they and the Lab is doing related to griefing. I have yet to decide if this is another vigilantly group or a responsible activist group. I tend to avoid griefer and anti-griefer discussions considering both sides mentally unhealthy. But, The Green Lanters blog seems oriented towards helping people, at least that’s my first take.

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Avastar 1.0 Released

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Gaia Clary has a new release of Avastar out. This trailer promoting it was released Saturday July 20th. The 1.0 release number should not be the significant problem it is with most other software. I’ve been using the release candidate builds and think the software even in pre1.0 releases is has been pretty solid.

[youtube MtwRAxZZbWA]

You can get more details about Avastar 1.0 on Gaia’s site: Machinimatrix.org. There is a list of improvements (14) and highlights (13). There is a known bug that has to do with animating the aSpine bone… I’m going to have to look for this problem, as I haven’t noticed it. But, I don’t recall attempting to animate the aSpine bone.

I will have to wait until I’m home sometime Monday to get my copy of Avastar 1.0. I’m looking forward to checking it out.

I’ll also be downloading Blender 2.68, which was released Thursday July 18th. This is the version Gaia used for testing Avastar 1.0. Less testing has been done with other Blender versions. Gaia believes Avastar 1.0 should work well with Blender versions 2.64 to 2.68.

Note: This is NOT a paid promo. I purchased my own copy of Avastar (US$22).