Second Life and Virtual Worlds
KarenMichelle Lane posted a list of the Le Tigre regions in this week’s Deploys thread. You can find it here. Le Tigre is the Release Candidate channel that has SSA enabled. If you’re in one of those regions and have an old viewer, you will be so gray… If you find problems, see if they … Read more
This week we are getting new rollouts. The main channel got a maintenance release. I think anything called a maintenance release is a security and exploits fix. Whatever, we are told that this release has a fix for a popular griefing tactic. The hope is we will see less region crashes.
This package also includes the LSL changes for llApplyImpuse and llXorBase64.
A new release of the Exodus Viewer came out. The previous release was back in August 2012. This release is primarily to catch the Exodus Viewer up to Linden Lab releases. The label is 13.07.09.1. This comes in Windows, Mac, and Linux flavors.
New features I n the viewer are few, but they are the important ones that will extend this viewer’s life.
Katharine Berry, the current lead developer for Exodus, writes that RLVa is just too much for the small team to integrate with changes coming from the Lab. A decision was made to drop RLVa to simplify the task of keeping the viewer up to date with the Linden viewer.
It is sad to see RLVa dropped. For some it will be a serious downer. RLVa is quite fun and about more than just BDSM.
In my intermittent travels I came across this funny but informative video on making your own physics layer to control boobie bounce. Made by IsolteEmber the video is a funny look at adjusting bounce and how the controls work. Be warned she rambles a bit, but even that is kinda funny. [youtube 4pjY_QAjYFY]
On Plurk I noticed Hamlet’s article: New SL User Retention is 20% (Wha?) I mentioned that stat in one of my ‘Rod Interview’ articles. Rod had said of the 400,000 new sign ups to SL each month 20% stay longer than 30 days.
Hamlet was thinking about that and wondering about the numbers. Hamlet had thought about past numbers and remembered that previous monthly sign ins was in the range of 500,000+. If there are 1,000,000 sign ins per month now and 400,000 of them are new sign ups each month, Then that means SL has only grown to 600,000 over a number of years. How can 20% stay and not drive up the sign in count? That should add 80,000 users per month.
Well, it has finally happened. Another grid, In-Worldz, is going ahead with the Mesh Deformer. They contacted Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz) and paid him to make changes to improve the Deformer’s performance.
Karl is estimating that the new version is 21 times faster. I don’t know that anything else has changed in the Deformer. Is it faster because the process of deforming changed? I don’t know. I doubt it. But, may be.
Henri Beauchamp posted in STORM-1716, the Deformer JIRA, that speed really hasn’t been the problem some think it is. But, there is a problem with how the viewer is handling the item’s LoD. That problem delays the deformer kicking in. So, this change may not resolve the ‘time’ problem in SL Viewers.
Henri says he will support this new Deformer code in Cool VL Viewer in his three branches of the viewer. The code is already in his viewers. BUT… only when connected to OpenSim grids. Only his experimental viewer will support the Deformer in the SL Grid. Linden Lab’s Viewer Policy requires any viewer that changes the ‘shared’ experience to be an experimental viewer until the feature is officially released by the Lab.