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.

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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).

Bits & Pieces 2013-29

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The Kitey grid is adding a Market Place. Daniel Voyager had a bit about it. You can get the details here: Kitely Market Info.  It’s doors should open  in early September this year.

Second Life™ on an iPad is a bit of news. But, don’t get too excited. This is just a case of the iPad being used as a remote terminal to a desktop computer. There is a short discussion over on SLUniverse.

If you missed my article on the Microsoft Surface Pro running SL, check it out: Mobile Second Life.

VWBPE or Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education is starting up in Second Life July 24 to 27. The Lab is featuring the event in their blog. See: VWBPE Second Life. There is a parallel event by the same VWBPE group in Cloud Party, the same days.

Hair Fair 2013 runs to the 28th. It is popular. Just getting into a region can require patience. Also, I’ve had problems in regions I think need a restart. Regions seem to get horribly slow at rendering textures. Some regions just refuse to render staying gray.

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