Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The site Co.Create has an article about Second Life™ by Susan Karlin. She interviews Rod Humble, Linden Lab CEO. The title is: A Look At Second Life’s Second Decade. Jo Yardley posted about it on Facebook.
Susan gets into the creative nature of people in Second Life. She mentions Jo and Drax.
Surely by now you know SSA is Server Side Appearance, which is about baking your avatar appearance. The Lindens have posted a second notice that SSA will be here next week. See: It’s Time to Update Your Viewer!
And they reuse their previous video:
[youtube jwglL3VXI80]
Please make sure all your friends know about the coming update and the need for them to be using a recent version of whatever viewer they use.
I see late yesterday the FS Team released viewer 4.4.2. There is an announcement on the FS Blog: Mandatory Firestorm 4.4.2 Update. This version fixes the problem of overloading the Linden stats servers. Users would not notice a problem. So, many might not update and stats indicate that would be the case. The result is this is a mandatory update.
Firestorm Viewer Download is here. Look in the right hand column, white area.
You may have found that your 4.4.1 viewer will no longer login. You get an update message on the splash screen. If you close it and attempt to login, you get another notice and the viewer does not login. If you close that one and attempt to login again, you find you are in a loop. The viewer is not going to login because the FS Team has told it not to. It is blocked by the FS Team.
We seem to be coming to a crunch point in viewers. The Lab is changing things so quickly third party developers have a challenge keeping up. Henri Beauchamp does well with Cool VL Viewer, which is a viewer based on V3 code with a vintage V1 user interface.
Niran seems to have leapfrogged the Niran’s Viewer to having all the latest Linden features by jumping to a recent SL Viewer V3 model. Niran’s Viewer is now Nirans Black Dragon viewer. Niran’s features from previous versions are being added to the new SL V3 Viewer code in Black Dragon. Eventually Niran will have Black Dragon on a feature par with his previous versions.
So, both of those viewers have materials. Firestorm 4.4.1 doesn’t and Tonya Souther of the Firestorm Team explains why, in a blog post: Tracking LL’s big changes, and why the 4.4.2… well now that there is an emergency roll out… 4.4.3 version won’t either.
The 4.4.1 version has a bug. It is going to get re-called the version 4.4.2 will be rolled out ASAP. This version will NOT need a clean install. You’ll see this hit today or tomorrow. It seems this version has a bug that overloads the stats server. Once the roll is available the 4.4.1 viewer will be blocked.
As of NOW the 4.4.1 version download is blocked.
The 4.4.2 version is not yet ready.
As you know the Materials System has been released by the Lab. The third party viewers are picking up the project and adding it to their viewers. Cool VL Viewer and Niran’s Black Dragon have Materials. Firestorm 4.4.1 does not have Materials yet but, 4.4.2 is nearing release and will have materials.
There are fixes for problems in Materials System that are in the pipeline. One of those has to do with Ambient Occlusion on large objects. That is unlikely to be in Firestorm’s 4.4.2 release.
Server Side Appearance (SSA baking) is planned for the release the week of July 7-13. The Lab is expecting it may be on the 8th or 9th.
Firestorm and Phoenix users will see a huge notice on the viewer’s splash screen that they need to update. If you have not yet updated to 4.4.1, avoid the rush and do it now.