Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Drax put his latest episode of the World Makers out today. This is a fun interview with Rod Humble. It runs 5 minutes and there are some interesting bits of information.
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If you have listened to Rod’s 2011 speech at UC Santa Cruz’s meeting Inventing the Future of Games, you may not be able to pick up on some of the context included in the video. See Rod Humble Speech Released for a brief summary and links to that video.
For some time I have covered Henri Beauchamp’s Cool VL Viewer and KirstenLee Cinquetti’s Kirsten ‘S’ Series Viewers. So, I am bummed to find out something is not right and we appear to have another viewer scandal.
Henri’s viewer uses a V1 interface, which I gave up on some time ago. But the viewer is a solid viewer made mostly of V3 or, at least, V3 adapted code. Probably more accurate way to say this is to say Henri has adapted a V1 user interface to run on new V3 code. Henri has been contributing viewer code to the community for a long time, well before I came around.
This Friday the Lab announced the Materials Beta Viewer is out 3.6.0-276764. Yay!!! See the announcement here: Materials Beta Viewer Launches.
The post explains a bit about what Materials is about and gives a quick tutorial on how to set the viewer so you can see materials. Now if they had just said something about where you could see some things using the materials… Well, try Hippo Hollow.
The MadPea folks are going to tear down the Carneval to make room for a new build. To celebrate the end of a fun build they are throwing a big party. There will be prizes, raffles, and more. See their announcement: Survive the Madness.
The party starts today at 12 SLT/PDT and runs for 48 hours.
MadPea is advertising this as the largest party in their history. Check it out.
No one on the Linden side is saying WHEN we might see SSA (Server Side Appearance baking) roll out. Today at the Server Beta meeting we found one reason it is taking longer than anyone would like. I think the Lindens are ready for SSA to rollout. But, they have to get problems fixed and they have a dandy one.
SSA is in testing on the Preview Grid (ADITI). You can go into Testy Sandbox and Lagland to try it out. But, be warned, read the rest of this article first.
JIRA SUN-74 – Apparent avatar skin and eye texture asset corruption with Server Side Appearance.
This bug is about SSA corrupting textures your avatar is wearing. Skin and eyes are definitely affected. It appears any Mod-OK skin is at risk.
Last week I wrote that the Beta Viewer and Development Viewer channels that carry release candidates are changing. Both have already pretty much stopped getting updates. The viewer development is going to parallel release channels like the server’s parallel release candidate channels.
Viewer development types watch the code repositories as they are often the first place we are likely to get a look at Linden Lab changes to the code. So, these people are interested in how things will change and where they can fine the code. For most of the rest of us, this is a non-issue. All we are interested in is where can we find a new version. For now there is nothing to point at.