Second Life and Virtual Worlds
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.
To go along with the Linden blog post about Server Side Appearance (baking) Jessica has published an article on where the FS Team is with the next release of Firestorm. See: Server Side Baking on the Way!
Jessica is trying to get 145,000 Firestorm and Phoenix users to upgrade their viewers. These are just the users that are on older viewers that will not support SSA. She says the majority of FS/PH users have switched to the newer 4.4.0 viewer. Still 145k users is a bunch.
I expect the SL forum to get lots of new users when SSA is enabled on the servers. They’ll all be there asking WTH? Avoid being one of those people, update to a viewer with SSA support.
Today Linden Lab posted an update on the Sunshine Project, which includes Server Side Appearance (SSA) (baking). You can see it here: Faster Avatar Loading on the Horizon.
This is a warning that failing to update your viewer is going to be a problem. In my mind it seems they are somewhat downplaying the aspect that this update is going to cripple users that fail to update. Those that like the old 1.23 viewer and older versions of Phoenix are going to need to change to a newer viewer. Singularity seems to be the viewer of choice for those users.
Google Inc. sponsors Summer of Code (SoC) each year for students over age 18. For those under 18 they sponsor Code-In. This year 15 Blender projects have been included in the mix of SoC projects. They are:
I’m not sure how many of these projects will directly affect the Second Life™ community. You can read more about each project on the SoC pages: Accepted Blender Projects. Click the project description to get more information.
Congratulations Blender guys and thanks Google.