Second Life and Virtual Worlds
I tend to leave drama out of my coverage, unless I feel I can contribute something to people’s understanding of it and hopefully reduce the drama. I think it worth your time to read Jessica Lyon’s recent post on the Firestorm blog.
See: A message from Jessica Lyon.
Obviously they are getting enough abuse Jessica felt a need to speak up. She did well.
If you have played with the new avatar Appearance Setting HOVER you may have noticed it is less than ideal. The slider ranges from 0 to 100. At 0 the avatar is lowered 2m. At 50 the avatar is neither lowered nor raised. At 100 the avatar is raised 2m.
Since the sliders are integer settings each setting increment of 1 moves the avatar 4cm (1.6 inches) up or down. If you watch the change from 50 to 49, it looks like it moves more than 4cm to me. (see image below – click to enlarge images)
I’ve used third party viewers (TPV) to adjust my height and found much better control. But, with the release of SSA (Sever Side Appearance – baking) those adjustments in TPV’s will stop working.
SO… how do we get our height adjusted now? Well, the choice for now is Appearance HOVER. But, what if you only need to adjust 1 or 2 cm?
Viewers
You may or may not have realized that most viewers now have the Server Side Appearance (baking) code. Also, the servers have the server side of the code now. This will allow the Lindens to start enabling the code in test regions in the main grid.
There is a Snack RC channel that supposedly has it enabled. But, that is unclear. We’ll likely hear more about this at the server meetings this week.
The Development Viewer is done. That channel is no longer updating. We will only see Beta and Project Viewer as the Viewer RC Pipeline rolls out, which will happen over the next 2 to 4 weeks, probably.
This Sunday morning I am going reading blogs and forums to see what is going on in Second Life. The interesting things I am finding follow:
Honour has images of Alice is Wonderland [SIC]. See: SL10BCC, Jumping Down the Rabbit Hole in Second Life. It is a region that is as strange and odd as the original story conveys and Honour does a good job of capturing that in her photos.
Maria Korolov on Hypergrid Business post more about the ongoing saga of the L$ Exchanges. See: Linden Lab allows third-party currency sales. Maria sees this as the Lab reversing their position. I don’t.
All exchanges MUST buy their Lindens from the LindeX. People can then buy those L$ from the Exchanges. But, in reality these will no longer be ‘exchanges’ as no one will be able to take money out of SL EXCEPT through the LindeX.
So, the exchanges are now only retailers of L$. It looks like many people will still have a significant problem getting money out of SL. This is of course the whole point of FinCEN regulations.
There is a question and discussion in the SL Forum about: Any solution for cashing out in Euro with LindeX?
The High Fidelity team has a new blog post up. This one is about using Google Glass to drive an avatar’s head. They go on to mention having made an Android app that collects a phone’s sensor data. This essentially turns the phone into a WII like controller.
[youtube h8YwF1yjB7w]
With their testing of Glass they found that the Android app was transmitting data to it. They aren’t where they can use it yet. But, the communications is working.
They also mention the have Oculus Rift working. In regard to High Fidelity, I have no idea what that means. Can they see into their test world? Or do they mean drive an avatar?
Whatever, there are lots of interesting pieces in the puzzle.
Each week the blog Lette’s Trivia And Trivial Stuff publishes the week’s top support issues with the Firestorm viewer. Another issue is out. But, some issues are not limited to the Firestorm Viewer. One of those is mesh objects failing to render.
Lette has written up an excellent section on the problem. She focuses on: MeshMaxConcurrentRequests. This is a Debug Setting in both the Firestorm and SL Viewers.
Word on the virtual street is that setting this higher is better and a must. Well… as often is the case the general advice is wrong. It depends on your computer and connection. But, in general it is a bad thing to change. To solve specific problems it is an acceptable temporary fix. But, used as a permanent change, it is a lag producer for you and everyone in the region.
Find out how to use this setting and understand the tradeoffs: Frequently Asked Support Questions of May 17.