Second Life and Virtual Worlds
There is still a huge amount of speculation going on in regard to the ToS change and the Lab’s issuing Cease and Desist emails to those operating L$ exchanges and building viewers that link to third party exchanges.
In one thread over on SLUniverse the participants are trying to figure out why third party exchanges are suddenly illegal. They aren’t illegal. But, they do violate the Lab’s ToS… may be. That is where the confusion is, the ToS.
I just added the WordPress Plugin: Ultimate TinyMCE. I am still experimenting with it. The plugin adds features to the WordPress Editor: TinyMCE. I have missed being able to set font family and size. Now I have those features, plus a whole load of features I’m not using… and a bunch I have no idea about what they do.
I do most of my writing in MS Word. The formatting in Word is HTML, but it is way verbose. Also, some features, like text color, cannot be copy pasted into WordPress. Much of the HTML is stripped out when pasting into WP. So, I have to do some editing within WordPress. Now it is much more fun and easy. Adding HTML code is no fun. But, these buttons make it easy.
I like adding formatting to writing to make things stand out and emphasize points. Now it is easy.
Priorities… Work flow at the Lab changes based on what is important at the time. Baker Linden was working on the Group Ban features. That work is on hold as he works on bugs in display names, mute lists, and searches for names.
Seems there is a leading space problem in those features. So, at some point leading and trailing spaces will not be allowed in Display Names. The system is going to remove them. You can try to enter them but they system will strip them off when it saves the value.
There is a good article on FastCoLabs: What’s The Big Problem With Developing Oculus Rift VR?
It seems it is not that hard to integrate into a game. Team Fortress 2 has an Oculus Rift interface now. Valve, the owners and operators of Steam, helped create the interface.
Joe Ludwig, one of the Valve programmers behind the Rift implementation, said, “Figuring out how to combine mouse and keyboard input with head tracking was not very well explored territory, so we had to break some new ground there.”
Is that an obscure enough title? You may have noticed that the direction your avatar faces at Landing Point Hubs has changed behavior since Tueday. Until now an avatar always rezzed facing east. This was a bug. The server is supposed to pass along data to the viewer that specifies which way the avatar faces.
The point was that people could tp in and the land owner could set the Landing Point’s to face the avatar the right, or convenient, direction. See: About Land. I don’t see how direction can be set. But, I am not a land owner. I think it has to do with which way your avatar is facing when you set the landing point.
I enjoy Gwyneth’s writing. She has a new article out that inspires thought and examination of one’s thinking about Second Life™ with some interesting comparisons between human behavior in Facebook and SL.
It supports many of my perceptions of life and human nature, so I found really interesting.
I like how she has described the fallacies in the thinking of the interviewees. I enjoy rational examination of philosophy and human behavior, which is why I have a Philosophy Section in my blog.
Gwyneth is responding to interviews of by Aria E Appleford with SL Residents that have left SL. I think it is good reading. See: Second Life Has No Humans.
While you are there, check out the poll that Gwyneth has on her blog: What do you think about Philip Rosedale’s upcoming virtual world, High Fidelity? I am surprised how many have not heard of it… well… there are only 17 respondents when I voted. So, it’s too small a sample to provide much insight.