Dio?

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Looking at Daniel Voyager’s blog I see Linden Lab has released Dio Beta. The web site is here: Dio. The press release is here: Linden Lab® Introduces dio™: a New Shared Creative Space. This is my first quick look at Dio.

So, what is it? A creative space… well, so what’s that mean? It is apparently like a Facebook timeline with linkable posts. Think Facebook timeline crossbred with Google Circles, but with links from circle to circle. Yeah, that about as clear as mud.

There is a video that tries to explain it. Here it is.

[youtube na2OJ1YA7CI]

Dio looks nothing like the video. That is supposed to give you the concept of what Dio is. The video didn’t do much for me. The Lab folks continue to seem to have a hard time explaining what they mean.

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Just Interesting – EVE Online

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I saw today that EVE Online made gaming news. I have friends that play EVE. I like EVE but, it doesn’t suit my time limits. I am, however, impressed by a recent battle in EVE. The video of part of it is below. It runs 18+ minutes. You can watch it in full screen.

[youtube TLqb-m1ZZUA]

You may not know much about EVE. It is obviously a space game evolving space ships and fleets of ships. Now Gamer describes it as:

In short, it’s a cruel world where deception, piracy and scams run rife, and if you don’t have a smart head on your shoulders, you will likely get eaten alive. The learning curve for new players is mountainous, but those who survive the first few months encounter a unique world rarely seen in gaming.  

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Second Life News 2013-5 (1)

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This is short but exciting… The picks for this week’s rollouts are out. The main channel will get the Region-Crossing package on Tuesday. This package is running on the Blue Steel and Le Tigre RC channels. It has apparently done well in the RC, so it gets promoted..

Unfortunately the Interest List package has not done well, creating lots of problems for users. The package created high packet loss for many resulting in avatars and other objects failing to render. This week we will see a revised version of this package return to the Magnum channel. Hopefully this one will be better.

Blue Steel is getting the Materials System Package. We still won’t be able to try it out. There is no viewer that can take advantage of the feature. There are private testing builds. But, none most SL users cannot find or get access to them. So, I see this test as more of a compatibility thing.

Le Tigre is getting the fix for the World Map problem where some regions are not showing up in search.

I am hoping to see a Materials System Viewer soon.

Second Life 2012 Statistics

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It is hard to find good statistics on Second Life™ that tells us what is happening. Nor have there been any exciting ‘statistical’ developments this year. So, I haven’t been writing much about them. I did want to summarize them for 2012. It took me some time to get around to it. But, here they are.

User Signup per Day
User Signup per Day

Signups per day tells us something. It is just debatable what exactly. We can’t separate re-signups, those creating Alts, from new users signing up. We can’t even get an idea of how many people may be going for an Alt. My belief is the majority users have at least 1 Alt.

But, we have never known and as far as I can see there is nothing that would have changed the rate of users creating Alts. So, the signup rates are hopefully consistently distorted.

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Handy OpenSim Scripting Page

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I don’t spend as much time as I once did in OpenSim, actually OSGrid. Most of the time I would spend there is spent in Blender. I do try to keep up with some of the happenings in the OpenSim community. One is of course how OpenSim scripting copes with Pathfinding additions the Lindens have added.

OpenSim does not support Pathfinding. As Linden Lab implemented it, it is dependent on the Havok Physics Engine, a proprietary engine. But, in an effort to maintain some compatibility between Second Life and OpenSim they have looked at helping scripters keep things sorted.

In that effort they have made a page: LSL Status/Functions. This page shows the status of LSL functions in OpenSim. If you script there, this can be handy.

Second Life Reddit

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I have spent some time on Reddit. I used to regularly post on Reddit, but not so much any more. I see people talking about how handy Reddit is. Some say it leads visitors to their blog. Daniel Voyager in his article titled: Second Life on reddit says, “…it’s a very good way to get the latest Second Life news…”

So, I was wondering just how popular Reddit is. I needed to find some stats. It took a bit of looking but I did come up with them.

Links Posted Lead to these Domains
Links Posted Lead to these Domains

A quick look at them shows who most of the posters are. The far left site is Inara’s modemworld.wordpress.com. The web page chopped off the name. 

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