Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This week following the Thanksgiving holiday we move back to the regular server updates. The Main Channel gets the maintenance package that was running on all three release candidate channels. This package has the fix for linksets and objects larger than 64 meters. (BUG-166 – Something invisible pushes avatars around.)
While some saw linksets larger than 64m as a good thing, it was being used to grief people and also accidentally causing problems. With this release the problem is ‘fixed’.
Several blogs have covered the art of Whiskey Monday. See the following articles for information on who Whiskey Monday is and some of her art.
Obviously I like Whiskey’s art. You can see it on her web: WhiskeyMonday.com, and Flickr.
The notable change is Whiskey is now selling RL prints, giclee, of her Second Life™ art. Giclee is a high end printing process used for fine art. It is expensive, but it lasts. When one cannot afford original art, a giclee is the next best thing.
You can find the art for sale at Fine Art America. Getting the source for giclee printing is a bit of work. So, not all of Whiskey’s art is on Fine Art America. If you find something on Flickr, you can ask that it be uploaded.
Good luck Whiskey.
Strawberry Singh has a post about a new game, Strangelings, expected to be out the first quarter of 2013. She says the Ozimals team has joined up with two former Lindens and a financial expert to form Flying Monkey Interactive, Inc. The team is developing a product platform called Toto that will run on iPad, the web, iPhone, and Facebook.
The Magic of Oz region has been remade to create a promotional and information spot in Second Life. It is an all mesh area. Check it out. Also bounce over to Strawberry’s blog and see the video she made. It shows the Strangling in all is awesome cutness: Strangelings & Mesh Oz!
There is an issue for some with the Mesh Deformer and the time it needs to calculate the mesh for offsetting. Kitsune Shan has been working with the Deformer and voicing concern about the time needed for the Deformer to kick in.
Kitsune is proposing that we do something like what is done with avatar baking. The viewer does the bake and sends a composite image to the servers for everyone else to use. Of course that is being changed to a server side process now, where a new service in servers at the Lab will do the bake and send out the composite image. Kitsune would like to see something similar to that for the Mesh Deformer.
White Rabbit points outthe difficulties with attempting to cache the deformation calculations. White Rabbit has done some testing and finds the CPU time for the Deformer calculation is consistently small. She speculates that the long calc times come from the thread being a low priority process.
The chances that Deformer calc’s will be cached server side is, in my opinion, slim to none. We do not have any statistics on the type of hardware being used with Second Life™. We know there is new stuff, way old hardware, and everything in between. But, AFAIK, we have no information on how much of each.
We have been told that number of users staying with SL Viewer 1.23.x is only 2 or 3%. Third Party Viewers that do not use SSE2 CPU commands is small. Read the SSE2 thing as meaning viewers that support really old computers. Their user bases are so small they fit within the 2-3% too. So, I’ll speculate that the Lab is not going to put much effort into something as complex as caching deformation data.
If you are following my coverage of viewers, you know that most Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developers are NOT releasing production viewers, but instead release Beta or test viewers to save on paper work. So, I am not surprised that Exodus has another Beta version out.
The Exodus blog lists the New, Fixed, and Changed features in this release. See: Beta 9 (12.11.24.1).
The release comes in both a 32-bit and a sort of 64-bit (LAA) version. The download file size is about 37mb and the download is quick. The install is simple and typical. I installed it over the top of my previous 8.1 install and it seems to work OK.
EzY McAlpine tipped me about an article on TechCrunch.com: How Linden Lab Hopes To Find Second Life In Mobile Creative Play. It is short but points out some new aspects of Dio & Versu, games coming from Linden Lab™.
In the article Darrell Etherington quotes Rod Humble, Linden Lab CEO, talking about Dio: “It’s sort of like Second Life without the graphics, or Facebook but trying to be more of a creative space. … So it’s a web experience and you create your space, but within the spaces, everyone has their own avatar and avatars carry inventory. The way you navigate from space to space is via doors, and you can make things like a MUSH [multi-user shared hack] or hobby space very easily.”