Second Life Going to Steam

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Another announcement came out this morning… Second Life is going to be available on Steam. (Reference)

As some sharp-eyed developers have speculated, we’re going to make Second Life available on Steam in the next month or so.

Many of us have friends who are avid Steam gamers, but if you’re not familiar, Steam is a very popular online game platform that offers a wide range of titles (and will soon also offer other software as well).

What does this news mean for Second Life? You’ll still be able to access Second Life just as you can today; there won’t be any change to that. But, the more than 40 million people who use Steam will also be able to get Second Life as easily as they can get games like Portal.

We’ll make an announcement on the blog when Second Life is actually available on Steam, but in the meantime, if you have friends who are Steam gamers, let ‘em know it’s coming!

 

Second Life Materials System Announced

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If you have followed me for a time, you know that I have been mentioning a MATERIALS SYTEM RUMOR. Today the Lab announced that indeed there is a Materials Project. So, what will our world look like with materials? Check out the 2min video.

If the video is still showing as unavailable use this link: Youtube

OK… every one else can display the video and my site won’t…   I suppose I need a plugin change.

Click for Video at Youtube

I think this is pretty awesome. We’ll be using this on buildings and CLOTHES… oh damn, SHOES too. /Me dances looking at my feet and thinking about new shoes.

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Viewer Performance

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A resident by the name of Nala Spires did some testing to see what affects the SL Viewer performance the most. You can read about his test and the results here: CPU / RAM/ VGA what sl likes More ? ((attempting to answer that ! ))

Nala Spires

She used this viewer: Windows 7 professional 64bit firestorm Viewer v4.1.1.28744

She also used FRAPS to benchmark the performance. FRAPS slows my system so I would expect the numbers to be a bit lower than normal.

A lot of the numbers make no sense to me. Since it is FRAPS I assume they were FPS numbers. But jumping around between 200+ and 20 seems a bit beyond anything that makes since to me.

I did read her Conclusions and they are interesting. Nala concluded  memory speed had a significant impact on performance. Buying FASTER memory did the most for performance.

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Disinformation

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Once up on a time, in the 1930’s, propaganda was a new mind control tool. The basic idea used by the National Socialist Party in Germany and Stalin’s Russia was to control the media. Anyone that did not parrot the party line was silenced. There was no investigative journalism. There was no questioning of the party line. To some extent we this playing out in Second LifeTM.

Understanding vs Disinformation – Image by: oskay – Flickr

At the time and even now a basic tenant of propaganda was and is the Big Lie. The bigger the lie the more believable it becomes. But, it cannot challenge what the audience already believes.  That is handled by small lies and innuendo.  With no presentation of countering facts and dissent propaganda takes root and moves into people’s belief system. It is a simple matter of repetition.

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#SL News Week 33

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Bandwidth

Bandwidth is a problem right now. Those using capped services and those having ISP’s with a strict abuse ToS are supposedly running into problems.

Server & Scripting 8/2012

The Magnum release channel seems to suffer the most. The worst case is when approaching the SW corner of a region that has 3 adjacent regions. Large draw distance aggravate the problem.

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#SL Mesh Update Week 33

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No new news on the Deformer. Karl, the one programming the Deformer, is usually a guest on MetaReality. Gianna that runs the show has been busy with other things. So, for the last 2 weeks no MetaReality podcasts and that means no updates on the Mesh Deformer.

Content & Mesh Meeting Aug 2012

The Redpoly Process is available for use, but it always was. AFAIK, no one has built a tool for use in Blender to make using the Redpoly process easy. So, that seems to be on hold.

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