#Second Life Translation Bump

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In December of 2011 Google ended their free language translation service. Now Bing is ending theirs, may be. Google announced their intentions to do so early in 2011. Public outcry caused the management of Google to reconsider. In the end they decided to turn it into a paid system. Bing made their announcement in April of this year.

Bing Translator API

All the Second Life™ viewers and third party viewers, once upon a time, used the free service Google provided. There were various translation devices in Second Life that used Yahoo, Google, or Bing translation services. Google’s seemed to be the preferred service.

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MetaReality: Making a Difference

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MetaReality has this week’s podcast out. Salome Strangelove and Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz, formerly Qarl Linden) are guests in this week’s edition.

Metareality Podcasts

I’ll remind you this is not a transcript of the podcast. This my take on what I heard said and relationship between what I heard to what was meant by the speakers is purely coincidental… well… may be not. I try to convey the meaning of what is said. If you find anything offensive or upsetting, listen to the audio before raving.

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Firestorm Viewer Follow Up

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I’ve gotten to use the new Firestorm viewer for a bit. I like the Firestorm default mode and have only been using that mode. It is nice. It is close enough to the Linden V3 interface I can find most things easily.

It has the debug settings for CameraOffsetRearView and FocusOffsetRearView, which I change on all my viewers to give a better camera position. See Camera Position Tips for more on that.

The performance of the viewer is faster than Linden viewers. I turned off Sun/Moon Shadows to get the skin color adjusted in my new N-Core Eloise ‘One Voice’ shoes. My FPS was hitting 40 in my apartment. Nice. My Core2 Quad and nVidia 560Ti are not as fast as I had hoped. But, this version of Firestorm is faster than the last.

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New Firestorm-Phoenix Viewer Release

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I got home late tonight, Wednesday. I see there is a new release of Firestorm Viewer out, version: 4.1.1 (28744). This viewer has been a work in progress for about four months. So, lots of new stuff.

Firestorm-Phoenix 4.1.1 in Firestorm Mode

Get the download here: Firestorm-Phoenix Viewer Download.

You can read the official announcement on the FS/PH Blog: Major Firestorm Viewer Update! It has a list of the more interesting updates and new features. A full list of changes, fixes, and features is in the  Firestorm 4.1.1 Release notes.

Inara Pey has a more detailed review on her site: Firestorm 4.1.1.28744. Her review hits some of what she sees as the import changes. One being this viewer is more stable than the previous version, which is good.

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Content Improvement Week 28

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The second meeting of the new Content Improvement Group (CIG) was this week. The group has not yet been added to the SL User Groups list. You’ll find it in the SL Wiki as: Content Improvement.

Content Improvement Group

Geenz Spad is known in viewer development circles. Geenz facilitates the CIG meeting. With a viewer development background it is probably not surprising that the first topic of discussion was outstanding JIRA items. It isn’t THAT boring…

Using the Linden Lab™ viewers, both main release and development, I kept crashing. I finally switched to the Exodus Development version and managed to stay connected (Exodus is fast). What a pain having to relog 3 times.

The highlights from the meeting follow. There is more on the Deformer debates.

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