Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This week’s show is titled: The Noob Experience. There is some interesting information in the podcast. I didn’t find much actionable information. The result is the index of the audio tape is a bit sparse. I have some comments in the summary.
The index starts after the fold…
I have a RL work project that is going to require my time for a couple of days. I won’t have time for much else. I hope to have it completed by the week’s end.
There is an article by Hamlet, Future Phoenix Viewer Development in Peril?, that points to a post by one of the Phoenix-Firestorm developers, Tonya Souther. See: Viewer 1 is officially on borrowed time. The title says it pretty clearly. The writing is on the wall, Phoenix is a dying viewer with an expected near term death. While Hamlet focused on Phoenix, there are problems ahead for any V1 viewer. Well… actually any number of viewers brands.
Near the end of June an announcement was made about the projects Linden Lab™ will be working on for the next few months. See: Project Shining to Improve Avatar and Object Streaming Speeds and my article Second Life Changes Coming.
HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. If you’re curious about the more technical but simple definition read The Webopedia definition of HTTP. For an even more technical explanation see: What’s HTTP? Explain HTTP Request and HTTP Response.
I last wrote about Myst-Uru in May. You may or may not know that fans have been hoping to see the Myst story made into a major motion picture. Today I saw that we have news on the Myst Movie. A day or two before, I was reading a thread in the Myst Online Forum. It is about how fans might promote Myst-Uru and get more people playing. That should sound familiar to Second Life users. As these two things come together in my mind I can see some possible changes coming for the Myst franchise and online game.
The thread “A Myst Movie Update” brings fans up to date on what is happening with the possible Myst Movie. Events and information leading up to current events can be found on MystMovie.com.
If you do not know, there are a series of books that tell the story of Myst. It is that story that provides the background for the Myst Games. It is a fascinating enough story fans wanted more. One of those books is called the Book of Ti’ana. For some time it was considered as the sole basis for the movie. But, Hollywood types looking at it objectively did not believe the book provided the starting point needed for telling the Myst story to an audience with no clue about what Myst is, the Cavern, or the D’ni.
I’ve put coverage of Pathfinding in several updates this week (29). This post has some of the unique items less related to other topics.
Right now the main Pathfinding concern is how vehicles work with the new Havok Physics Engine version. Depending on who one asks, they work well or not at all. So, far that seems to be a matter of whether the vehicle is built well or not. I know saying ‘well’ is an over simplification.
The concern is not really with Pathfinding. It is Havok. But, Pathfinding precipitates the change from height maps to terrain mesh. That change is breaking some content…
The Lab does not resist breaking what they consider poorly made content, at least not in all cases. This seems to be one of those cases.
One of the big problems with vehicles and the new Havok is the use of collision surfaces made from sculpties and tori. Using either for the physical items in a vehicle is going to fail.
Report vehicle problems in PF regions in the PathBug project, so the right Lindens will see it.
For the Lindens this was a bit of a hectic week. Originally Creative Tools was to roll the main grid, it did. A maintenance package was to roll to Blue Steel, it did. Pathfinding was to roll to Le Tigre and Magnum. That last one did not happen. Read on for the details.
Oskar says at the last minute they decided to put Creative Tools (AKA: Advanced Creative Tool, AKA Experience Tools) on Le Tigre and enable the Tools a number of regions in the channel. Pathfinding was updated to a new release with a number of fixes in Magnum.
Oskar explained some of the scheduling and work load around the roll outs. He says the weeks when they have three RC’s rolling out are really confusing because they have so much to watch, monitor, and track.