Second Life – Page 534 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Emerald Viewer Scandal – Recovery?

2010/08/22 by Nalates Urriah

Today there is a new post about the Emerald Scandal on the Modular blog. Fractured Crystal apologizes and resigns from the Emerald Team. This is no small step. Whether it will be enough to save the viewer and restore people’s trust in the development team, time will tell. See: [Emerald] Off with his head

Whatever the case, it is a huge step.

The SLUniverse forum has been abuzz with people discussing the Emerald scandal and to some extent so has the SL blogrum. In both those discussions it is obvious people have lost trust in the Emerald Viewer and are abandoning it.

The Emerald team uses the hits on the login page to measure Emerald Viewer usage. It would be interesting to see the viewer usage stats leading up to Fractured’s resignation. Even without them I’m sure there will be speculation about what actually moved Fractured.

KirstenLee S20 Build 33 (All Platforms) Released

2010/08/20 by Nalates Urriah

KirstenLee says this version of the viewer has many big changes in user interface, user interface useability, performance improvements, memory leak fixes, group chat fixes, and more. The multi-layer clothes feature is now hard coded in… This is the feature that allows one to wear like 5 shirts layers. Torley has a video tutorial on … Read more

Phillip's SLCC Speech Index

2010/08/15 by Nalates Urriah

New World Notes put up a link to a recoding of Phillip’s keynote address to SLCC; Philip Rosedale Offers Second Life Roadmap

The camera work is absolutely horrible. The sound is very good.

I made an index of the speech as I listened. This should help you find the items in which you are interested.

Emerald Viewer Scandal Erupts… Again

2011/04/152010/08/15 by Nalates Urriah

Updates at end of article.

On July 13 a post appeared on the Emerald Modular blog. Concerning recent activities.. Sounded like a bit of drama. Not uncommon in connection with the Emerald Viewer.

Now another post appears. Recent News, August 14. Both of these seem like they are part of the ongoing drama we see related to virtual world and online communities. But then we start seeing other blogs and forums picking up the story and expanding on it. So, what is the story and who do we believe?

Another problem is that some of the detractors of Emerald are lose wing nuts. That has to a great degree numbed the community to complaints about the Emerald viewer and dev team. This latest scandal is more fact based than drama based. There seems to be a real problem.

SL Viewer 2.1.1 Released

2010/08/14 by Nalates Urriah

This viewer has a texture download fix that should greatly improve performance. If you even just barely pay attention to SL technology you have likely heard of HTTP Texture Get. What you likely have not heard is there was a bug in SL viewers 2.0, 2.1 and the 1.23 series that cause texture caching to fail. This meant every time you visited a place you’ve been before; all the textures had to download again. So even with a faster download, we were not getting as much performance gain as we should have. Now the textures should cache and greatly reduce rez time.

The problem has been fixed in 2.1.1 (207998) Aug 11 2010.

Second Life and Linden Lab Dying?

2010/08/12 by Nalates Urriah

Update: 2010-08-14 (at end of article) – I’m depressed. Gwyneth Llewelyn wrote Good-bye, meshes! Gwyneth works in the RL virtual worlds service fields and apparently has contacts among the Lindens. She writes about the status of the supposed coming Collada meshes. Seems they may not just be delayed but canceled for the foreseeable future. Bummer. (Her blog changed appearance, a nice new look.)

Gwyneth describes why this is likely to become a major disadvantage for Second Life’s ability to compete with other virtual worlds. I think it is so important that it may mean the end of SL, not tomorrow or next year, but…