Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Third Party Viewer Directory is updated from time to time. Oz Linden changed the TPV List 4/16.
The viewers with enough users to generate reliable stats and that participate in crash reporting are listed in the first section of the list in the order of stability, least crashes. In this update Catznip is in the first position as the most stable.
The Imprudence Viewer is second, Singularity, Phoenix, Firestorm, and RLV follow.
Congratulations Catznip!
Today an announcement came out that the new Direct Delivery system now has ANS… Automatic Notification System.
Today, Linden Lab launched Automatic Notification System (ANS). ANS allows those Merchants that used Xstreet with the Magic Box Delivery System to confirm that a delivery has completed and send order details in a consistent format to a specified URL.
In order to support ANS with Direct Delivery purchases, we have made ANS available in Merchant Admin under Store setup on the Marketplace web site. Note that the Marketplace version will only support sending data URLs; it will NOT support sending data to inworld objects. For more details on how this system will work, please see this user created content on the wiki.
Before we can retire Magic Boxes, we will need to complete support for limited quantity items (or items that are “no copy” for the merchant).
The Commerce Team (Reference)
The lack of ANS has been a problem for a number of merchants as they change over to Direct Delivery. So, this will be a welcome addition.
In the SL News Week 16 article I covered the roll out to Blue Steel and Le Tigre of a server maintenance package with enhancements for Direct Delivery. With any luck these new changes will make DD more usable and dependable.
I’ve been busy with other things, so I’m a bit behind. Also, while there is news, there isn’t that much exciting news. But, here is what’s up.
Andrew Linden was busy enough with Pathfinding fixes, creation, and changes he could not make the Sever/Scripting User Group (UG). I suppose that is a good sign.
Falcon Linden is supposed to have a new UG up tomorrow, Thursday, April 19. It will meet in the Pathfinding sandboxes at 4 PM PDT/SLT in ADITI. There is a Pathfinding Project Viewer. It is probably a good idea to use it if you attend the meeting.
Falcon has not added an office hour/user group entry to the wiki. So, I doubt many new faces will be there. Plus the 4 PM time in ADITI is going to cause problems for those of us attending Andrew and Simon Linden’s Server/Scripting group that runs from 3 to 4. It will take some time to log off AGNI and into ADITI. So, lots of late arrivals.
Linden Lab® has announced Second Life’s coming ninth birthday in June. It is a small announcement, 158 words. See: Help Us Celebrate Second Life’s 9th Birthday! If one had no history with Second Life® the announcement would just be an announcement, neither good nor bad. But, those having history with Second Life are having various reactions to the announcement based on their history, expectations, and perceptions of Second Life and Linden Lab.
Tateru in an article on Dwell On It, Anniversary time. Everything new is old again, recalls what, to her, is probably the best SL Birthday in all time: SL3B. Tateru see this announcement as possibly opening the best opportunity for a great celebration in years. She goes on to speculate on why the Lindens are proceeding this way, but that is speculation.
Innara Pey at Living in a Modem World sees it as a shame. For her the collection of regions devoted to the celebration and the large number of builds for the Second Life 8th Birthday (SL8B) made for a great party.
I was somewhat disappointed with SL8B. I like to see great builds. I like to see creative ideas well expressed. I love things like Kerryth’s lacy, fairy like buildings. I like the interactive art. I like finding a bunch of friends parting and having fun. There were 3 or 4 builds in all the dozens that fascinated me. I want to be endlessly fascinated. But, such builds take a huge amount of effort. Building just for a few days and then seeing the build disappear has to take its toll.
I ran into this problem in early March. It seems my idea to change my password to flush and refresh my inventory in the ADITI grid was not such a good idea. It seems others use the same idea and change their password too. Or some may do it for security reasons. I suspect those of us playing and working in ADITI are more concerned about our inventory.
No Save Inventory – This is an annoying problem. When a password is changed one’s inventory is copied over to ADITI. Any inventory one had in ADITI previously is REPLACED. This is an expected behavor. It can be used to clean out the tons of test stuff one generate playing and experimenting in ADITI.
The new problem is anything created and saved to inventory will be gone the next time you login. Build something, save it to inventory, relog, and it is gone.
A new release of the Dolphin 3 Viewer is out: 3.3.3 (23731). This one seems to be mostly small bug fixes. The announcement on the release lists these:
All seems very typical and nothing out of the ordinary.
I find the viewer gives me about the same performance as the Linden Lab® Development Viewer, 10 to 15 FPS in my Core2 Quad w/ASUS GTX560Ti.
The Viewer’s Fast Timers show it is spending 62ms rendering a frame. My CPU cores are run about 25% and the 560 about 15 to 45% load. There are almost no page faults. So, I don’t see a hardware bottle neck. Viewers using the latest Linden Lab® code are just slow. Finding a fix is like questing for the BIG ‘O’.