OpenSim vs Second Life vs Minecraft

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Hamlet in an article on New World Notes titled OpenSim Gaining Regions… But Not Gaining Many Users makes a point about user numbers for OpenSim. They are apparently decreasing while the region count is increasing.

OpenSim vs Second Life vs Minecraft

It is hard to know what is happening with user numbers in Second Life. From my empirical experience I would say they are growing because I meet so many new people now, but it is hard to find real numbers to back up that opinion. What I do think is coming clear is the nature of OpenSim and the reasons for the popularity of Second Life.

OpenSim

I have nine regions in OSGrid, an OpenSim world. I’ve had them for over year. In that time I’ve had probably 50 visitors, more or less. I have a count if I would bother to look it up.

As I write this there are 125 users in world now and about 3,300+ have logged in in the last 30 days.

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Restrained Love Viewer 2.8.3 Released

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A new version of the RLViewer was released and announced by Marine Kelly. RLV is for those that enjoy dominance/submission play. So, it or feature sets form its code are popular with numerous role play regions in Second Life.

This is a special viewer and has features and foibles that are atypical to other viewers. The install is unique as is the use of the viewer. Enough so that videos have been made to show people how to install it and use its special features and toys made for it. The basic viewer is as easy to use as Linden Lab’s viewers.

You can read about the new features and fixes in this version in the RLV Blog.

Download and Install

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The download is a bit slow. It is 27mb so it’s not bad, two or three minutes. You can download the viewer from: Restrained Love Viewer Download. Pay attention to which version you download.

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#SL Mesh Deformer Worries

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Worrying is generally pointless. However, the concerns that bring the worry can be important to consider. Such concerns have come up in a thread over on SLUniverse. The basic concern is what will the Deformer do to our existing mesh clothes? Since they are mostly expensive it would be good to have an answer.

This is Alpha

The Deformer is in the alpha stage. So, we don’t know what the final Deformer will make mesh clothes look like. We have found problems and it seems many feel we will need a flag to tell the deformer whether to deform or not. But, even that is undecided as some of the problems the flag would address can be handled in other ways.

There is also the thought that perhaps a slider setting the amount of deformation may be better. So, we could tell the Deformer to deform by 0% to 100% of its normal deformation.

With so much unknown, all we can do is make intelligent guesses and speculate.

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SOPA Update

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ReadWriteWeb has an article on recent developments in the SOPA, Protect-IP, and OPEN bills. The Obama administration is saying they will not sign any bill that would allow censorship or changes in the domain naming system. Personally, I think that is smoke to quite the resistance these proposed laws are drawing from around the world.

[vimeo 31100268]

I will point out that this is the same administration that issued a ‘legal opinion’ telling government agencies they may ‘legally’ lie to avoid complying with Freedom of Information requests. See the LA Times editorial:  Obama’s secrets

Additionally this is the administration that signed an executive order that relives the government from following due process when American citizens are accused of sexual misconduct on campuses. Guilt is to be determined by the college or university administration. Failure to do so is cause to cut off funds to the institution. See this article by a Buddhist Obama supporter. (It links to the WSJ)

I suggest that any time a politician tells you what he is going to do, you better watch them. The result you get is often very different than the politician’s words.

Keep writing letters to Congress. See: SOPA is Still a Problem for detailed information.

Qarl Alignment Tool Rejected

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Tateru Nino has an article about a reject response from Linden Lab in the JIRA STORM-468 comments. Charlar wrote the comment.

Thanks for making this effort. Alignment and snapping are an area where there are useful enhancements to be made.
However, we are not able to accept this contribution as it is.

These are the primary issues we found which resulted in that decision:

  • The feature should support the same modes as the other manipulation modes.
  • It does not work for non-mod permission objects. This functionality should work for all objects that the user can manipulate in-world.
  • It only supports World snap mode, not Reference and Local modes, unlike all our other manipulation modes.
  • It packs and aligns to the face of the object bounding box. If objects are not cubes and do not share the same alignment, or aren’t aligned with the world coordinates (see above), the result of the operation is unexpected. Ideally the operations would use the actual shape of the object for aligning and packing.
  • There are also some coding implementation style issues that would need to be addressed. These can be covered in more depth after the functionality is dealt with.

    • In it’s current form, this is usable for purely prim-based builders under specific circumstances. It’s less useful for building with non-cube prims, mesh, sculpties. It’s minimally useful for building when the structure is not facing a global direction (ex: North, South, East, West). It’s not usable by non-building residents who need to place and organize purchased items.

    I found many of the comments to Tateru’s articles interesting examples of transference. I always find it odd that people when told why something is rejected speculate on why it’s being rejected. Whatever…

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