Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Today Lee posted on the Kirsten Viewer blog. The post is an update on the current effort to get Lee funding so that he can afford to work on the viewer and support Dawny. He discusses the goals for and results of the funding.
[youtube fZ811O1hlx4]
Lee is looking for funding to reach the point it can cover a year of development. For one with obligations that is understandable. Basically he is saying, hire me for a year or I need to get a job that will. That covers his comfort zone.
I’ve done pretty well with the development viewers, until today. I installed Second Life 3.1.1 (242977) Oct 16 2011 10:50:04 (Second Life Development). I started it and crashed shortly after login. I think as soon as it tried to render the world.
We have seen lots of viewer crashes from the OpenGL problems. Most of those have been with the new video cards and drivers. With this version of the SLViewer I got an error with my 8800 GTS and driver 270.61 (8.17.12.7061).
To day at 2 PM PT/SLT in-world will be a meeting about the Mesh Deformer Project. The meeting will be at Garden of Dreams. This is designing Worlds Treet.tv studio. A featured speaker is a Maxwell Graf, well-known designer and owner of Rustica. Also Graham Dartmouth of Builders Brewery and and Jusden Jonstone, an Opensource Developer, who has worked both for Linden Lab and for Third Party Viewers will be speaking.
The Mesh Deformer is about getting mesh clothes to work with the appearance sliders. It is more complex than that, but basically that is the part that will affect most SL residents.
I suspect we will get new information on the project. There is likely to be some fund raising going on too.
This meeting is an hour after the Content Creators User Group (Mesh Group) meeting. This is the week the Lindens said they could give us more information on their research into what may be the best way to provide mesh deformation in SL. I’ll have more on that later in the day.
You can learn more about the project at Indiegogo.com.
The Zindra area of Second life is the adult continent. Adult does not mean its XXX, but it may. So, along comes the Naughty Snowman. This is an annual winter event. In past years it has been for Zindra residents only. That MAY change this year. The residents of Zindra are planning the event now.
The event features snowmen made by residents. Votes are taken for the best snowman. Whether there will be a prize or one just gets bragging rights is yet to be determined. Want to sponsor a prize?
We don’t hear much from the Linden Commerce Team. But this week the new Direct Deliver system made it to the Release Channel in the main grid. We know because the Server team told us. It is currently testing in Le Tigre regions. That means there is a chance it will move to the main grid this coming Tuesday, if things go well.
As best I can tell the new features are not enabled. Visiting Le Tigre sandboxes I see none of the new folders needed for Direct Delivery in my inventory. Presumably this is a code compatibility test. They are checking to see if adding the code breaks anything else.
Also there are the other inventory services using HTTP Inventory. Those services are to make Inventory load faster and more reliably. I think new API’s are part of the deal too. So, new viewers should see a speed up in inventory while in Le Tigre channel regions.
This meeting of the Beta Server Group was Oskar Linden’s 100th office hour/user group meeting. Lots of fireworks. Oskar started dealing with server QA two years ago. At that time there was a server roll out every quarter. Oskar feels most things have changed for the better. Post a congrat in his FEED.
Tuesday the Fast Scripts update rolled to the main grid. The upgrade improves the performance of a number of script functions. The functions improved are those that do NOT change the properties of objects, so mostly llGet…() functions.