Firestorm Milestone

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Today on the Firestorm/Phoenix blog Jessica Lyon announced that Firestorm now has more unique users than SLV 1.23. Not only are there more people using the viewer, their total time in world with the viewer is more than the time in world with SLV 1.23.

Firestorm is still in beta. So, this is a big milestone. While this comes as no surprise to me, it deserves congratulations. Congratulations Firestorm Team!

The Sad Side

Of the 54 team members 38 are support personnel. None of these people are paid employees. The team is made up of volunteers. The viewer and support are provided for free.

In spite of the above there is enough abuse directed at the team that Jessica mentioned it in her blog post. While I have been in debates in the Myst-Uru community about online behavior and seen frustration used as a justification for poor behavior, I’ve never accepted frustration as an excuse. I think it shows a level of immaturity and a lack of ability to cope with life. In other words, such people need the help of a professional counselor.

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Second Life General News

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There are lots of little things happening in Second Life that don’t fit into the updates I normally do. But, they are interesting and some affect what residents do in SL. So, here are a few that interested me.

Search

In April Linden Lab changed their search engine. See: Test Out New Search, Delivering More Relevant, Faster Results. The title is a hype. But, the new search engine is in place. With that release my sales went down the tube. With earlier releases others sales due to search placement went down and mine went up.

If you want good placement in Second Life Search, you can read Darrius Gothly’s blog DGP4SL. Darrius has released his new search tool. It is designed to help you figure out how your store will rank in the SL Search engine.

Igor Ballyhoo "Metamorphosis"

Rod Humble Interview

Daniel Voyager has an article pointing to and interview with Rod Humble (you do know he is now the CEO of Linden Lab?). The Mark News has the full interview titled The “real world” can learn a lot from the creativity and imagination unleashed in virtual realities. (7/11/11) Rod puts forth some interesting information and opinions in the interview. Did you know SL’s demographic is people in their 40’s?

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#SL Mesh Update Week 28

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We still don’t have a cost for mesh upload or prim equivalency. But in Monday’s meeting mesh cost was still a big issue. Mesh making residents are upset that mesh costs too much. Did I mention that the Lindens haven’t set the cost yet? So, we don’t know what it is going to cost, but it’s too much. Sounds like politicians arguing.

Mesh in ADITI

Latest Mesh Cost Information

The equation for calculating simulation weight, streaming weight, and physics weight to get prim equivalence cost is pretty well set for the first release of mesh. However, the constants and multipliers aren’t. The upload cost is still in flux. The equations in the wiki are a mix of up-to-date and out-of-date. Jeremy Linden made a bunch of changes to the Mesh Pages in the wiki today.

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Kirsten Viewer S21(8) Released Review

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New release, Kirstens S21 2.8.0 (8) Jul 10 2011, with new stuff is out. This viewer is based on Linden Lab’s viewer code 2.8. The Snowstorm Development viewer has just gone 2.8.0 this week. This viewer will give us a glimpse into new features coming to SL.

Oops - Attachments

Download & Install

File download size is about 32 mb. The install is typical Kirsten. The previous RC3 is uninstalled. Settings, logs and other stuff are saved, except for your graphics settings which are changed to the defaults for your graphics card.

There are some reports of problems from the settings file. So, if you run into problems, delete the settings.xml from C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Roaming\Kirstens S21\user_settings. The viewer will generate a new file on the next startup. See: S20 Cache & Settings Manual Clearing Howto.

Also, there are some inventory features that are a bit laggy as some of the new stuff in inventory is not yet supported by the server side. That should correct as the features get rolled out to the main grid. Part of the problem is your inventory is connecting to the SL Market Place and that can cause an initial delay.

INSTALL UPDATE 7/11: The normal uninstall/install doesn’t work well. It is better to do a clean install of S21 for this version. See the comments for where KirstenLee noticed that my install was not right.

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#SL Server Updates Week 27

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Since Monday was a holiday in the US there was no Tuesday roll out to the main grid. However, we did see the Release Channels rolled back and the main grid software installed there. This is just until they add a new batch of fixes to the Mesh Prep update that was on Le Tigre and the Mesh Prep update that was on Magnum.

Slowing

Week 27 is the second week for the main grid running with the new Mono2 update in place. The main grid has many more strange conditions than can be found in the Release Channels. So, problems not revealed in testing show up. In the article Second Life Server Update Week 26 I explain one of the cases where Release Channel testing did not find a problem that quickly showed up when rolled to the main grid.

Services Failure

During week 27 there were some reports of scripts still slowing. There may be a problem when a region is using up all the available script time. If you’re seeing a slow down, check the JIRA’s.

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Second Life Outfit Folders

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I like the way the new SLV2 Outfits work, somewhat. I have several problems with how the sidebar handles them. There is a work around that I came across in the JIRA that handles my problem with organizing outfits.

Outfits Panel

Problem

The Outfits Sidebar provides only a single list of outfits. This mixes together the outfits I make and the default outfits provided by Linden Lab. As I create more outfits this is going to become more of a problem. So, I want to create folders in the Outfit Panel. But, that is not possible.

There are a number of JIRA feature requests and bug reports about the lack of folders in the Outfits Panel. I’ll get to those later.

Work Around

There is a way to get outfits into folders, sort of. First off, know this is for Series 2 viewers. Don’t mess with your Linden Outfits Folder in Series 1 viewers. Doing so is likely to cause you problems. Also, know you will get different results depending on which version of a Series 2 viewer you use. So, you may need to be flexible.

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