SL Community Help

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Some of you know about the changes that have been going on in the resident run and volunteer help groups. Some months ago Linden Lab disbanded the existing Linden run help groups because stats were showing new users getting help from the group were less likely to stay in Second Life. So, some other type of user support was/is needed.

With the forum changes we are seeing an effort to reshape the community and support systems. We have a new knowledge base and an answers section in the community forum… blogrum… wikrumog… whatever that thing is we have now. Also the team responsible for getting it working is having open meetings, office hours. You can find them at: Community Tools User Group

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Second Life Gets Physics Materials

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So what is a Physics Material?

These are materials that can be applied to an object. They allow one to adjust friction, density, gravity multiplier, and restitution… and I have no idea what the restitution part is about. So, with a material you could make a balloon that floats away. Balloons are more fun indoors. Vehicles behave better with 5x gravity.

Eventually these settings will be scriptable. More testing is needed to see if there are griefer exploits the Lindens have not thought of. Once they are pronounced safe, the scripting side will be added.

Material settings do not work on avatar attachments. Avatar attachments are excluded from physics calcs, so Physics Materials have no effect when worn.

Falcon Linden is going to offer a bounty for first person to crash an Experimental Mesh region (ADITI) using Physics Materials. The region is apparently not set up yet. The controls will be in the Mesh Project viewer.

Several new features are in testing on the Preview Grid. This new stuff is coming to the main SL grid in the next few weeks. Until then you can preview it in ADITI.

 

Second Life’s XMPP Chat Dies

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It seems that the XMPP Chat the Lab has been implementing and testing in ADITI is not providing the improvements hoped for. So, progress on implementing XMPP Chat is stalled. The effort is changing to finding out what is the causing chat problems we have now.

Bummer
Aaaaaah! – Image by: cocoate.com @ Flickr

According to what the Lindens say in the Beta Server Meeting the new XMPP Chat was no better than the current chat. The decision has been made that the Lab will not be replacing our current chat with a new system that is no better.

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Education Organizations in Second Life

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I see the wiki has just been updated to show the educational organizations using Second Life. The wiki page providing a list of the organizations is: Second Life Education Directory

There are 149 organzations listed (if I counted correctly). Each has an SLURL to their in-world location. There is also a link to the university’s main web site. Also provided is the in-world contact name and the iRL email address and contact name.

KirstenLee Viewer S21(7) RC3 Released

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New code is rushing to the viewers in a torrent. This release of KV has lots of fixes and new stuff. Unfortunately the Apple versions are lagging because the machine used to compile those versions is overheating. The Windows version RC3 is out today.

New Second Life Physics Layer Object
New Physics Layer Object

 

Enhanced Avatar Physics: This is the booby juggle code for bouncing breasts, belly, and butt. If you don’t already know one adds their breast enhancement by going into clothes and creating a physics layer. It can be worn just like clothes. Other people will see you bounce or not according to your settings.

Mesh Upload: More work done on the mesh uploader.

Code Updates: The Windows code is now being compiled to the Windows 7 Std. Developer’s Kit. For most of us this means little. The benefits are not so much in your face as they are about making things more efficient when running in newer Windows versions.

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