Second Life and Virtual Worlds
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yesterday, the Phoenix Team announced that the 1050 RC version would become the final 1050 version. No changes are being made. The version worked as is. So, if you have the RC, you have the final version. But, if you have had problems, there are some things you need to do.
There is currently a shift in mesh development. To understand the shift you need to understand how viewer versions are made. You probably know programmers write a program that becomes the viewer. The nuance in that process is the language programmers write in is not the language computers speak. So, at some point a translation has to happen. That ‘translation’ is called a compile. The compiler tool being targeted for use is Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010. Much of the last week’s work and probably this week’s and next week’s will be toward getting the new mesh-viewer code compiling using VS2010.
What you may not realize is why the change to VS2010 is important for the Mesh Project. The main SL Viewer has been worked over to get it to compile in VS2010. See: Second Life 2.6.3-225584 VS2010 Review This moves the code and the viewer abilities to a new level of optimization for newer computer hardware. If you follow KirstenLee’s viewer development, you know it too has moved to VS2010. So, most viewers on the SL grid are going to be optimized to a 2010 era, at least for those on Windows systems.
This week Fast Assets moved to the main grid. This is sort of a change from doing things in a sort of single cue of first in-first-out to multiple cues. The idea being to reduce anyone person’s wait time. One should see the world rezzing faster.
Moving into the Release Channel testing are various bug fixes. None too exciting, but they are progress.