Second Life and Virtual Worlds
While I suspect most of the readers of this blog have interests more Second Life and OpenSim oriented, there are a number of us interested in what makes any computer game popular. In some ways that translates to what may make SL popular. Also, some SL/OS residents are interested in what can make their inside-SL-games popular. Here are some sources of information for those with such interests.
Friday 2/4, Rod Humble, CEO and known as Rodvik Linden in SL, along with Pete Linden held a by-invitation-only meeting to talk with selected residents. One of those invited was Chestnut Rau, author of the blog Second Life of my Dreams and writer for New World Notes. Chestnut posted a transcript of the meeting for those that want to read it, link later. Following is my summary and comments on the things I found interesting.
After introductions and a statement of the meetings purpose, not a press conference for Q&A (a later description of the meeting by Garmin Kawaguich is ‘an exchange of courtesies’), Pete as the meeting facilitator setup Rodvik’s initial talking point, ‘what has Rodvik found most exciting about SL.’ The answer:
The Beta Server Groups minutes are out. Here is some of the things I found interesting.
Asset Delivery – A new Linen, Log Linden, is working on improving asset delivery from the backend side of SL to the region servers. Most everything in SL is an asset. So, this makes for a big possibility for speed improvements.
It seems the delivery process from asset servers to sim servers is HTTP protocol. However, only textures are delivered to the viewer via HTTP.
We are getting closer. In Oz’s office hours meeting Gez Linden, the project owner, explained the next steps for moving forward on Group Chat. Soon a Group Chat Project Viewer will be out. Code will be available. An in-world group will be started for the project. The first testing will be on the ADITI (Preview) Grid in a couple of weeks.
Some ADITI sim’s are already using XMPP group chat. Once the Project Viewer is out the next level of testing can begin. The first release will be trying to achieve parity with existing chat. Once the new chat is doing everything the current chat can, the code can be rolled to the grid. We should see a big reduction in chat lag. Plus, the new XMPP chat will be separate from the SL SIM servers. So, we should see less region lag too.
You can see a YouTube video that previews the coming Firestorm Viewer. If you don’t know, Firestorm is the next generation Phoenix Viewer based on series 2 code. The video shows how to work with the new Firestorm Viewer user interface. The video lasts 15 minutes.
[youtube 8MInIyHH0mU]
In world there is a Phoenix-Firestorm Group. JOIN
Here is the latest news on the Dolphin Viewer.
A couple of weeks ago a poll was being taken to see whether residents wanted the Dolphin Viewer to stay with the series 1 code and user interface (UI) or move on to the series 2 code and UI. The final vote was 76 to 39 for series 2.
Lance is going to shift over… well has shifted over to series 2 code and UI. He plans to maintain the 1.5 based Dolphin Viewer until it is either too much work or Linden Lab bans the use of series 1 viewers on the grid.
Lance’s new series 2 viewer was released on the 28th. You can read about it and find the download links here: Dolphin Viewer 2 2.4.0.13926.
Lance has a list of the things he likes about the Dolphin Viewer and feels make it better than the Lab’s production viewer. List There are some pretty nifty mods that he has added. I’ll mention the ones I like. Check the list. That PITA bug you hate or that feature you are missing may be there.