Second Life and Virtual Worlds
New World Notes put up a link to a recoding of Phillip’s keynote address to SLCC; Philip Rosedale Offers Second Life Roadmap
The camera work is absolutely horrible. The sound is very good.
I made an index of the speech as I listened. This should help you find the items in which you are interested.
Updates at end of article.
On July 13 a post appeared on the Emerald Modular blog. Concerning recent activities.. Sounded like a bit of drama. Not uncommon in connection with the Emerald Viewer.
Now another post appears. Recent News, August 14. Both of these seem like they are part of the ongoing drama we see related to virtual world and online communities. But then we start seeing other blogs and forums picking up the story and expanding on it. So, what is the story and who do we believe?
Another problem is that some of the detractors of Emerald are lose wing nuts. That has to a great degree numbed the community to complaints about the Emerald viewer and dev team. This latest scandal is more fact based than drama based. There seems to be a real problem.
This viewer has a texture download fix that should greatly improve performance. If you even just barely pay attention to SL technology you have likely heard of HTTP Texture Get. What you likely have not heard is there was a bug in SL viewers 2.0, 2.1 and the 1.23 series that cause texture caching to fail. This meant every time you visited a place you’ve been before; all the textures had to download again. So even with a faster download, we were not getting as much performance gain as we should have. Now the textures should cache and greatly reduce rez time.
The problem has been fixed in 2.1.1 (207998) Aug 11 2010.
Update: 2010-08-14 (at end of article) – I’m depressed. Gwyneth Llewelyn wrote Good-bye, meshes! Gwyneth works in the RL virtual worlds service fields and apparently has contacts among the Lindens. She writes about the status of the supposed coming Collada meshes. Seems they may not just be delayed but canceled for the foreseeable future. Bummer. (Her blog changed appearance, a nice new look.)
Gwyneth describes why this is likely to become a major disadvantage for Second Life’s ability to compete with other virtual worlds. I think it is so important that it may mean the end of SL, not tomorrow or next year, but…
If you have been wondering about Second Life Search and why all the squawking about search… then read Where, Oh Where Has My Little Store Gone? by Darrius Gothly. It is well written and easily understood.
Update: 2010-08-11 6:45 PM SLT – A new post appeared today explaining a bit more about the 2439 update and the removal of the 2439 beta release post being removed. Fracturedcrystal posted: Posting to clear some confusion, I unpublished the previous post with beta 2439 because we are working on a new beta which fixes … Read more