Second Life and Virtual Worlds
I liked Tr.im. It was may favorite URL shorting tool. The home page now says they have closed and will be completely gone by the end of the year. See: Tr.im R.I.P. The reason? Spammers. Too many companies were using Tr.im to push their advertising and get around various spam blockers.
The ‘Thanks for all the fish.’ page provides a list of services you can use as replacements. Since I’m a Twitter kid I decided on bit.ly.
Linden Lab gets sued often enough. A recent one is from the maker of the Rez Tool for use with the Emerald viewer. See Weird in Emerald Viewer Fast Rez Tool.
But this new suit could touch us all. It could go class action. A serious attorney that has made his case before is in action. Over at Massively see: Evans et al vs Linden Lab: The new lawsuit on the block.
If you own or have owned land, currency, things, made products, and essentially in some way had ownership in something within SL, you will want to follow this law suit. The claim is LL has taken properties without due process. The attorney, Jason Archinaco, of Pribanic, Pribanic, and Archinaco LLC of Pittsburgh, has made this point before and LL settled out of court.
Those that have had accounts closed and lost money or other materials of value may recover some of that loss. It will be interesting to see how this progresses.
Update 4/24 – Emerald has made it on Linden Lab’s approved viewer list. See: Third-Party Viewer Directory
Yesterday Modular released an updated version of Emerald. This is the TPVP (Third Party Viewer Policy – SL’s TPV Policy) compliant viewer required to connect to Second Life after April 30, 2010.
I am the 23,275th person to download it. I’ll be trying it in a few minutes.
Today 4/20, the download is running very slowly. On my fast cable the 40mb is showing 20 minutes to download.
As slow as a mountain turning to sand the online version of Myst is going open source. A step forward was taken when Cyan Worlds, Inc., the creators of the Myst series of games, placed the game back online in February, 2010. See: Play Myst Online (Free)
Another step was taken when Cyan released the binary version of their Plasma plug-in for 3DMax (versions 7 only). This allows fans to mod the game. Well to a point, there are complications both technical and license-wise. Those things are to be resolved somewhere along the road to open source.
If you are following this blog you know KirstenLee is updating her viewer faster than I can keep up with. She has also written about what a hassle it is working with some of the new 2.0 viewer code. I have no doubt the Modular people working on Emerald have several challenges adapting all their features to the new 2.0 style viewer.
I’m not plugged into Modular’s developers’ channel so things seem pretty quite to me. I have great hopes for Modular’s next release of Emerald.
For those that want the new features of Second Life Viewer 2.0 without the drastic user interface changes, consider Kirsten’s viewer. Those making machinima certainly want to check out the version S20 build 15 and newer ones. The current build is 16. — As of 4/12 version S20 (17) –– As of April 15 version s20 (18) – As of April 24 version s20 (19) – As of April 26 version s20 (20)…
Kirsten is making changes faster than I can keep up. Work projects have me working more than playing just now. Kirsten’s viewer is progressing quickly.
Kirsten has made a new site. You can check it out here: http://www.kirstensviewer.com/ Update your bookmarks.