Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The new experience is titled Tyrah & the Curse of the Magical Glytches. (TCMG) The intro video is here…
I think it is way funny.
The announcement is here: Introducing a New Grid-Wide Experience. The announcement tells you how to get started and the rules…
You can have Glytches, the bad guys, on your private parcels. For the ‘how to’ on that see the Official TCMG Wiki page.
Check out the announcement and wiki page to get started collecting and I suppose imprisoning Glytches to save the grid.
The main channel is not updating this week. It will continue to run version #17.09.01.508236.
Blue Steel and Le Tigre channels will update to version #17.09.14.508549. This version addresses: Improvements to address some problems that could degrade simulator performance in rare cases.
Magnum will update to version #17.09.14.508533. It fixes BUG-100505 – “llGetEnv (“agent_limit”) is returning an empty string in Magnum, Le Tigre and Blue Steel regions.”
The only interesting additional information from the Server-Scripting UG meeting is that work on the servers includes an effort to reduce the recent outages.
When I saw the announcement for the final release of AvaStar 2.0, I hadn’t noticed the RC-14 version is out, which was me being a bit slow considering the video I posted. Check your AvaStar Products Page for the download.
I won’t get to play with it today. But… soon.
The release notes are here. The big change is in BVH import and export. Bone translations now work. The IK controls for the hands change.
There are other minor improvements and some fixes.
Word is Sparkles will update with or just after AvaStar 2.0 releases.
This week’s Product Meetups will be held on Friday 09/22/2017 at 9:30 – 10:30 am (PT) and 4:00 to 5:00 pm (PT) Location: Zen Garden
The Casual Meetups are at oYo Galaxy Time Gate – 2pm – 3 pm (PT) Monday thru Friday!
These meetings are hard to get into. Be early. Also, pre-cache the Experiences before the meeting you plan to attend. Program updates and Experience load times can cause you to arrive late and be bounced to an empty instance.
AvaStar is thinking they will release AvaStar 2.0 around the end of September… yes, 2017.
I like the AvaStar developers and support people. But, I’ve decided they are way too susceptible to feature creep. Fortunately, they release RC versions that keep us going.
If you are using Blender, there is nothing equal to AvaStar for Second Life developers. If you are new to SL development, AvaStar is the one tool that can reduce your learning curve significantly. Well worth the cost.
With Bento out, animation for SL became way more feature rich. I expect we will start to see animations labeled in ways similar to how we label clothes; Maitreya, Belleza, Slink, and etc. compatible.
Facial animations are likely to be the most problematic, as we are sensitive to even the smallest imperfections in facial expressions.
Hypergrid Business has an article about what Linden Lab’s® move to the cloud may mean for OpenSim grids. By knowing what may happen to OpenSim we can infer what is likely to happen to Second Life.
David Kariuki thinks moving to the cloud will allow Linden Lab to run on demand regions. Meaning if no one is in the region, the region would spin down and drop out of the servers, go offline. When someone is on the grid next door or TP’s there, the region loads into a server and spins up.
The result is fewer servers would be needed, a huge cost saving in hardware and electricity.
It sounds to me like this could be a performance problem. Would we have to wait while the region spins up? Or can a region load fast enough we wouldn’t notice? We don’t know.