Unfortunately I did not get to see Oz Linden live at VWBPE 2015 this evening, which was disappointing because I wanted to see this discussion, alas I had to go shopping and then got into family matters, which changed all my plans.
However over at the VWBPE website there is a small part of Oz’s appearance where he answers questions. This video is not the full appearance of Oz the Great and Powerful, you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled for that. However it contains enough information for us to take a look at the sort of challenges educators using Second Life face compared to individuals. However don’t think that the information does not apply to people who aren’t educators, there’s interesting news of developments for all here.
One of the questions Oz got asked was whether or not screen sharing would ever be available in the Second Life viewer. Oz’s answer was a very sensible one. Oz pointed out that screen sharing is an area whereby other people have already developed solutions, and those solutions work well. Oz said that he himself will use applications such as Skype to share his screen with other people to look at bugs, new features etc.
That’s a very fair point and sometimes we overlook the fact that there are other applications dealing with matters very well that will work with Second Life.
However as an example of the fact that not all apps that do something well work with the Second Life viewer, a rather fascinating issue was raised. Someone pointed out that the Second Life viewer accepts typed Chinese characters, there’s a Google App (which wasn’t named) that allows people to speak Chinese and then that spoken word is entered into a document or a browser, so we’re probably talking about a speech to text app. However that app does not work with the Second Life viewer, if it did students would be able to interact with NPC’s in Chinese.
Oz was totally honest and admitted that he wasn’t familiar with the app, so therefore he didn’t know how it injected characters. However he says that he could not think of an architectural reason as to why it doesn’t work, but there is one extremely big problem in terms of Oz looking at this, he can’t speak Chinese.
However we then saw an example of how Linden Lab’s community can assist, Oz suggested that this may be something he could put on a list for Open Source developers to take a look at because there’s more likely to be an Open Source dev who can speak Chinese than there is a person at Linden Lab who can speak Chinese and work on the problem.
The question of education pricing was raised and Oz, honest again, replied that this really wasn’t an area he could discuss as it wasn’t within his remit. However he did point out that Ebbe Altberg had touched upon pricing in his keynote speech.
Next came a question about Alphas in hair. Oz replied that there are many issues with Alphas, including with hair and that issues with Alphas keep coming up but Linden Lab do work on fixing issues when they can. One of the issues is of just how many things interact to cause an Alpha bug.
Next up came an issue that was rather interesting to me, as I’ve faced this issue with other applications and it’s nearly always a complete and utter pain in the backside. The issue related to the fact that someone had pretty high end computers, but onboard graphics. However they had tweaked the graphics settings to be acceptable and perform fine in Second Life. The issue therefore in a lab environment is, how do you get those settings to all users to ensure a consistent experience?
Seriously software makers, this is a real pain in the backside. I seriously dislike roaming profiles on Windows computers, indeed I’ve done my darnest to ensure we don’t use them in my day job. However local profiles still exist and those local profiles all too often need a user specific setting to ensure consistency with a software application. I’ve dabbled with different methods, using group policy preferences to enforce registry settings, copying files, doing something fun with Windows Powershell, yadda yadda yadda. However, there is no one size fits all solution, although some people will sell you tools at a very high cost that they claim can help with this. However where’s the fun in that? I’m going off on a tangent, but it shouldn’t be this much of a pain to ensure consistency.
Oz replied that there is a settings file, it can be found in user settings, but he also pointed out that some of the settings are specific to a user, so it’s not quite that straight forward to just copy it around, although some of the settings could be copied to try and ensure consistency.
However there may be some light in terms of Second Life on the horizon when it comes to settings in some areas. I’ve touched upon this before, very briefly. Back in February Linden Lab invited us to : Check Out the Latest Improvements to Second Life. One of the forthcoming improvements revolves around a funky new tool for graphics settings :
Your preferred way to see the world can change depending on what you’re doing, and your graphics preferences strongly affect the performance of your viewer. We’re introducing an open source contribution that allows you to save named sets of graphics settings, with a drop-down for quickly changing between them. When you sit down to listen to a performance in your favorite music club, you can pick settings optimized for rich display of your companions and settings, and when you go exploring you can pick a set that trades off longer draw distances and better lighting effects for simpler rendering of details – whatever you think is important. This Viewer will also expose some controls we’ve been experimenting with for some time to give you better protection against nearby objects or avatars that are too difficult to render fully on your system.
That sounds interesting for everyone if you ask me, we could all have settings set for busy events, quiet strolls, rampaging through land as we conquer it, you get the picture, I hope. Currently only an issue with avatar rendering is holding this up, Oz explained.
The final question in the segment I saw, was to do with viewers and more specifically alternate viewers which allow people to get an inside track on testing release candidate viewers. Oz pointed people in the direction of the alternate viewers page on the Second Life wiki. A point to note here is that you don’t need to be an educator to engage with these viewers.
However whichever viewer you decide to test is the one you’ll stick with, until it becomes the main Second Life viewer, so if there’s something that appeals to you about a certain viewer, select that one. Obviously you can install a different one and move to that track, but then you may lost sight of what you were interested in!
This was only part of Oz’s session, I’m not sure how long he was there for, but this small Q&A session was really interesting to me in terms of some of Linden Lab’s processes, in terms of some of the issues that are unique to educators and some of the issues that might at first seem unique to educators but are actually interesting to all of us.
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