Virtual Worlds – Page 105

December 19, 2014December 21, 2014

Firestorm Casts A Mighty Shadow Over The Official SL Client When It Comes To Photography

I’ve recently returned to using the official Second Life client. Well first of all, let me recap, there was a stage when the official client was the only client I really liked using, I was wary of those third party clients, despite all their bells and whistles.

I’d tried them, I didn’t get on with them and then one day I tried Firestorm, and quite frankly I never looked back when it came to taking photographs in Second Life. The photo tools, the sheer amount of windlight settings, I was as happy as Larry playing around with these and ramping up my graphics for the right shot, moving the time of day slider to cast shadows. Awesome sauce.

Then one day I noticed my AMD graphic drivers were a tad out of date and updated them, and Firestorm made a very sad face at me. However I saw some light on the horizon, a new version of AMD graphics drivers were released and I updated again. Alas, this was a terrible mistake as Inara Pey pointed out. However the investigative Inara Pey also points out that there may be hope on the horizon.

The thing is that may my main issue with Firestorm was not regarding rigged Mesh, well it is now, but the issue I had with Firestorm after updating my graphics drivers was that if I set my settings to Ultra, my scene looked like something rendered on the Sinclair Spectrum.

So I returned to official Second Life client and that’s where my head scratching started.

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December 18, 2014

Former Lindens Making The News, Games, Music & Art

Some former Lindens are making the news or quietly making moves in certain areas. Hamlet Au over at New World Notes reported : Cory Ondrejka Leaving Facebook to Launch New Company: Second Life Co-Creator Helped Drive Oculus Acquisition. Cory, who was once Linden Lab CTO and played an extremely important role in the evolution of Second Life. Cory, whilst praising Mark Zuckerberg as his best ever boss is also quoted as saying :

December 22nd will be my last day at Facebook. From high-performance javascript through mobile to virtual reality, I could never have predicted a journey quite like this one. I will miss working with everyone, but I am excited about building my next company from scratch.

We’ll come back to that quote later because it’s not an easy step to make. Meanwhile, VentureBeat reports : Metric Insights’ $2M funding reflects the feisty nature of the business analytics market. Metric Insights are, as the title of the linked article suggests, in the business of business analytics. The founder of Metric Insights is not a name I’m familiar with, his name is Marius Moscovici. However the article provides the link to Linden Lab :

Moscovici originally got the startup going in 2010 after he had been frustrated by the lack of extensive and consistent usage of analytics tools at Second Life developer Linden Lab, where he was head of the company’s data warehousing and real-time-analytics group. Previously he had run a business-intelligence consulting company.

I’m not sure if Marius was ever a Linden we’d know from inworld. Maybe someone else knows. However rather interestingly the article also suggests that Philip Rosedale participated in the funding.

Meanwhile, the Fort Mills Times Informs us : Tom Hale and Larry Kutscher Join ReachLocal Board of Directors. ReachLocal are a company who specialise in online marketing for local business. Tom Hale is currently the chief product of officer of HomeAway, a company who specialise in vacation rentals such as Beach Houses and cabins. Tom Hale was Linden Lab’s Chief Product officer between September 2008 and some time in 2010.

Then, a more quiet development that involves a certain Rod Humble, former CEO of Linden Lab.

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December 17, 2014

SL GO Embraces Firestorm

An Image Should Be Here — SL GO Comes To Firestorm

Last Friday’s Drax Files Radio hour is well worth a listen because it featured Cubey “Not the Grandfather Of Aviation In Second Life” Terra. However it also featured something else, Draxtor Despres and Jo Yardley dropping hints about a big secret regarding SL GO from Onlive.

I’d actually forgotten all about this until I saw a post on New World Notes : SL Go Streaming Now Available Through PC/Mac Versions of Firestorm, Second Life’s Most Popular Viewer. SL GO can now be used with Firestorm as the client. This is further explained by the Firestorm team themselves in their own blog post : Firestrom On SL GO!

It should be noted that SL GO is not yet available on mobile devices with Firestorm. However that is promised for the future. Wait a minute, isn’t SL GO aimed at mobile devices such as Tablets? Well yes and no. SL GO can also be used to bring more life to Second Life on older PC/Mac hardware. The Firestorm blog post explains how this all works, I’ll quote some of that here but you really need to read the whole blog to get the full picture :

Onlive is essentially a streaming service. They host Firestorm and the SL Viewer on their many servers and stream video of a viewer’s interface and graphics to your computer screen while relaying your key and mouse inputs back to the viewer. This allows you to use graphically intensive games and applications without weighting down your own computer. In many ways it is like a remote desktop allowing you to manipulate the computer you are connected to with your own computer or mobile device. And since the computers on which OnLive hosts Firestorm are very high-end machines, you can run SL with full ultra graphics, shadows and everything without the drop in performance that highly detailed graphics usually cause!

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December 16, 2014December 16, 2014

Do Avatar Physics Make Females Feel Unwelcome In Second Life?

Back in April 2011 Linden Lab announced : Introducing the Updated SL Viewer Beta with Enhanced Avatar Physics. In that post they explained the arrival of a new feature in Second Life, that of avatar physics :

In this viewer, you can now configure the amount of movement that you would like for your avatar’s soft body parts, making your avatar much more (ahem) realistic. Since the physics are controlled by a wearable object, you have the ability to easily customize and personalize your settings just as if you were editing any other clothing item. So whether you want lots of movement, or only a bit, you can adjust your settings and they will apply only to your avatar’s targeted body part.

Of course, we continue to smash bugs and make strides in viewer stability and performance, but we figured that you would be much more interested in avatars bouncing and jiggling.

The idea behind Avatar Physics is of course to make parts of the avatar body move in a more realistic fashion. Second Life, being user generated content of course, saw people create some very extreme physics for giggles. However over time things seem to have generally calmed down so that people try and use avatar physics in a sensible fashion. An example of the extremes of these physics was produced by Seraph Linden :

People in Second Life are familiar with avatar physics these days, some people use them well, some people don’t bother with them at all. That’s the same with a lot of avatar features in Second Life, plenty of people still happily go about their business without an AO.

Unity 3D allows avatar physics too, but they have found themselves in hot water because of it. The problems started when Unity Asset Store Tweeted :

Apply physics to bones, joints, hair or breasts! #AssetStore 24 hour deal : 50% off Dyanmic Bone

The offending part of the tweet was that Unity Asset Store had mentioned the word “breasts“, even though avatar physics does actually apply to breasts. The Tweet appears to have been removed and therefore a lot of the conversation is now in picture form or on archive sites.

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December 15, 2014December 15, 2014

Second Life Could Do With More Widgets

I’ve mentioned this before but here we go again. Second Life could do with more ways for people to share information about events, places and sims by allowing people to easily embed that information into blog posts.

Flickr allows you to embed or copy the code of a picture easily so that you can included it in a blog post :

YouTube makes it easy for you to share or embed videos :

These quick and easy ways of sharing content from social media sites help to not only promote your own content, they help to promote the brand of the platform you publish on. Second Life is a little lacking in this area when it comes to sharing content from Second Life on blogs. Let’s look at some more social media examples.

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