SL GO – Page 2 – Ciaran Laval

March 23, 2015

Firestorm Viewer Gets The Nod From SL Go For Mobile Client

OnLive

SL Go from OnLive have today given the Firestorm Viewer team a major voted of confidence by announcing : Firestorm Mobile on SL Go! At first glance you may not think this is much of a vote of confidence, I mean after all Firestorm is already a choice for SL Go users when it comes to the desktop version of the app. However when it comes to mobile, there’s one glaring difference, choice is not an option :

OnLive is thrilled to announce today that due to overwhelming demand from our community of SL Go users, we are making the Firestorm Viewer available for mobile devices including Android and iOS. Due to current technical limitations, we are only able to offer one viewer for mobile devices. Our studies have shown that the SL Go community prefers the Firestorm Viewer, and now they can enjoy the same rich experience on their mobile devices.

Please note that desktop users will still be able to have a choice of whether they use Firestorm or the official Second Life client, but when it comes to the mobile version, all roads lead to Firestorm.

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March 11, 2015

Using Open Broadcast Software & SL Go To Record Videos In Second Life

Open Broadcast Software is free and Open Source software for recording or streaming video. The software is available for Windows, OSX or Linux. I’ve tried to use it before to record video in Second Life and my creaking PC couldn’t handle it. The results were crashtastic.

However I decided to give it a go using SL Go from OnLive and found, well it works, to a degree at least. Now I should point out here that I have pretty much no experience whatsoever in recording video footage from Second Life, so the results are not spectacular by any stretch of the imagination.

I was taking a look around A Tattered Page, from Cursed Events, when I decided to give it a whirl. By the way A Tattered Page is an interesting event, currently on round three with a theme of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, it combines literature with Second Life events and is therefore very worthy.

Now what I did here is pretty raw, I’ve engaged in no editing and just dumped the footage to a file.

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March 10, 2015March 10, 2015

SL Go Linden Dollar Payments Option Starts To Generate Interest

OnLive

First of all, for the purposes of full disclosure, I am a paying customer of SL Go from OnLive. I pay a monthly fee of £6.95 for unlimited access, other than the times when there’s server maintenance going on, which will be happening around now on the server I was logged into.

I also like OnLive because they provide a press pack with icons! I like this a lot and wish more companies provided such icons for stories on their products. Now that being said, let’s move on to the big news, the news that new customers of SL Go can now pay with Linden Dollars : SL Go – Now, Pay with L$ :

For a limited time, if you sign up for SL Go with a NEW USER account you can buy weekly subscriptions in-world using Linden Dollars (L$). There is a private sign up booth where you can create your free SL Go account, and then pay for subscriptions using L$. Each week is only L$650, and you can buy up to 4 weeks at a time. Also, you can return and renew or extend your subscription in-world at any time.

This is a very interesting development. Inara Pey covered this yesterday : OnLive announce pilot L$ payment programme for new SL Go users. Inara’s post is worth reading because Dennis Harper of OnLive contacted Inara to provide some extra information.

An important point to note is that the option to pay for the service using Linden Dollars is only available to new users. This means I can’t use that option :

Sorry, but existing users with monthly subscriptions will need to wait for this feature. It is much more complex to transition an account from US Dollars to Linden Dollars. We will be bringing this feature to you soon.

Paying for SL Go with L$ has been one of the most common requests we have received in our forums and chat rooms. We are very excited to offer this now to new users. We hope this makes it much easier for you to be a part of our growing SL Go community.

However if you’ve never used SL Go before then this is an option that may appeal to you because this is far from the only time that Second Life customers have requested the option to pay for services in Linden Dollars, rather than cold hard cash.

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January 23, 2015

SLGO Is Worth A Dabble But Snapshots Are Easier With A Normal Client

Ok first of all, as I’m a great believer in ethics in Virtual World Blogging I will declare from the outset that I have no connection with SL Go, or OnLive. At the moment, I’m on my iMac, which isn’t new and I’m struggling to find the bloody hash symbol. This reminds me of the time I was in the United States and phoning home and the phone told me to press the pound sign, which confused the living daylights out of me as there was no £ sign on the telephone, eventually I realised they meant the old pound sign for weight, which is #. Aha alt + 3 on a Mac. Ok, so #Theonlywayisethics

Now on with the show!

I logged into SL Go from OnLive for the first time in ages. This is largely due to the problems I’m having with AMD graphics in Second Life. The results, were quite staggering on my mid 2007 iMac. Now, wait, I hear you say. A 2007 iMac won’t have AMD graphics, this is true, but I was downstairs watching Cambridge United v Manchester United in the FA Cup.

Anyway, the first thing I noticed was that my experience of the wonderful Escapades Island was vastly improved because all of the textures seemed to load right away.

Wait wait wait! You can’t save Snapshots to disk with SL Go! This is true too, the images in this post were taken on my PC with the regular Second Life client, but here’s the thing, whilst I’m waiting for scenes to rez on my PC, I see the textures loading, they turn from grey and lifeless to being filled in. This doesn’t happen when I’m using SL Go.

However I do like my snapshots. So the ideal scenario for me is to be able to use SL Go and a regular Second Life or TPV client and I’d imagine a lot of people are the same.

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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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