High Fidelity – Page 6

January 16, 2015

High Fidelity Talk About The Ease Of Setting Up High Fidelity Local Servers

Dan Hope of High Fidelity has blogged this week : Stack Manager Makes Local Servers Easy to Setup. The post is aimed in the main at those who have been in High Fidelity Alpha and have attempted to setup a local server before. However the post is also worth a glance from those who may want to know where High Fidelity is heading.

Stack Manager is the name of the application that allows people to setup a local server in High Fidelity, this amounts to running a server on a local machine. The application has been through a lot of changes, and in the past people found it a bit cumbersome. However the latest version makes setting up a local server a breeze, as High Fidelity engineer Stephen Birada explains in the blog post :

Basically, in less than two minutes — from download to installation to running the Stack Manager — you will have a local server, and you can start to build with it.

Basically that’s it, you download the application, run the setup and then start the server and you have a High Fidelity world running on your local machine. At the moment you need be an alpha tester to download and try Stack Manager I believe. However in the future anyone will be able to use Stack Manager, as the blog post explains :

After creating a new world, the next step is to invite people to visit, and Stack Manager is designed to streamline that process. Create a temporary place name — even without a High Fidelity account — and connect friends without making any firewall/NAT changes to your router or computer. If you like the domain, buy a place name in our directory to preserve it.

Continue reading “High Fidelity Talk About The Ease Of Setting Up High Fidelity Local Servers”

December 31, 2014

2014 Reviewed All In One Post

If you’re read my other two posts reviewing then there’s nothing new here in this one, it’s just a merging of the two posts to make it easier for future reference. This means it will be a long post, with pictures, videos and probably some errors.

January

January started with a look back to 2013 and the number of private region losses. The scores on the door from Tyche Shepherd displayed a slow down on the number of regions leaving the Second Life grid, something that would continue during 2014.

2012 Net Private Region Losess – 2865 (12.0%)
2013 Net Private Region Losses – 1719 (8.2%)

The virtual world of Kitely moved to a different pricing model which largely did away with the pay by the minute options as these had not been popular.

Blackened Mirror poster should be here — The Blackened Mirror Poster

Season 2 of The Blackened Mirror was taking a mid-season break but would return by the end of January. The show was recorded in Second Life.

Linden Lab were Raising The Roof : The HTTP Project. This project, which had started in 2012 was aimed at improving HTTP communications to improve the end user experience. Linden Lab would continue working on improvements during the year.

Second Life users were getting frustrated by tax and account information requests from Linden Lab. They would continue to be frustrated by these requests throughout the year despite Linden Lab improving their communications and information on these issues.

Second Life got a mention in the comedy show, 2 Broke Girls.

Then came the storm to warm up many a chilly January evening, Cloud Party announced that they would be closing their virtual doors on February 21st.

This was quickly followed by even more news to warm up January, Aston Villa fan and Linden Lab CEO, Rod Humble, was leaving Linden Lab. This created a Twitter storm.

Continue reading “2014 Reviewed All In One Post”

December 31, 2014

2014 Reviewed Part 2 : July To December

In this post I will review 2014 from a largely virtual world perspective for the months July to December. This is part 2 , part 1 is the post before this one. I’ll combine both posts into another post for easier future reference once they are both completed. These posts will miss lots of big and interesting stories because the nature of the beast demands some brevity. These post may well look longer than they actually are at first glance because of images and pictures. The aim of posts such as these are to give a brief overview of the year, rather than an in depth review. An in depth review is too long for a blog post, it may make for an interesting book.

July

New changes to Skill Gaming policies in Second Life were coming to the fore in July, the result would be a learning curve for Linden Lab, creators and region owners. This was not a smooth process. KR Engineering, creator of the very popular Greedy Greedy announced they would be releasing a free to play only version of the game to ensure they did not have to deal with the Skill Gaming Policy.

Experience keys were the flavour of the month as Linden Lab invited us to the Cornfield to experience the new experiences!

Linden Lab updated section 2.3 of their terms of service. The update wasn’t really convincing and remains problematic. CG Textures, who now forbid use of their textures in Linden Lab products remained unconvinced that any of their concerns had been addressed at all and told Jo Yardley :

I’m afraid this does not change the situation for us.

I’m not sure why it’s so difficult for Linden Lab to address this issue.

Linden Lab announced upcoming improvements to Second Life, including experience keys beta, improving group chat, implementing the chrome embedded framework and more improvements for Mesh and texture loading.

I covered the University Of The West Of England teaching an MA in Virtual Worlds within Second Life. This course was aimed at those who want to teach in virtual worlds but some of those taking the course were actually just interested in the subject matter.

Despite the slow down in the loss of private regions in Second Life, the overall amount was still dropping. Tyche Shepherd informed us that the number of private regions had slipped below 19,000 for the first time since 15th June 2008.

The new Skill Gaming policy in Second Life, which had initially been pencilled in to be enforced from August 1st had its deadline pushed back to September 1st.

Continue reading “2014 Reviewed Part 2 : July To December”

December 29, 2014December 29, 2014

2014 Reviewed Part 1 : January To June

In this post I will review 2014 from a largely virtual world perspective for the months January to June. This is part 1 of 2 as part 2 is still a work in progress but will hopefully appear tomorrow. I’ll combine both posts into another post for easier future reference once they are both completed. These posts will miss lots of big and interesting stories because the nature of the beast demands some brevity. These post may well look longer than they actually are at first glance because of images and pictures. The aim of posts such as these are to give a brief overview of the year, rather than an in depth review. An in depth review is too long for a blog post, it may make for an interesting book.

Anyway, on with the show, as they say.

January

2012 Net Private Region Losess – 2865 (12.0%)
2013 Net Private Region Losses – 1719 (8.2%)

The virtual world of Kitely moved to a different pricing model which largely did away with the pay by the minute options as these had not been popular.

Season 2 of The Blackened Mirror was taking a mid-season break but would return by the end of January. The show was recorded in Second Life.

Second Life got a mention in the comedy show, 2 Broke Girls.

Then came the storm to warm up many a chilly January evening, Cloud Party announced that they would be closing their virtual doors on February 21st.

This was quickly followed by even more news to warm up January, Aston Villa fan and Linden Lab CEO, Rod Humble, was leaving Linden Lab. This created a Twitter storm.

Continue reading “2014 Reviewed Part 1 : January To June”

December 24, 2014

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

We here at Ciaran Laval …. hmm might need to change that title in the new year! Anyway, we here at Ciaran Laval (*Editor* pssst there’s only one of you these days /*Editor*)….. Then who are you? Wait wait wait! Back on track.

We here at Ciaran Laval would like to wish all of our readers a very merry Christmas and a very happy new year, even those of you who don’t like us. (*Editor* It’s just you! /*Editor*).

We would like to wish Linden Lab, High Fidelity, Inworldz, Kitely and OpenSim a very merry Christmas too. We definitely want you to prosper in the new year (*Editor* I resign! /*Editor*). Obviously this is because this blog depends upon these ventures prospering!

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