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TriloByte Zanzibar

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Everything posted by TriloByte Zanzibar

  1. I saw that this was posted... https://hippotechnologiesnews.wordpress.com The trouble (for me) is, I don't buy it. They dismiss it as 'a few well caffeinated hours' but I know from my own firsthand experience, as well as reports I've seen online that it lasted much longer. The explanation also doesn't address the shutdown of the in-world island main store. From what I can tell, it's been shuttered, and they're downsizing to a parcel elsewhere which appears to currently have restricted access. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Dosojin/235/182/30 (I can hit the landing zone, but the entry-way blocks me with the 'cannot enter the parcel, you are not on the access list' error). I agree, this is a major communications fail and I no longer trust them. Time to back up customer data and work on a transition plan.
  2. If you recall, Hippo's original creator (Andy Enfield) sold the company to a company (I believe called B and M software group) that would continue to provide server power and offer customer support. They would continue to sell the products, as well as subscriptions for groups and support packages. As I'm reading through recent complaints and posts online, it sounds to me that as revenues from sales and subscriptions dropped, they may have either simply pulled the plug, or the business was no longer self-supporting and they've pulled the plug (the generic info part of the site exists, but the account login side does not, and the main store island is no longer accessible. That's just a guess, it could be anything. Remember, through those scripted objects merchants have given Hippo Tech access to their account and Linden balance. You should probably go through your in-world locations and unregister any Hippo products asap (especially including any servers).
  3. Expect disaster - all their in-world "server" devices rely upon a web server behind the scenes. To be on the safe side, you may want to try testing your system by pushing out an update on a test item. A word of caution to makers/creators who use the system - the vending machines still have the appearance of working to customers, and are accepting payments from customers. Normally, the way it works is like this: Customer pays vendor Hippo takes lindens Transaction recorded Payment sent to maker Item sent for delivery Customer receives item. However, currently the servers are dead, so only steps 1 and 2 are happening. Go in-world and unregister your vendors asap to both shut them down and revoke the permissions that Hippo Tech has to access your account. I am currently directing our customers to our SL Marketplace store, and will replace my in-world vendors as soon as possible (it will take me a little while to configure and test a replacement).
  4. Our HippoVend system appears to be failing as well. I'm sorry to see them go, and really would have appreciated some kind of heads-up to allow time to make a proper transition in-world (as well as back up any recent sales records). I'm putting signs up at in-world locations directing customers to the SL Marketplace while I get a new system set up, tested, and deployed.
  5. I'm unable to reproduce the problem using SL Project Benchmark 3.7.17 (294710).
  6. Bump - any word on this? The blog sounded so promising, but the published build didn't actually work and no update has yet been posted on the project viewer page. I managed to get it working via the workarounds, but it was still very much a work in progress and is now a couple months behind. Please let this not be abandonware...
  7. Zeja, with luck down the road we'll see WL as an asset (inventory item) that can be very easily shared or sold. There is, in my opinion, a huge opportunity here for those who are interested in investing the time to really get to know the controls and build some really compelling 'day cycle sets' (a day cycle can have up to 20 different saved windlight presets throughout the SL day). I like some of the preset day cycles quite a bit, and have been having fun playing with the settings and working on something to use at our place, but as a resident and a consumer, I'd still be interested in buying WL preset packs when I'm able to.
  8. Techwolf, from all that I've seen/experienced, doing windlight at a parcel level actually takes away from immersion rather than enhancing it IMO. Sure, there could be some artistic use-cases for having gradual changes occur as you walk through parceled woods or explore an art installation, the reality is more likely vastly jarring settings changes a dozen or more times as you walk across a single region (even more jarring if you're traveling faster via land/sea/air vehicle). That said, proper estate-level WL shouldn't interfere with the method Phoenix/Firestorm uses, unless they decide to give priority to the grid-wide estate settings at some point.
  9. The idea of letting merchants choose the way their goods sort is a great idea, but the way this is being implemented is alarmingly bad. There still appears to be no method to choose sort method whatsoever. The default of 'by relevance' appears to have changed dramatically, and for the worse. For me, the "by relevance" results appear not to have anything to do with either top sellers in units sold, top sellers in gross revenue, or even popular search categories. The only "choice" for allowing merchants to sort their wares appears to be a manual process. Not quite terrible if your store has a few dozen items, but incredibly tedious when the assortment goes beyond 100. And of course, it's a process that needs to be repeated with every new product added. If there's any upside, it's that you aren't required to enter a value for every item, just the ones a merchant wants to prioritize in this new method. The new sorting methodology should have the name changed, or be given a better description. What is "By Relevance" and can that label still be used to describe how goods appear by default in all stores to all customers? Edited to add: What merchants wanted was the ability to choose the default sort order (from those in the drop-down menu). You know, a line on the Store Setup page that read "Default 'Sort By' method for Store" and had a drop-down menu with each of the sorting choices. What was implemented not only doesn't do that seemingly basic thing, but breaks the current default behavior and creates a lot more work for Marketplace merchants.
  10. I use it quite a bit, and consider it a standard 'power user' feature, but think it would be a bad idea to make it the default behavior for all residents. Second Life can be a little disorienting, and take some getting used to all by itself, without the added confusion of teleport-hopping every time a new resident clicked twice on the screen (that is, in the areas that permitted it).
  11. You don't mention anything about your machine (graphics card, OS, etc) or your internet connection or any of your settings, so it's impossible to suggest anything specific. Loading & rezzing has been getting better and better for me with just about every release (running a Mac with nVidia GTX-285 and OSX 10.6.7). I help with testing viewers while they're in development, and have seen significant improvements not only in the time from 'gray goo' to rezzed, but also in how fast they go from blurry to sharp since last summer (when I got back involved with it). If something in your preferences is set wrong (graphics or network settings), you could end up with slower performance, or if you have corrupt data in your cache folder that could lead to poor SL performance too (for best results go find that folder in your Explorer/Finder and empty out the contents manually before launching the viewer). Good luck!
  12. Haven't had any problems with crash on exit in the Mac client, either in the 2.6.3 release or the last couple development builds I've tested. I don't believe it's happening for all Windows (or Linux) users, it may be a problem specific to certain GPU's or configurations. The JIRA is still the best place to report bugs, and when you do file, make sure to include key info like which GPU and which OS you're using, as well as the specific viewer version. The easiest thing to do is to just copy the info from the Help -> About window. Good luck, hopefully the bug can get caught and stopped dead in its tracks.
  13. Believe me, Hitomi, the issues get raised. :smileywink: But the latest (current as of this writing, linked in my earlier post) build works fine.
  14. You should have no trouble at all filming good quality motion video in SL at 720p, or even 1080p on the 27-inch model.
  15. A lot of folks have been asking about SL and the new machines, so I took a few minutes to do a write-up - check it out here.
  16. First - to disable automatic updates, go to Preferences -> Setup, at the bottom of the tab is a drop-down that lets you choose either automatic or manual. Second, it sounds as if some of the data in your cache may be corrupt. Easiest and most effective way to clear that is to quit the viewer and go in Finder/Windows Explorer/etc to the folder where you set your Second Life Viewer cache. Select everything in that folder (but not the folder itself), and delete it. Another method to 'jiggle the handle' as it were is to use the develop menu (if you don't have that enabled, you can turn it on from the Preferences -> Advanced tab), and choose Develop -> Avatar -> Character Tests -> Test Female or Test Male. Give it a few moments to force the default avatar through your system, and then swap back to your preferred look (I use outfit folders for that, but whatever method you use to quickly load up your choices for skin/hair/clothes/etc.). Good luck!
  17. Had no problem with it in the "official build" (2.6.3 release), and both KDU/sound etc appear to be working normally in build 228438 - get it here.
  18. I'm running the Mac Viewer (build 228438 - Windows and Linux builds also available at that link), my AO (SEMotion) seems fine either in standing or walking mode.
  19. We haven't run into that issue on any of the Macs in our studio. A couple things to think of offhand... If your password is under 7 characters, the viewer may be erroring out on that. New users have a longer minimum password length now, if this is the case you can fix it by changing your pw from the secondlife.com site. You may also want to look at what folder you're using for Viewer cache (especially if you have multiple viewers installed). After launching the viewer (but before logging in), hit cmd-P for preferences and go to the setup tab. Now where you see the file folder location for your viewer cache, click the browse button and choose a different folder name than the default (even if it's something simple, the same name as default but with a "v2" at the end of the name works for me). Then click okay, and then you need to quit and restart the viewer. It will take a few extra moments to load up (since it's rebuilding your cache from scratch), but once you're on everything should be good to go. Good luck - hope that helps!
  20. The issue may be password length. I believe that new user accounts are forced to a minimum password length (for security purposes) that's longer than it used to be. If your password is less than 7 letters/characters, the viewer may be bouncing back an error because of that. You should be able to fix that by logging into your account on the secondlife.com web site and then changing your password to something longer. If that's not it, then you may want to consider filing a support ticket (being unable to log in should be something you can file regardless of whether you're premium or not). Good luck!
  21. The AMD (formerly ATI) Radeon HD 6570M/6770M/6970M in the new iMacs handle SL extremely well (all can handle ultra settings), and get really solid frame rates with SL. By default, the Mac SL client can use half your machine's video memory, up to a max of 512MB (a hard-coded limit of the viewer), but as it was mentioned, the additional video memory would come in extremely handy when multi-tasking. If you're involved in SL content creation, a 1GB machine means having Photoshop etc. open simultaneously and never having to worry about Viewer crashes. If you go the extra mile and get the biggest of the iMacs with the 2GB video memory, you'll have smooth sailing even if you do fun/crazy stuff like big renders, or you run multiple instances of the SL Viewer. A good example of use would be shooting video. Use an alt that you use for camera control, and then your avatar can run around in its own viewer instance, you can easily see what's going on both in the camera view and your avatar view... all while recording in iShowU or ScreenFlow, and with other tools like Photoshop or iMovie/Premiere Pro running in the background.
  22. The SL Viewer just isn't very good at using multiple cores. Even with multiple threads enabled, the application doesn't seem to utilize more than 2 CPU cores/threads. Supporting many cores is possible (I use a number of apps that put all 16 threads to work on my system), as is 64-bit, OpenCL/CUDA (tapping into the GPU's processing power to help get the job done), and other cool things that would allow even better Viewer performance on all platforms..... they just need either the resources to write it or the contributions from the community to make it happen.
  23. Thanks for posting. It's an excellent read, and raised a couple issues (to me, anyway). First is a radical sense of entitlement that some folks have. Rather than being thankful for AM Radio having shared his work, and kindly given folks plenty of notice before the removal of the installation, or rather than being thankful for the kind and generous support of his patron/sponsor.. people are expressing forms of outrage. As if they've been somehow entitled by law to have the works available, at no cost, in perpetuity. This is rarely true in RL - art exhibitions have a start and have a finish, and even in the case of the very few pieces of art that are public works, there are costs associated with maintaining them. Next, on the other side of that coin, an individual or entity should be allowed to have as much or as little space on the grid as they like, shouldn't they? And SL residents should be allowed to use their prims for what they like, shouldn't they (respecting any covenants or agreements they may have with their landlords, of course)? How would it sit with any of us if we had to get the approval of some third party group before removing a build or installation, or reducing the size of our virtual land holdings? You bring up Philip's participation in Burning Man, but neglect to mention that Burning Man artists not only pay their own way, but that their works are often short-lived. The annual festival has its own life-cycle, and many of the works are often destroyed at the end of the event. Sometimes replaced by new incarnations in future years, sometimes replaced by entirely new creations, and sometimes not replaced at all. And when noting that Burning Life was turned over to private residents, it's important to note that the residents in question are the owners/organizers of the Burning Man event. They had been involved with the event for a number of years prior, and there had been some ongoing talks to turn the event over to the owners for as long as I've been in SL (2008). Artists in RL and SL can choose to pay their own way, or they can secure the backing of a sponsor (whether that's an individual patron or a corporate/institutional entity). Supporting the arts is a wonderful thing, and those who feel strongly should perhaps consider contacting AM Radio, Bryn Oh, or any number of other virtual world artists about hosting, sponsoring, or commissioning work. The lesson here isn't "how dare they" or even the flip side, "suck it up" or "tough luck." It is that art is to be cherished. As individuals or in our RL/SL societies, we are not owed unlimited lifetime access to art installations & exhibitions. Enjoy it, appreciate the work, consider supporting or sponsoring an artist, or make a point to do business with companies who support the arts.
  24. Can we get a link to release notes for this week's deploys? Thanks
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