SLBuzz.com snapshots are working again!
Earlier today Torley Linden contacted me to let me know that SLBuzz had stopped processing postcards sent from within Second Life.
Turns out that the issue was that the format of the embedded meta data had changed which the parser couldn't cope with. The new meta data is better as it also includes the region coordinates, not just the local coordinates. I modified the parser, and it's all working again, the backlog has been processed and nothing was lost. Currently, some of the postcards come in with old and some with new meta data, as there may be a rolling restart going on, but both formats are handled properly.
Keep the snapshots coming!
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MetaverseData beta starts
The key problem with developing for Second Life thus far has always been the less than sufficient APIs that Linden Lab offers.
When it comes to communicating with objects in-world, you have the choice of the reliably broken XML-RPC, polling from in-world via llHTTPRequest(), or sending bite-sized data snippets by email. To make it easier, faster, and more flexible, MetaverseData introduces the Message Exchange Service that makes this task painless.
Interacting with avatars (say, sending message, or delivering a product) can be just as much of a hassle. Everything is dependent on their UUID also known as their "key". If you don't have it, you can't do it. Again, Linden Lab currently does not offer a useful way of acquiring the UUID, making transparent web applications that much harder. MetaverseData offers Avatar Services that let you look up avatar related information easily via REST calls.
Getting a list of region data used to be fairly straight forward task; everything was embedded in the JavaScript file that was part of the MapAPI which was used by SLURL.com. With Linden Lab switching to Google Maps and custom map tiles all that went away. [I believe this is an effort to conceal the size of the grid.]
Finally, uploading textures into Second Life has only been possible using the Second Life client. The Texture Service allows you to send an image in pretty much any format, converts it to JPEG2000, uploads the image into Second Life, and returns the UUID which you can use in your Second Life scripts to interact with the image in-world.
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Second Life Preview with Voice Beta!
While most of you are probably aware of this already, there's a Beta Version of Second Life available with Voice support.
Jeremy Flagstaff blogged this on SLPodcast.com and Johnny talks about this on SecondCast #56 with Philip and Joe Linden, too. Unfortunately the podcast is in mono and doesn't convey the spatial sound experience at all, the quality however is rather good.
It's a quite awesome experience and opens up a whole new dimension for Second Life. I've already forgotten how to open the chat history.
Last night a small crowd gathered and Spike and Monroe Linden gave an introduction of how the technology works, answered questions and gathered some feedback from individuals.
If you would like to try it out (Windows and Mac users so far, unfortunately a Linux build was not offered for download yet) grab the preview client, log in, and head to the Lusk area, which seems to be the only area that is voice enabled at the moment.
While transparent to the user, voice is run through a separate voice server with technology from Vivox, who really know what they're doing. The experience is great. Last night we had a blast flying around while singing the Flight of the Valkyries.
The sound was clear and the positional sound makes it easy to pick out individuals in a crowd, even when many (15+) residents are talking at the same time! This is because you are "hearing" with your camera, so by alt+zooming around you can change which avatar you want to focus your attention on. We also observed that we'd naturally start forming circles, so everybody can see and hear each other and also make out where someone is talking from.
While it's not possible to mute individual voice participants, it's definitely on the to-do list and will be implemented before the public rollout on the main grid. Audio griefing will certainly be part of the experience, and when done in moderation and creatively it can be quite fun. We had one individual who kept blowing raspberries into the mic while running around the crowd in circles. Hearing that with the positional audio (which updates its position ten times a second) was hilarious.
Server stability is decent, although we did end up experiencing some crashes every now and then. That is, the voice server would crash and restart. This can easily be fixed by going into the preferences dialog, disabling and then re-enabling voice chat, which would cause the Second Life client to reconnect to the voice server.
So, while it's certainly a beta, the only real issues with this are the rather random to rare voice server crashes and the lack of individual mute feature. The Lindens mentioned we may be able to see the feature in the First Look client some time in April. That would be great, because the current Voice Beta client does not include the frame rate optimizations.
If you haven't already, give this a try and join our discussions on how this will "revolutionize" Second Life, result in new games (SL Marco Polo, Name-that-Alt), and change the way the escort service industry will operate.
Posted by Second Life Resident Mark Barrett.
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Discovering Second Life
I took the plunge. I had heard about Second Life before — mostly on Slashdot. I spent a few minutes browsing Google Video and came across one of the Google TechTalks titled Glimpse Inside a Metaverse: The Virtual World of Second Life.
Essentially it was Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka from Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, giving a talk on the technology that powers the world of Second Life.
So far I've played Star Wars Galaxies (which in my opinon was mutilated by the SOE) and dabbled with Planetside (after the downfall of the Tribes series), but otherwise anything MMO (WoW, etc) has not interested me as a "Gamer", and so far I hadn't much thought about looking at it from a developer point of view.
And that's pretty much where the presentation caught my attention. Particularly the objective to switch to a Mono powered platform.
So I've signed up (my Second Life name is Mark Barrett) and ran around aimlessly to find out what's up.
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