Despite us being relatively low key in the new release department in the month of February, it was quite a busy month. Starting with getting things established on Avatars United, we had a couple of our best-ever days in the shoppe, appeared in the Modavia Fashion Directory XIV, and even made our first appearance in the Second Life Destination Guide! I also spent quite a bit of time doing some software testing, ranging from projects I can’t talk about to Snowglobe 1.3 and then towards the end of the month with the SL Viewer. There were a few other bits and bobs in-world, but a lot of time was also spent with upgrades here in our RL studio. I’m happy to report that BlakOpal’s machine is running beautifully and exceeding all our expectations, plus my redesign of our wired and wireless networking, and backup strategy seems to both be running well and ready for the next steps.

In getting ready for those next steps, I think it’s time to pull a few things off the fire. Linden Lab will be retiring the Battery Street Irregulars (viewer testing group), and the time seems ideal to back away from a few other testing programs as well. There are a couple I’m very interested in, and will not only continue with but likely become more involved with them. And I’ll likely continue to fumble my way through the Viewer 2.0 Open Beta, wrapping my head around its features and functions. But involvement in too many projects starts to stretch me thin, and worse it seems to invite some people to treat me like a personal tech support department or target me as a person to sound off on when they feel the need to vent regarding something LL does or says (and believe me, there have been some doozies). I’m happy to participate in technical group chat conversations from time to time, but that’s about the extent of it. Except for Miss BlakOpal, of course, as I do happen to be her IT department :-)

That said, I’m very excited indeed about the next steps ahead. BlakOpal’s first machinima video on her new machine came out looking great, and I’m looking forward to seeing more videos from her soon. Additionally, we’re both bubbling with excitement over ideas for outfits and builds, and I’m looking forwards to some big improvements in computing/rendering power on our next system upgrade (once certain hardware is released and we’ve saved enough lindens). There will hopefully be a couple new shoppe locations in there as well. It’s going to be an exciting month - I’m excited.

Tags: SL, RL, Reachra, BSI, Viewer, Shoppe

Hey look, the new version of Snowglobe is almost ready! As a beta tester, I’ve been working with various builds and incarnations of Snowglove 1.2 since late summer, and I’ve got to say I’m really excited about this thing coming out. All the safety and security of a Linden Lab viewer, plus a lot of the innovation from the vibrant SL developer community - it’s a great mix.

As of this writing, Snowglobe 1.2 RC3 is the latest release, and offers significantly faster network connections (in preferences on the network tab, you can now set the slider to 5000kbps - more than 3x faster than the max of 1500kbps in the SL viewer), automatic language translation in local chat (using Google translate, it’s far from perfect but a very nice start), greatly improved texture handling (in the Advanced menu, enable Rendering -> HTTP Get Textures to let Snowglobe take advantage and drastically improve the loading of things like the SL map), a Worn Items tab (in your inventory window, you can now click on the Worn Items tab to see just the stuff your avatar is currently wearing), and more.

Get Snowglobe here.

Tags: Snowglobe, Viewer, SL