Day: March 27, 2014

Seanchai turns six!

Posted on by Inara Pey

seanchai 6I’ve been covering the events at Seanchai library SL for the last couple of years, providing a weekly overview of their upcoming events to tie-in with their own preview published weekly on the Seanchai Library blog.

Times mean I don’t often get to attend events in person, although I’ve attended a number of special events co-hosted or organised by Seanchai, such as The Dickens Project (Storyfests SL) and The War of the Worlds, and I can as a result, recommended all of the Library’s events, and those of Storyfest SL.

However, Thursday March 27th marks a very special date in the Seanchai Library calendar, being the official celebration of the Library’s sixth anniversary, as Caladonia Skytower explains:

In 2008 our founder, Derry McMahon, founded the West of Ireland Library and Cultural Center into what would become the Seanchai Library.  Who knew?  Thousands of stories and thousands of hours later, Seanchai Library can be proud of six years of bringing stories of all kinds to life in Second Life through live voice presentations.

To mark the event, members of the Library, past and present, are gathering at the Library’s headquarters on Imagination Island,  and an open invitation is extended to all who enjoy the spoken word in Second Life to attend.

The Seanchai Library
The Seanchai Library

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CtrlAltStudio 1.2.0 released

Posted on by Inara Pey

CAS-logoOn Wednesday March 26th, Dave Rowe released CtrlAltStudio version 1.2.0.40751.

While the release does not contain significant updates to either Oculus Rift support or to the stereoscopic 3D capability, the version number change 1.2, as Dave notes, serves to reflect the convergence of the 1.0 and 1.1 Alpha versions, and also brings CtrlAltStudio to parity with Firestorm 4.6.1.

With regards to the latter, this means CtrlAltStudio now includes all updates found in the  Firestorm 4.5.1 and 4.6.1 releases, including a number of significant LL-driven viewer updates, such as:

  • Fitted mesh support – for those unfamiliar with Fitted Mesh, I have an overview here
  • HTTP updates for improved rendering
  • Request Teleport feature
  • Region Restart updates
  • SL Share (link to Facebook)
  • CHUI updates
  • Particle capabilities, including particle muting
  • Materials support
  • Temporary attachments no longer get removed improperly
  • and more

(Further information on the recent Firestorm releases, please refer to my 4.5.1 review and my  4.6.1 review.)

In addition to the above, the release includes a number of fixes:

  • Fixed turning off Basic Shaders while in Riftlook messing up display.
  • Fixed Kinect fly up and fly down gestures sometimes being swapped when shouldn’t be.
  • Removed –riftlook command line option which wasn’t working properly.

An important point to note, again as Dave points-out, is that this release does not include any of the Lab’s own Oculus Rift support – for the simple reason that the code hasn’t been made available for integration into TPVs.