There are lots of things changing in SL. To those not following the Wiki, blogrum and various Lindens’ office-hours meetings; changes may appear to be moving slowly. However, I see a pattern of changes reflecting Phillip’s direction to improve communications between residents and the Lab and improve how they develop software for SL. I find the pace of these changes rather impressive.
One change is Torley’s recent update of the Wiki post on the Second Life Quality Assurance Portal and the changes in the QA process and how to participate. Torley is actually really busy updating the Wiki with all the new changes related to Bug Tracking.
Another change is the JIRA and the Second Life Bug Triage process. The 2010-08-23 Bug Triage is posted. The FAQ on using the Bug tracker is revised.
The new bug status classes are up. See Second Life Bug Tracker/Status
Along with all the changes Torley was making he made the videos; How to search the bug tracker and How to report a bug.
The summary and transcript for the Second Life Open Source Meeting/2010-09-07 is now posted. A summary follows;
Snowglobe web site is coming down, replaced by Snowstorm. In 3 months the Snowglobe version repository will come down. Write access to the repository is closed now. The JIRA will be scrubbed of Snowglobe issues. Those that are applicable will be transferred to Snowstorm. Snowglobe viewers will be allowed to access the grid as long as the 1.23 viewer. Then both will be blocked at the same time. The guess is these viewers will be in use for the next year (12 months). No decision has been made on when to discontinue their use. It depends on two things. One is the SLV2.x user interface and when LL has that changed to something usable. Another is when it is necessary to makes way for coming server features not compatible with older viewer versions. Snowglobe user base is extremely small (1%+/-). From the Linden viewpoint, this curtailing of Snowglobe is necessary to allow LL to focus on fixing the SLV2 interface.
Open Source meetings are going to once weekly to make room of the other open source related meetings, like Snowstorm, Beta Server, etc.
New building tools are coming for Snowstorm and thus the SLV2 viewer.
In another area Computer World’s Mitch Wagner interviews Phillip Rodedale, LL CEO. See: “Fast, Easy, Fun” with Second Life founder Philip Rosedale. One interesting change being;
“You need a model where you can get a URL, and you’re in Second Life, and later you sign up. That needs to be the new user experience,” Rosedale said.
In line with the Open Source Meeting above is Rosedale’s statement;
Viewer 2 also needs to be beefed up for Second Life content creators, who nearly universally criticize the software as a giant step backward from the previous version. “We’ll rapidly make the Viewer 2 codebase have the capabilities that everybody wants,” Rosedale said.
Tofu Linden in answering a question reveals there are plans to enable higher levels of compiler optimizations for the viewer. These are in the development pipeline now. I suspect these are more than just the SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 optimizations, but those are named. ToFu says these are intertwined with other features and experiments to improve performance.
There has been an ongoing editing war on the wiki pages regarding the SL Rail Roads. I’ll stay out of that one as I don’t know how to care less. I do want to point out the Virtual Railway Consortium/SLRR History 1 page. The page Second Life Virtual Railway Consortium/SLRR History 2 is less about history and more about current events. Salt everything you read on these pages as they seem to change often.
Esbee Linden is continuing to work on a blog post and sketches about UI customization.
Oskar Linden has the new server testing channels pages started in the Wiki. See: Beta/Ferrari (now Beta/LeTigre), Beta/Magnum, and Beta/BlueSteel. The sandboxes in AGNI are active but incomplete (9/9).
Lil Linden has posted about the new server deployment process. See: New Deploy Process – Lots of good info there.