February – 53 Articles

Rod Humble, SL CEO, commenting in his feed stirred up hope of last names returning. Hopes were eventually dashed.

New functions and the LIST functions made it into the Release Candidate channels. Problems were found and the changes continued to come into RC channels as more fixes were applied. About mid month the list changes rolled to the main channel.

The first try of the Phase I Multi-Threaded Region Crossing package arrived in a RC channels. Late in 2012 the Phase II part made it into QA on ADITI.

The Mini-map avatar elevation problems started getting attention. I was eventually fixed. Still, it is only accurate up to about 1,000m.

Oskar Linden made an excellent reply to an irate ignoramus. See: #SL Response. I still send this link to people.

Market Place delivery continued to be a problem with early morning deliveries (US West Coast time) being particularly bad. The Lindens found the problem and announced a fix. Valentine’s Day saw a huge Magic Box failure in the Market Place. See: Valentine Fail Update. In late February we saw the Received Items folder appear for testing.

Server updates in the Release Candidate channels created avatar ghosting problems.

Hexagon 2.5, Bryce 7.0, and Daz Studio 4 Pro were released as free programs.

Small bits of news about Linden Realms Tools, aka Experience Tools and eventually named Advanced Creator Tools, continued to leak out. Mid-February we got more information on what parts of the tools would be released and a rough ETA.

The Lab proposed guess blogging in the Linden Blog. Drama erupts. See: #SL Linden’s Blogging Offer

The Phoenix-Firestorm team publishes a wiki page on white listing viewers with anti-virus software. See: #SecondLife and Anti-Virus. I added more information for you to consider than the Firestorm people did.

A new release of the Mesh Deformer came out. This one was designed to handle the ‘crumpling’ problems. I looked at it in: Mesh Deformer 0.2 Update.

A feature request (STORM-1803) was filed requesting the viewer be changed to allow uploading of ANIM files. These are animation files with more control than the then current BVH files and they have more features that closely match SL’s internal animation format. Eventually, the feature was added to the viewer. See: #SL Animation Changes.

Testing Maze in ADITI

We started to see the first of the Pathfinding Project documentation appear in the SL Wiki. Regions in ADITI that were running the Pathfinding beta were announced. The official announcement appears 2/16. See: Pathfinder Official Announcement.We met Lorca Linden this month, he primarily worked on Pathfinding.

Pink Prims bug hit hard in mid month. SL Viewer 3.2.8 was where we first saw it. See: Pink Prims Bug.

Image by Blaise Glendevon

Word comes that the Imprudence Viewer will live on. See: Imprudence Viewer to Live. That was optimistic. I expect SL users to drop it once the Avatar Baking change arrives in late February.

Hamet at New World Notes speculates on directions the Lab will take for 2012. Rod Humble Drops Hints About Linden’s New Projects. We will see the projects released in the last half of 2012.

In late February we saw the release of a revised Linden Lab viewer policy. This was a major dramatic event in the SL saga. See: #SL Viewer Shock Wave. An audio of the meeting announcing the change was released a couple days later. You can find the original recording here: TPV Dev’s Meeting 2012-02-24. My summary with time marks of the recording is here: #SL Viewer Policy Change Meeting. Later Oz Linden answered questions on SLUniverse’s forum. See: Oz Answers TPV Policy Questions.

Avatar status checks changed. It seems llRequestAgentData() was being used to stalk avatars. So, the function was nerfed. But, there were so many legitimate uses for the function that broke the Lindens rolled the nerf back until they could devise a way to handle the legitimate uses. See: #SL Server-Scripting UG News Week 9.