Second Life News 2013-31

I got most of the interesting news out Sunday. Today we have confirmation of which server updates they plan to roll out this week.

Main Channel

The main channel will get the maintenance pack with some bug fixes and the faster materials processing that ran in Blue Steel last week (30). So, objects failing to detect collisions after teleporting, run time permissions messing up in attachments, and pathfinding characters wondering out of their parcels should all be fixed. The Materials system will now be able to request 4 textures per second in place of the 1/sec previously.

Blue Steel

This channel gets a new maintenance package. llListen (BUG-3291) and llApplyImpulse (BUG-3307) have fixes. Plus there is another… or some more crash fixes… which I read to mean more exploits cured. 

Le Tigre & Magnum

These two channels will continue to run the SSA upgrade. It gets the main channel updates and apparently no other changes. The Lindens continue to collect usage data and monitor the changes for problems.

50% Discount on Premium Membership

Daniel Voyager noticed the Lab is offering Premium Membership at a 50% discount for a limited time. See the page: Second Life Membership Discount. This offer runs from Friday July 26, 2013 at 12:01AM (PST) and expires Sunday August 11, 2013 at 11:59pm (PST).

You get L$300/week as a member. If you keep the member ship for 45 days or more you get a L$1,000 sign up bonus… The fine print says this is only available to those going for the Quarterly Plan.  Ummmm…  how does one do less than 45 days after paying for 90 days… ? Am I missing something here?

Also, the discount will be applied ONLY to the first quarterly billing cycle only.

Of all the silly things they offer, the really nice thing is the Premium Member only sandboxes. To be in a sandbox and not get griefed has to freaking wonderful.

Prices are:

  1. US$9.95/month or x12 = $119.40/yr – [(L$300*52)/260 = $60±] = $59.40.
  2. $11.25 + ($22.50×3) for $78.75/yr – [((L$300*52)+$L1,000) = $63.84] = $14.90.
  3. $72.00 Annual subscription – [(L$300*52)/260 = $60±] = $12.00.

The best deal is still, by my numbers, the annual plan.

SSA Bake Fail

SSA is supposed to fix bake fail. SSA fixes the problems identified as part of the viewer baking and texture delivery process for appearance. It does not solve every problem in SL that can contribute to bake fail. In my Sunday article I got into that a bit more.

While most of the actual bake fail problems are solved, there are other problems that can contribute to SSA not being able to bake your appearance. We are going to be learning about those problems over the next few weeks.

The Firestorm Viewer Development Team has put up a new support page titled: Dealing with Avatar Bake Fail – SSA. This page has some of the concrete information about problems associated with SSA bake fail.

Minnesota Almost Froze

On a complete tangent, the USA’s east side heat wave had a low point in Embarrass, Minnesota, 1.6°C. See: Live Science. Its not that uncommon for Minnesota. But, reporting of these occurrences are rare.

4 thoughts on “Second Life News 2013-31

  1. Ive always read the fine print as meaning one has to log in every day for 45 consecutive days to get the 1000L – so hardly anyone ever gets it.

  2. Not sure why you’re calculating based off of a L$330/wk stipend.. It’s L$300 unless you have an old account.

    First time Premium subscribers get their signup bonus after being Premium for 45 consecutive days. Both Quarterly and Annual make it easier since you’re probably going to make it without having to renew once like a Monthly plan. But a Quarterly member could still request a refund (giving up their membership) or get disabled (like for non-payment or getting banned)…

    Source: LL and my own experience.

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