May

(71 Articles) – The new Viewer Rollout Process is officially announced in the beginning of May. See: Second Life Viewer Release Changing. Later in the month Oz Linden explained more about the process. See: Second Life Viewer Pipeline.

Automatic Rollbacks were something I only found out about in week 18. This is something that happens when a region is repeatedly crashing. See: Second Life News 2013-18 #2.

Content & Mesh Meeting 2013-19

In week 19 we heard an Experience Tools Preparation Package was being rolled to an RC channel. During the month of May we would see the Experience Tools role in and out of the RC channels.

The new AO functions were included in the Experience Tools package. Things were little confusing but the AO functions did make it to the main channel in week 19.

In the first week of May we saw controversial TOS change rollout. This was the change about the sell and purchasing of Linden dollars. This complicated things for a lot of overseas users of Second Life. The change is explained in: The New ToS Explained.

For a time there is question of whether ‘unauthorized’ was the same as ‘not permitted.’ During May the lab started sending out emails to Linden Dollar Exchange owners that made it clear ‘unauthorized’ and ‘not permitted’ were the same thing. That signaled the end of any exchanges other than Linden Lab’s.

By the 10^th May Linden Lab was sending out Cease-and-Desist letters. See: ToS L$ Change Update. This remained a hot topic throughout the rest of May. Linden Lab trying to clarify the situation with an information release. See: Lab Makes L$ Exchange Announcement. Plus they were obviously trying to mitigate problems overseas users were having exchanging Linden Dollars

Meeroos were having problems. The problem seemed related to the Interest List changes. Andrew Linden was working to figure out what the problem was.

With the Mesh Deformer on hold lots of clothes designers were looking for better ways to make close that fit the avatar. This made Collision Bone Weighting a popular tool. For tutorial see: Second Life Weighting Collision Bones.

Landing Point Orientation has to do with which way your avatar faces after a teleport. Landowners are supposed to be able to set which direction an arriving avatar faces. That feature was broken in SL for some time. In week 19 Maestro Linden was telling is the feature was being fixed in an upcoming release.

In week 19 Baker Linden worked on fixing Avatar Display Names. The fix has do with leading spaces and the types of characters that can be entered as a display name.

During the same time period Voidpointer Linden was working on putting parcel restrictions on pathfinding characters. The idea was to allow parcel owners the ability to decide whether they want pathfinding characters on their land or not. The intelligence to respect parcel boundaries was being added to pathfinding characters.

Image found by:

Goon Squad Viewer… See: Goon Squad Viewer.

About May 14^th we learned that JSON was coming to Second Life. For an explanation of what that is and what it means see: JSON Comes to Second Life.

Drama around the KirstenLee Viewer S19 heated up with the release of version 407. See: KirstenLee Viewer S19 (407) Released and check out the comments.

About May 17 we got word Jo Yardley, the builder  of 1920’s Berlin in SL, that she had heard from Rod Humble, Linden Lab’s CEO, that the Lab is actively working on building an interface for the Oculus Rift. See: Oculus Rift Update 2013-20.

There’s an interesting video about developing Oculus Rift game interfaces. See: Oculus Rift 2013-21.

In week 21 I wrote an article or I wrote how the new RC viewers in the viewer development pipeline would be named. I got a wrong. But, new viewers were starting to roll through the new pipeline.

The Z-axis or avatar-height setting that SSA broke was replaced in SL Viewers by an apparent setting named Hover. I wrote about the limits of that setting in: Second Life Hover. I also provided a short tutorial on how to work around those limits.

New Appearance Setting: HOVER

Griefing had reached the point that a number of people showed up at the Server Beta User Group to complain. For a clear explanation of what the Lindens in attendance can do about griefing see: More Griefing.

Materials made it to Beta Release the last day of May. See the official announcement: Second Life Materials Goes Beta.