June

(60 Articles) – The month starts out with Henri Beauchamp blasting KistenLee for plagiarism. See: S19 Viewer Controversy.

Jo Yardley, 1920’s Berling in SL, publishes an interview with Rod Hummble, Linden Lab’s CEO. See: 5 Minutes Isn’t Enough.

Disconnection problems were fixed in week 23. Large numbers of people were suddenly being disconnected. See: BUG-2564. The fix ran on all three RC channels in week 23.

The Lab released a commemorative avatar to celebrate SL10B (10^th Birthday of SL).

Second Life and independently Penny Patton released articles on the Best Building Practices for Second Life. If you build in SL and missed them check out: Best Building Practices in Second Life.

Kelly Linden let us know he is working on two new scripting functions for SL: llReturnObjectByOwner and llReturnObjectsByID. For a few more details see: New LSL Functions Coming. We got more details in week 24. See: Second Life News 2013-24 #3. The function llReturnObjectsByID was removed from the ADITI grid for a week (24-25) while fixes were made. There were problems with return of parcel owner items. Thesse changes made it to the main channel in week 26.

SSA was having some problems in week 23. People moving in and out of SSA enabled and disabled regions ran into problems, see the image. For more details see: Second Life News 2013-23 #2.

I tried to put these problems in context with what the Lab is up against. See: SSA Context. This should also help one to understand why it is important to run updated viewers and operating systems.

Problems with SSA and Avatar Hover (Z-axis adjustment) remain. Nyx tells us they won’t have time to do anything with Z-axis until after SSA rolls out. That is held back by COF corruption causing bake fail.

The last week of June we got an estimated release date for SSA: week of July 7-13.

The Mesh Deformer sinks farther into a confused state. I try to clear up some of the confusion: Mesh Deformer 2013-23.

Still no ETA for Materials was being given at this point. But, another RC version of the viewer was released: 3.6.0 (277049). On June 19 the Lab officially releases the Materials System. See: Materials Released. New wiki pages were appearing for Materials. See: Materials Information.

This month new pages appeared in the wiki for JSON and how it operates with SL. See: Second Life JSON.

The HTTP updates caused several problems. Large mass disconnections of users started happening in May. Also, scripts that depend on HTTP connections to outside servers were losing their connections. Updates made in week 24 alleviated some of the problem but were not a complete fix.

In week 26 the Lab announced the roll out of Sunshine, which includes HTTP.

Texture lag has started to come up in May as more of an issue. The viewer is basically designed to use 512mb of video ram. There is some call to allow the viewer to use more video ram.

Baker Linden’s work on Display Names was moved to QA in week 24. One of the reasons for making the fix was to get Mute Lists working as intended. With this fix moved into QA Baker moved back on to Group Ban Lists.

Posing avatars for pictures is tricky. Strawberry Singh provided a tutorial on how to position avatars even in no rez regions. See: Moving Your Avatar.

Viewer projects are built in code repositories. The Lab maintains a number of these. One that was discovered by users this June is an Experience Tools Viewer repository. This didn’t tell us much about the tools, but it did confirm the project as alive and advancing.

The Viewer development pipeline started producing obvious results this month. The Vivox upgrades that were in development waiting on a beta viewer slot were placed into a parallel RC viewer.

Vivox was in an RC viewer. We also got word the new viewer pipeline will start installing RC Viewers in the first part of July.

For some time there were problems with viewer snapshots. Those problems were being fixed this month.

Particle selection was enabled in one of the Maintenance RC Viewers this month.

Oculus Rift was seen hands on by Jo Yardly about June 18 and she posted: Oculus Rift and Second Life.

Linden Lab released some interesting statistics in week 25. See: Stats 2013-25. Lots of bloggers pickup on the numbers and play with them. We learned later in June that the Lab was getting a new statistics reporting system.

Another Rod Humble interview makes it out. See: Rod Humble Interview 2013-25.

Chip Midnight writes about using Materials over on SLUniverse. It is worth checking out. See: Second Life News 2013-26.

The Next Ten in Second Life is an article I wrote in June to get some perspective on where SL might be in 10 years.

CtrlAltStudio Viewer is released in week 26. This is a Third Party Viewer based on Firestorm that has Oculus Rift support. The interface remains pretty much the standard interface without adaptations for the Rift.

Sidden Munro puts out a video tutorial on work flow for standard sizing of clothes. See: Second Life Quick Standard Size Modeling.