July

(48 Articles) – One of the first things that happen in July is the Firestorm Viewer had a bug that was overloading the Linden’s stats server. The Firestorm team quickly blocked the 4.4.1 viewer and rushed out version 4.4.2. See: Firestorm 4.4.2 Emergency Rollout.

I started off the month with a review of the state of viewer development. See: Viewer Updates 2013-27. By week 30 the pipeline was mostly operational. For more information on how it works see: New Second Life Viewer Pipeline.

SSA was announced as intended to roll out in week 28. SSA rolled to an RC channel in week 28. My experience with was described in: SSA Follow Up 2013-28. SSA moved from the smaller Le Tigre RC to the larger Magnum RC in week 29. It also remain on RC for week 30.

We got more information on how SSA works from Maestro and Nyx Linden. See: Second Life News 2013-29.

Another Rod Humble interview appeared this month. See: Another Rod Interview 2013-27.

Oculus Rift announced releasing the 1080p Rift SDK. See: Oculus Rift – VR Update

In week 28 we learned that In-Worldz is adopting the Mesh Deformer for use in their VR world. See: Mesh Deformer Update 2013-28.

We got some more SL statistics this month. See: Some Stats 2013-28. 20% retention rate…

In week 28 we got news that Linden Lab had purchased Desura, a software distribution site somewhat like Valve’s Steam. See: Interesting News About Linden Lab. More information and speculation is here: Desura Follow up.

Toysoldier Thor posted an article about his experiments with Materials. See: Second Life Materials Experiments.

I didn’t write much about the SL Market Place this year. It was a depressing subject. Darrius did write about. See: Second Life Market Place Update 2013-29.

In week 29 we got fixes for repetitive Navmesh rebuilds and Pathfinding’s parcel intelligence.

Regions restarts were sometimes doing double restarts with the week 29 updates.

Avastar 1.0 for Blender/Second Life is released. See: Avastar 1.0 Released.

Texture Thrashing came out as problem this month. See: Second Life News 2013-30.

The Experience Tools package rolled out to the main channel in week 30 passing the SSA package that remained in RC.

A 50% discount for education groups was announced. See: Bits and Pieces 2013-30.

Premium membership account signup saw a 50% discount too.

CHUI updates continued to come out during the month of July.

We ran into animation synchronization problem toward the end of July.