Second Life 2015 in Review: January 2015

I like looking back at the year to see what has happened and get a perspective of how Second Life™ is progressing. On a week to week basis I tend to lose perspective. Also, many of the things that have changed this year are forgotten, taken for granted. Other things I am often surprised to realize how long I have been waiting  for them.

boule de neige....Un ange

boule de neige….Un ange – snowball …. An angel

So, I publish my review in bits. I don’t have time to do the whole year in one sitting.

January 2015 – 23 Articles

If you don’t know, WordPress has an Archive feature that allows one to see the articles published for any month in any year a blog was operational. Look in the column of this blog to find drop down. 

The first month of the year saw shorter Third Party Developer meetings. A trend well established now. There just isn’t a lot to talk about. Server updates were fewer. The Experience Tools Project saw more fixes rolling to the RC channels. RC viewers for VMM and Experience tools were released. Linden Viewers were changing to allow people to turn off “willing to run RC’s” and be forced to downgrade to the older main release. CmdrCupcake (Sovereign Engineer) found some of the cause of texture thrashing.

The ‘Hover’ feature was in a project viewer. Late in January the feature was rolled to the servers in the main grid’s RC channels.

The Viewer Managed Marketplace project was still in development and public beta.

In January Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296 was available. Today December 17 it is on version 3.7.18.295296… but, they are going to update it any time now.

Viewer 3.7.25.298129 was the Hover Project viewer. This month it was an RC viewer.

Chat was being researched and problems identified. This month the Lindens made some breakthroughs that would lead to changes in the chat software.

Voice chat was often not operational after a region restart. The Lab was looking at how to fix the problem.

This month the Lab was expecting to be building viewers with their new coding system by week 6. The first RC viewers built with the tolls were being released this month.

There was a problem with SL Go. A free month of use was given away to make up for the problems.

The first week of the month the Lab announced they would be having a product planning meeting. A primary issue to be considered was customer communication.

The Firestorm team started Tool Tip Tuesdays.

Machinimatrix was running a 50% off sale on Sparkles, a Blender add-on for making animation easier.

Blender 2.73a was released. AvaStar version 1.3-18 was released. This December we saw 2.0 release along with the Lab’s Project Bento.

The Second Life™ Wiki reopened for user editing. It had been closed to correct a griefing problem.

MadPea released Buried this month.

There was lots of blogging about in-world photography in the month of January.

Monty Linden moved from SL’s HTTP Library update over to working on Sansar.

Kokua Viewer changed from RLVa to RLV.

In January I was busy with RL and thinking I might blog less. Now it is December and I am busy with RL and thinking I’ll blog less… I had decided to blog less about viewers using the V1 UI. I pretty much did that.

In January problems with my blog convinced me to move to a Linux based server. In the move I lost a lot of images I had used in the blog. I still have them in my local machine. But, it is a real pain moving them to the new server and splicing them into WordPress. So, that process has yet to complete.

There was discussion about SL2 (not yet named Project Sansar) being used for marketing as it was once thought SL (1) would be. That debate continues.

Summary

That about it for January.

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