Second Life News 2017 w01

I wish you a Happy New Year!
The no change window has closed. The Lindens are coming back to work. Servers are being restarted and user groups are meeting. New users are erect and desperately or hopefully… let’s say gleefully shouting, “Wanna have some fun?” Shoppers are crowding the malls, combatants are stressing the sims with 12-rounds-per-second weapons, all while old timers snuggle in their skyboxes and merchants dream of L$.

LeLutka Church

LeLutka Church

I expect 2017 will see steady improvement of Second Life™ servers and viewers. There are no rumors of big changes or marvelous new features. Only rumors of… something… So, we will find out only as the year passes.

I suspect many of us will be distracted, for a time, by Sansar, as it opens to a larger and larger audience throughout 2017. The unknown is scary. Chicken Little will tell us again that Second Life is falling. I expect Sansar to repeat the SL development story. SL started out as a platform form for developing 3D web content. Hopefully the Lab has learned from the problems SL ran into and will avoid the big mistakes. Expect new ones. Only rime will allow us to see how it works out for Sansar and SL. 

Servers

My home region is on the main channel. I have a script that records when the region restarts. Today it shows a restart at 2017-01-03T15:14:42.18… that is GMT time as best I can tell. So, it is 8 hours ahead of SLT/PST converting to 7:14 AM PST. The previous region restart was 2017-12-20.

There is no Deploys posting this morning. I suspect this restart was a refresh or a roll to allow operations to upgrade the underlying Linux operating system. Whatever reason the servers were restarted, we’ll have to speculate.

There may be a RC channel update Wednesday. But, we have no word about any possible RC package.

Viewers

The main SL Viewer is version 5.0.0.321958. This last updated in week 50 of 2016.

Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 5.0.1.322513 – No update since week 51.

Second Life Project 360 Snapshot Viewer version 4.1.3.321712 – No update for several weeks nor any expected for a couple more. Once work on this one resumes I expect and update to v5 to add Bento compatibility.

Anticipated ?.?.?.###### 64-bit Viewer – This is the Linden focus. Staff moved off the 360-viewer to work on this version. Expect a project version of this viewer soon. Once the project version is public some staff will move back to work on the 360-viewer.

Singularity – I suspect the adoption of Bento mesh is moving fast enough those using non-Bento capable viewers are seeing problems. I hear of melted hands and heads. A number of times I’ve seen users ask in the Singularity Viewer group about when the viewer will get Bento support.

The answers are it is being worked on and there is no ETA. A few say there is a Bento version mostly working in testing. But, all the development pages, alpha and Source Forge, I know of have nothing new since August 2016. All this proves is I don’t know where to look.

Alchemy – In regard to adding Bento support Sovereign Engineer said, “In regards to bento: SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON”

UKanDo – Still no new information. So, I assume no Bento support for the foreseeable future.

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