Planned Second Life Updates

The Linens have announced some new things coming to Second Life™. Some are good, some are a pain.

In the pain department first, there is an increase in the fee to buy Linden dollars (L$). It is going from US$0.60 to $0.99 per transaction. This goes into effect today, Nov 2, 2017. Dang. I need Lindens…

Also, when cashing out the fee goes from 1.5% per transaction, with a $3 (USD) minimum and a $25 (USD) maximum to 2.5% per transaction, with a $3 (USD) minimum, and no maximum. This happens January 3, 2018.

- to The Mist -

– to The Mist –

Why? Thank criminals and government regulators. The cost to remain compliant with regulations is going up.

In the goodies department, money is being budgeted for; new features, engineering support, customer support, billing systems and upgrades, and customer acquisition outreach. These are all good things. I like new features. Animesh is the exciting one. The improved server-side baking for 1024 rez and adaption for use with mesh bodies and other mesh attachments is intertwined with animesh phase I & II. But, it has great potential to reduce avatar induced lag. 

The Glytches game is a recent addition. It is sort of a Pokemon Go like game. You may not know part of the marketing in Pokemon Go was for businesses to have Pokemons hanging around their RL stores. The idea was to attract people to the store. Catch a Pokemon and hopefully see something you want to buy.

That feature is being added to Glytches. We already have 5,000 people playing Glytches. That seems a small number to me. But, it is poorly defined. Is that 5k per month, week, day, or per hour? The way the sentence was written I infer it is total to date… which is why I think it is so few.

There is the Environmental Enhancements Project (EEP), which is a change to Windlight. This is when Jo Yardley, 1920’s Berlin, gets her 24-hour SL day. We get parcel Windlight. We get Windlight assets, meaning a set of Windlight settings can be made into a thing, an asset, that can be traded, sold, whatever.

Some new feature is coming for Premium members that is being hinted at as something to help shoppers and merchants. I suspect it is something to help with demos. But, they talk about streamlining ways to get noobs into the SL economy… buying stuff. So, it is hard to say.

If you are following my blog you have seen all the server updates described as ‘internal changes’. This announcement tells us that some of those changes have been about closing exploits to protect creatives’ IP ownership. An exploit used by Gotcha scammers has been closed. This one was not just closed, it was changed to CATCH the thieves and a number of the bad guys banned for life. We can debate how effective banning is or isn’t. But it is a PITA for the scammers and I think that a good thing.

The Brave New World project is underway. The is the move to the cloud. It has tremendous possibilities. As more of the system moves to the cloud the Lab can take advantage of scaling. So, if one person is on the Lab doesn’t need the 4,000 or so servers running (old number) that the SL system uses now. The cloud can scale down or up to handle the current load and that reduces cost.

The Lab is signaling that cost saving will be reflected in the land cost. I suspect there will be more land products available too.

The Lindens point people to three sections of the forum:

Following the Viewer link, you’ll find out that those of us running the Alex Ivy RC Viewer hit an update problem. The automatic update failed. Then stuck halfway through the update, the viewer would not run. It was stuck in an update loop, update, install, crash on start, and repeat on next launch attempt. Fortunately, it was an easy fix. Do a manual download and install.

This section is handy for finding fixes to viewer problems and getting questions answered. More often than in other parts of the forums a Linden will post.

I usually hang out in the Answers section of the forum. However, these are informative and helpful sections you’ll want to check out.

Web User Group 2017 – Denby, AGNI

In the Web Notes section is a post telling us that there will be a Web User Group meeting November 10th. (Details) Grumpity & Alexa Linden will facilitate the meetings planned for every other Friday at 2:30PM SLT @ Denby (Maps URL) just over the hill from Simon’s Server Scripting meeting site.

The Deploys section of the forum is pretty well known. So, nothing new there.

If you don’t know, Lindens used to have Office Hours. That has sort of changed to User Groups. Whatever we call it you can find a list of the meetings in the SL Wiki: User Groups.

 

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