August

(81 Articles) – For week 32 and 33 the SSA package remained on the RC channel. It made it out to the main channel in week 34. See: SSA Goes Grid Wide this Week (34).

The viewer pipeline change began to propagate to the more obvious parts of SL. Five candidates made it into pipeline this month.

The Lindens were starting to work Google Breakpad, a software error reporting system, into the SL Viewer. More CHUI changes were appearing in the RC version of the viewer. The Snowstorm RC Viewer became the channel or open source contributions.

To speed up the viewer testing process RC Viewers that are not promoted may be merged with projects waiting for an RC slot. See: Viewer Release Pipeline 2013-34.

A fix was released for Stop Animating Me or VWR-13228 – Object can obtain and retain permissions indefinitely without avatar’s knowledge and no way of knowing who took it. For details see: Second Life News 2013-32 #2.

As of week 32 the region shutdown notices should contain the region name.

Ciaran Laval write an article about the SL Affiliates’ program. See: Linden’s Second Life Affiliates. I hadn’t even known they had affiliates.

In week 33 we got a warning from the Lab regarding Liquid Mesh. See: Second Life Liquid Mesh Early Warning. We know now that the Lab discarded the Mesh Deformer idea and went with Collision Bone mesh or as we call it now: Fitted Mesh.

A video of a Firestorm user meeting made it to YouTube August 12. In it the Firestorm team said there are 1800± version of viewers on the grid. The team thought 1600± were Phoenix-Firestorm viewers. So, the plan is for the team to start blocking old viewer versions to force updates. See: Explosive Firestorm Meeting. For a follow on see: Firestorm Blocking Update.

Gaia Clary figured out what happens with the avatar and how it uses the UVMaps that create some odd distortions. See: Second Life Avatar UVMaps Quirks.

A second ToS update arrives this month. It turns out to be much more problematic than the earlier one. See: Second Life ToS Analyzed. Echoes of the change are still reverberating.

For information on how the server RC works see: Where is SSA Rolling To?

In Exporting Second Life I point to an article Hamlet wrote about the export ability in the Singularity Viewer. It makes Singularity a must have for advanced SL users.

Strawberry Singh asked question about Liquid Mesh. Many others were asking similar questions. So, I took another shot at explaining Liquid Mesh and the chances it would or would not break at some point. See: Second Life Liquid Mesh Continued…

Gaia Clary publishes her take on Liquid Mesh. See: Another Voice on Liquid Mesh

Mac users were running into more Texture Thrashing problems. There was an easy fix. See: Second Life News 2013-34 #2. New versions of the Mac viewer have the problem fixed.

Group Ban List was still a work in progress.

Animation Interface was being considered as a joint Third Party Viewer Dev and Linden project to develop a viewer interface to allow the new AO functions to be built into the viewer. See: Second Life News 2013-34 #3.

We got more information about the GPU table used by the viewer. See: GPU Table & Performance.

Another Rod Humble interview came to light. See: Rod Humble Interview – July – it was one I initially missed.

This month a report came out on Cyber Crime that shows Windows XP is a vulnerable operating system. See: Second Life and Windows XP

In week 35 we got more information on Parcel Access controls for land managers. See: Second Life Access Controls.

An Oculus Rift user visits 1920’s Berlin in SL and writes about it. See: Oculus Rift in Second Life’s Berlin 1920.

Linden Lab made the Second Life Viewer available on their recently purchased Desure site. See: Second Life on Desura.

Loki Eliot shares what he has learned about building with mesh. See: More Mesh How To.

The Oculus Rift and Sex in SL. See: Oculus Rift and Sex.