Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Linden Lab has announced that migration from the existing Second Life Marketplace to the new Viewer Managed Marketplace (VMM) will start July 23, 2015. See: Viewer-Man
Migrations will start at 9PM PT and run to 9AM the following day. I expect this to take days, but may be not. You will get an email when they start and finish. Merchants with a large number (5,000+) of products will get advance warning of the pending migration.
Tuesday (6/30) at about 11 AM PT the Lindens announced the partial release of Experience Tools. I write ‘partial’ because they are only fully released to Premium Members. This afternoon the 3.8.0 (302622) Jun 12 viewer automatically downloaded and I installed it.
This is also the main viewer now. Look at the download page.
That is a Jul 2, 2014 video.
The announcement is here: Experience Tools Available Now For Premium Members!
All users can get the viewer and use it. My understanding is only Premium Members can build experiences with this viewer, but all users can enjoy the experiences.
There is a knowledge Base article that helps you get started creating experiences. See: Experiences in Second Life. This is for both those wanting to participate in an experience and those wanting to create an experience.
There is a forum section the beta testers and early adopters used. It is now open to all. See: Experience Tools Forum.
You can find experiences to play in Second Life™ here; Resident-created experiences in our Destination Guide and the Linden Portal Parks.
On Monday Linden Lab announced the end of the L$ Reseller Program. As of August 1st, 2015 it will only be possible to buy L$ from the Linden Exchange. Resellers have about 6 weeks to sell their stock of L$ and close their businesses.
In the announcement they provide a video tutorial on using the Linden Exchange for those that have never used it. Apparently some people have only used Resellers for their purchase of Linden dollars.
I don’t remember the Lab telling people that the Reseller Program would be a temporary step in their plans to provide international players access to L$. So, I suspect some people will be upset with the Lab.
Last week’s TPV user group had lite attendance. But, the meeting ran just over an hour. We got some new information about Second Life™ and a tiny bit on Project SANSAR (published separately).
You may also have noticed that Inara and I both are breaking the news coming from the TPV Dev’s meeting into multiple articles. That lets me get them out faster. You also don’t have to wade through long articles with parts of less or no interest to you.
Oz Linden was having trouble with the settings in the viewer he was using during the meeting. The Firestorm peeps were putting some good natured trash talk on him about being able to save settings. If you use Firestorm you know it has a save settings function.
Linden Lab is apparently making lots of headway on putting CEF support in the Second Life™ Viewer. They will have a project viewer out ‘real soon’. The Lab will need someone in the Linux community to step up and move that new code into the Linux viewer. If not, the Linden Linux viewer will go way out of date.
I think this will be an awesome change in the viewer. WebKit is used now and it is a bit of an orphan.
This will allow developers to use more HTML5 to develop panels in the viewer. It will also affect many parts of the viewer. There are also possibilities for what can be done server side.
Linden Lab has found and is in the process of fixing Calling Card (CC) bugs in Second Life™. Recent work has found some CC problems affecting performance. One fix LL will likely put in is a feature to remove duplicate CC’s.
Having a CC triggers lookups at login and other times during a secession. With some people having 50k calling cards that puts a heavy load on viewer and server. An older but common tip for improving viewer performance is deleting all your Calling Cards. If you are not using them, there is no point having your viewer doing the work to update CC status for those avatars.