At the Second Life™ Third Party Developer’s (TPD) meeting (7/31) Brooke Linden spoke. So, we know as of Friday, all merchants have been migrated to VMM. Only minor problems were encountered. They are working on fixing those. Brooke and Skylar are working with a few merchants that have run into issues from the migration.
Reign of a new World
The plan moving forward is to shut down MagicBoxes August 17th. On that date MagicBoxes will STOP working. The XStreet market, the current marketplace, will come down on August 27th and they will run solely on VMM.
Inara made it to last Monday’s open source user group meeting where Oz Linden apparently talked about the Second Life Render Muting feature and where it is in the development pipeline. You may remember that a bug was causing the Jelly Babies to be invisible. That is fixed.
Surfing at Teahupo’o 1
Now the feature is waiting on UI changes. Once those are complete we will get an RC viewer version with the feature. Inara is guessing sometime in week 32, which I think is a good guess. I am looking forward to this feature. I think it will have a significant impact on performance in the long run.
Inara quotes Oz talking about the notices that will appear when our Draw Weight changes and when those around us are not rendering our avatar. We will be able to control how long those messages stay on screen. We already have a Debug Setting to tell the viewer when to render high draw weight avatars as Jelly Babies. Presumably we will have that control out where we can adjust it easily too.
Or shortened to VMM… The RC Viewer: VMM Viewer version 3.8.2.303583 has been out for a few days and may make it to being the main viewer this week. On the 23rd the Lab will begin moving the marketplace to the new system. But, how will you know how to work with Second Life’s™ new marketplace?
Diva Lingerie – Raine by Posh Pixels
Canary Beck is pointing out a new tutorial on the marketplace. Auryn Beorn is writing a series of guides and Canary is helping with the marketing side of the guides.
While this first guide is oriented toward opening a new store, there is a lot of information that will help exiting store owners.
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.
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.
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.
