General News

#SL News Update Week 33

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This is a catch up article from last week. I had serious RL partying to attend to this weekend. So, hopefully this will get me caught up. I am bummed there is no new Metareality poscast in week 33.

Region Crossing

In Week 22, 2012 Phase I of the Multi-Threaded Crossing Project rolled out. See: #SL News Week 22. Today Oskar tipped us off that Phase II is moving through the QA process and close to reaching Release Channel Candidate status.

I take that to mean that in the next couple of weeks we might see it on a release channel. This is a complex process that is taking a load of work. So many parts of the SL system are touched there are a load of places for things to go wrong. We saw that with Phase I. It took months to make it to roll out. Phase I was in and out of the release channels for months. Hopefully that will not be the case this time.

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Second Life Going to Steam

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Another announcement came out this morning… Second Life is going to be available on Steam. (Reference)

As some sharp-eyed developers have speculated, we’re going to make Second Life available on Steam in the next month or so.

Many of us have friends who are avid Steam gamers, but if you’re not familiar, Steam is a very popular online game platform that offers a wide range of titles (and will soon also offer other software as well).

What does this news mean for Second Life? You’ll still be able to access Second Life just as you can today; there won’t be any change to that. But, the more than 40 million people who use Steam will also be able to get Second Life as easily as they can get games like Portal.

We’ll make an announcement on the blog when Second Life is actually available on Steam, but in the meantime, if you have friends who are Steam gamers, let ‘em know it’s coming!

 

Second Life Traffic Numbers

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For land and shop owners this is a serious problem. With the roll out of the latest update lots of people are seeing the problem.

Traffic Count in SL Search – enlarge

JIRA’s

SVC-7458 – Traffic counts borked across (All or Many Regions) – See 1. Second Life Viewer – VWR VWR-27621 Drop In Traffic Calculations. Nov 2011. Short not much information.

SVC-7459 – Drop In Traffic Calculations. Nov 2011. Updated Aug 2012. This seems to be the most active JIRA on the topic.

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More on What is Second Life

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I was talking to a friend about being at a concert while programming. That thoroughly confused them. I needed something to show them for a quick explanation. Trying to explain Second Life™ with words is pointless, in my experience.

What is Second Life?

The Lab has a good web page up that serves the purpose of explaining SL. While it falls short, the videos there are far better than my words and verbal efforts. I can just say, “Second Life is a second fun only life.” Send them to the web page and they seem to get a closer idea of what SL is. But, I have yet to see any answer to the question “What is Second Life?” that actually works for everyone.

Check out: What is Second Life?

 

Second Life Player Retention Week 32

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This is a long article. I think it may shape your thinking about Second Life™ and change how you deal with events in SL. So, I hope you read it and consider the concepts. Because while everyone has their ideas about Second Life™, ranging from; what it is to what it will become, what the Lab is thinking, planning, and doing… some basic paradigms have changed and few seem to have noticed.

The Inspiring Orientation – Learn to Fly

One area of thinking about Second Life important to a considerable number of users is what will retain more visitors, converting them to long term users, residents if you will. If you take a simplistic approach to things an answer and/or solution to player retention problems is likely to elude you forever, as humans as a whole are anything but simplistic.

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Looking Ahead Week 32

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Viewer Development

Viewer development process changes a bit. The Lab is changing the release process a touch too. More likely now we will see Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developers releasing betas and development viewers rather than production releases, the later being the stable version intended for general use.

The Lab has gotten much more metric driven about their crash rates. They are putting more effort into holding the lid on the Linden Viewer crash rates. This means code in the Beta and Development viewers are likely to see more testing and changes before new code makes it into the release viewer. That is good thing, but may slow things down.

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