General News

Second Life News 2017 w50

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It is the holidays and everyone is busy. Plus we are coming up on the No-Change-Windows. So, while there is some news, things are slow.

Servers

Last week the email update rolled out. So, if you haven’t verified your email address, you have stopped receiving your offline emails of IM’s.

🐼483🐼
🐼483🐼

Main Channel – We get an update to version #17.12.01.511131. All we know about this version is there are internal changes.

If you think about the usual pace of server development at the Lab, which we see when shinnies are in progress, and the months of ‘internal improvements’, where we aren’t seeing much change, you start to think the Lab is slacking off. I doubt that.

Since the community is complaining about content theft, we’ve had a few hints they are dealing with it, and we know the Lab doesn’t talk about security fixes… I assume there is quite a bit of work going on to fix exploits. But, we can’t really know.

RC Channels – No update this week. The RC’s will continue to run last week’s version #17.12.01.511131. Mazidox Linden found a bug in the planned updates and stopped the release. So, next week… probably not. That is the start of a no-change-window.

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Second Life and the CLOUD

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Inara Pey has apparently sat through a dry video of Tara Hernandez’s, Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Lab, presentation at Amazon’s Las Vegas promotion for their services. She has written about it here: SANSAR AND SECOND LIFE IN THE CLOUD: LL SPEAKS AT AWS RE:INVENT. The video is here:

That is a 34-minute video on YouTube. There are some gems in the video that interest Second Life™ people.

I had not realized the first iteration of SL used a graphics engine designed to circumvent the Windows graphics and go directly to hardware. This go-to-hardware was the early game-graphics optimization used by most of the industry. That is long gone. Now OpenGL is the optimization that interfaces with all the various graphics systems in use with SL.

Inara covers the main parts SL’ers will find interesting. But, the video is loaded with tidbits about Second Life and how they are changing away from the problems with ideas for Sansar. So, some seldom talked about SL things are described in the video.

There is about 10+ minutes of tech description on Sansar and how it works. And toward the end some words on how they plan to adapt Second Life for life in the cloud.

Pine Lake – November 2017

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Pine Lake is a post-apocalyptic build in Second Life™.  I’m not that much into doing travel guide stuff for SL. But, occasionally I find a place that is like… Wow! Pine Lake is such a place.

PineLake_001 - Landing Point
PineLake_001 – Landing Point

You can get a kinda lame idea of what the place is like from their Flickr Group. The images there today do not do the build justice.

It is the attention to detail that impresses me. Wow! Just wow. The amount of detail is incredible.

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Planned Second Life Updates

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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. 

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SL Support Offline 11/7

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The Lindens have posted that they will have support offline November 7th starting at 3PM PT. They plan to have it back up by 9AM PT 11/8. It may take longer.

*^-^Meow^-^*
*^-^Meow^-^*

They are changing the infrastructure of the support system. Only ‘open’ tickets from 2017 are being transferred over. There are 1.2 million tickets and 200,000 live chat records from 2016 and before that will eventually transfer over. But, probably not for some time.

If you need ticket information from before 1/1/2017, get it now, before 11/7.