Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
At the Third Party Developers’ meeting Ed Merry man said that the Firestorm Development Team is planning to the next version of Firestorm in 10 days (from Friday’s TPD meeting)… May 3rd.
This release is about 6 months after the last release. The normal release schedule is a new version every 3 months. The way things have worked out, that hasn’t been possible for the Firestorm Team.
In the Third Party Developers’ meeting Oz Linden mentioned that someone spotted a maintenance version viewer without the ability to send snapshots via email from Second Life. This omission of the feature Snapshot-to-Email from this RC version is deliberate. It will eventually be removed from all Linden and Third Party Viewers.
The way the system works, the images are sent TO whoever with the FROM address of the user-sender, at least when the Lab knows the sender’s address. But, the email is being sent from a Second Life server, so they are spoofing the FROM address. This ‘spoofing’ is a common practice of spammers and black-hat crackers. So, the SL servers are getting blocked by numerous ISP’s automated systems as spammers. That is affecting other email services the Lab uses to communicate with users.
At Friday’s Third Party Developers meeting Oz Linden was asking from some specific help and changes in behavior from the Third Party Developers. I’ll get into the what and why with this post.
The Lab is making new ways of doing things and working to make all the Second Life™ system’s processes more robust, which I take to also mean more efficient and reliable. One way of accomplishing that is changing more and more processes to use HTTP and CDN (Content Delivery Network).
The fate of the Second Life Linux version viewer is now up to the Linux community of Second Life. In the Third Party Devlopers’ meeting Oz Linden spoke about the Lab’s Linux support for the near term future. Basically the Lab is going to provide less Linux support.
There are two reasons; one is the Lab’s limited resources and second the new projects they will be starting in the next months or so, which I take to mean late May or early June.
Oz Linden in the Third Party Developers’ meeting mentioned that the Tools Update Viewer made it to main viewer status. That means the Lab is now fully committed to building viewers with VS2013.
Since the Tools viewer got promoted the main viewer is less crashy then previous versions 2% less. That is a significant improvement. While 2% may sound like a small number, it is a significant improvement.
At this weeks Third Party Developers’ (TPD) UG meeting Brooke Linden provided an update on Viewer Managed Marketplace (VMM).
The VMM beta has launched on the main grid. They are limiting access to the beta for now. Also, VMM is currently only in English. In a couple of weeks the localization (multi-language support) will be in place. You can get more information about VMM in the wiki’s VMM FAQ. Additional information is in the Knowledge Base: VMM. And there is technical information on the VMM API here.