There is an announcement up that Second Life’s ™ voice system will be offline for maintenance June 24th (Tuesday) from 12AM PDT. There is no ETA for its return.
See the Grid Status page:
[Posted 3:24 AM PDT, 23 June 2014] Our voice provider will be undergoing scheduled maintenance on Tuesday, June 24th beginning at 12:00 AM PDT. Residents may lose voice access during this time. Once the maintenance is complete, some residents may need to relog to return to voice. Please continue to check this blog for updates.
Nyx Linden is going to fold his UG meeting into the Server/Scripting UG. So, the Content & Mesh UG closes with today being its last meeting.
Nyx Linden told us today, “This will be the last regular meeting for this user group. I’m moving on to other projects and haven’t been able to keep up with the details of content creation tasks as well as I used to be able to.”
World of Particles – 2014
Whirly Fizzle and others asked the obvious question, “Are you being reassigned to the new world stuff Nyx?” I found the answer a bit ambiguous when Nyx answered, “I’ll still be in world from time to time, and will be helping Oz whenever any avatar issues come up or with any other pieces where I can assist of course.” So, I find that a bit fuzzy. But, I’ll take that as a yes.
Oz Linden told us, “Topics that otherwise would have come here can be brought to either the simulator UG or one of my open development meetings.” And continued by saying, “I don’t know what the new platform team will be doing to engage with users, or when.” I take this to mean no one knows for sure what they will be doing or when they will be doing it. Things are changing for the Lindens and while Ebbe can make off-hand comments I suspect the Lindens (staff) are still limited in what they can talk about.
Friday’s Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developer’s meeting was long, 2 hours. The last hour is covered in Second Life 2.0 Coming. That is the exciting news, SL 2.0 is coming!
Viewers
As of Friday there were two RC Viewers; SL Share and Snowstorm. SL Share has been in the cue for some time. It is the likely candidate for promotion, probably late in week 26 or in week 27. The Snowstorm RC has a bug that is in the process of being fixed. I expect a new version to make it out to RC in week 26.
The Project Viewers haven’t changed since I last wrote about them.
Jessica of Firestorm says they are integrating ‘Interesting’ and hopefully SL Share features for their next release. The Sunshine AISv3 changes probably won’t make the next release. Experience Tools may make it. But, the team has not had time to examine the changes needed for Experience Tools.
Ebbe Linden spoke at the TPV Meeting 6/20. We learned that Second Life 2.0 is in development and will likely go into Closed NDA Beta late this year. EARTH SHAKING! I’ll relate the comments below in the order as Ebbe did. He did not seem to be at the meeting to announce the news. But, it has gotten out.
The World – by: Nicolas Raymond – Flickr
Ebbe, the Linden Lab CEO was at the Friday TPV Meeting. He says he is enjoying popping into the various meetings. I think in general the users meeting him are happy with him.
Ed Merryman asked about Ebbe’s plans for player retention. See: TPV Meeting. I’ll touch on the things I think are interesting. But, listen to the video/audio for a sense of Ebbe.
Ebbe clarified what he means by making Second Life easier. He definitely does not mean making it dumber. He wants to keep the power and find ways to make things easier for new users to understand and learn.
We have been hearing a bit more about the Advanced Experience Tools Project (AETP). Some have found the region in ADITI where Advanced Experience Tools (AET) test code is running. Friday in the Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developer’s Meeting Oz Linden told us that within about the next month an Experience Tools Beta will be opening up. He also expects it to last several weeks. So, these tools are close to release now.
Server Scripting 2014-25
We were talking about these tools back in 2011 when they were called Linden Realms Advanced Creator Tools. Tiggs Linden was talking to us at the LSL Scripting UG (disbanded now) in early 2012 about what was coming. See: #SL Linden Realm Tools. The Linden Realms (See: Linden Realm Tools – 2011)was a Linden Lab project to reveal to staff the problems in developing games and places in Second Life™.
The first roll out of these tools was in May 2012. See: Greifer Monday. That was a disaster. Since then AET has been in development.
Not much new news came from Thursday’s Beta Server UG.
Fashion for Life 2014
Servers
As we knew the Group Ban feature has spread grid wide on the server side. This means when you ban someone from your group, they are effectively banned. There are currently no known ways around the ban.
We need a Group Ban Project Viewer to ban people. Currently there are some problems with the project viewer. Whirly Fizzle has been testing it and filing JIRA bug reports. Those are being looked at. Serious bugs will be fixed before the viewer advances. Minor bugs will likely be fixed post-release, but may before. It depends on time and the complexity of the fixes.
