Second Life TOS Update 2013-42

Update: See Strawberry’s Monday Mime.

Last Saturday the United Content Creators of Second Life™ (UCCSL) sponsored a meeting to discuss the Terms of Service (ToS) changes made in August. They put together a panel of attorneys to answer questions. I think it was the Second Life™ Bar Association that provided RL attorneys to form an answer panel. I was able to attend only part of the meeting, but there are audio recordings and Machinima of the entire 3-hour meeting.

A full three-hour audio recording was captured by Toysoldier Thor. You can listen to it from a link on Toy’s blog: Recap & Audio – Inworld Legal Panel Talk on LL TOS. Toy’s opinion is that people should listen to the audio and make up their own minds about opinions provided by the UCCSL panel. I’ll go a bit further and add some opinion.

Inara has a summary of the meeting up. See: ToS changes: Legal panel discussion – audio recordings and notes. She has images of the slides used in the meeting. Plus lots of time marks in the summary. 

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Second Life News 2013-42

Viewer Status

Second Life™ Viewer 3.6.8 (282367) Oct 14 is a hot fix release for an ATI driver incompatibility problem. The Release Candidates will be getting updated with this change too.

Interest List

Richard Linden says the project is coming to an end and viewer side source code is out. TPV Dev’s are looking at it. The changes have NOT been through QA and are NOT ready for release. But, at least TPV Dev’s can see what they will need to handle. More eyes mean more bugs found and more brains thinking mean more solutions and improvements.

While building the coming Interest List release the Lindens were focused on things not rendering but still having a presence in the physics engine. Sever changes at this point are significant. The viewer is a preliminary version without significant change.

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Second Life Mesh Eye Lashes

I like lashes. I have a bunch. But, prim lashes can be a pain to get adjusted. Mesh lashes can solve some of that problem. They can be more easily shaped to the avatar eye and nicely curved.

The beautiful Juicybomb has an article on lashes. Check it out: Know your Mesh Lashes.

The current main SL Viewer 3.6.7 (281793) Sep 30 2013 has the transparency problems Juicy mentions. That really sucks.

The fun part of these lashes is the tintable set and the ability to make them glow.

 Update: Strawberry likes these too. See: My Favorite Mesh Eyelashes.

Second Life News 2013-41

This week there was no roll to the main server channel. That means none of the RC’s passed testing.

The RC’s

All three RC channels are going to run the same package as last week. There are, of course, fixes that were applied to the package. We will see those rollout Wednesday to the RC channels.

The package contains: a fix for the group notice delivery issue, introduces a missing JSON operation to LSL, and includes preparatory work for an upcoming viewer with scene loading (interest list) improvements.

The only change from last week’s version is addressing an issue with the llGetCameraRot() LSL function.

I doubt that llGetCameraRot() is the reason that the package was not advanced to the main channel. But, that is all I’ve heard.

UPDATE: May be the camera thing is enough to have held things up. See: Possible camera position problem, Magnum vs Release.

Another Second Life ToS Victum

Ziki Questi just blogged about another artist stopping work in Second Life™. This artist is Johnas Merlin. In the middle of an LEA project (Linden Endowment for the Arts) Johnas has stopped work. The reason given is the textures Johnas was planning on using can no longer be used in Second Life. So, this piece of art is going to remain unfinished.

You can see Ziki’s article here: Quantum Reflections, Victim of the ToS.

More ToS Information

Hamlet Au ran a poll on New World Notes asking if creative types had stopped creating and uploading to second life. Of the 266 poll participants 121 answered they have. There were 32 others that selected the other option. That gives us a total of 153 or about 57% that stopped uploading content to Second Life™.

You can see the poll result here: Linden Lab ToS Survey Results: Majority of Respondents Have Stopped Created/Selling Second Life Content.

As family points out, this TOS change has gone far beyond just drama. We are seeing a change in resident behavior. I have to wonder if this is starting to show up in the stats Linden Lab tracks. This would be a good question for people to be asking of the user group meetings.