#SL News 2 Week 51

We did get a roll to the main channel this morning. The Lab was running similar packages in all three Release Candidate channels. Blue Steel and Le Tigre had the week 49 package with additional fixes running. Magnum had the same pages with additional fixes. The Magnum package rolled to the main grid. So, we got all the fixes in the RC channels.

Content-Mesh Meeting
Content-Mesh Meeting

Sudden Massive Lag

This has been a perplexing problem for weeks. We have: BUG-355Increased Instant Sim Lag & Avi Crashes During Major Events – sim network issue. A serious problem is the Lindens have not been able to reproduce the problem. They can see it. But, they cannot trigger it. That makes it very hard to fix.

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#SL News Week 51

Today I made it to the Open Source meeting, something I seldom do as it is too early for me, 7:00 AM. A few interesting things came up.

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Phoenix Viewer

Oz was asking how the community was talking the ending of Phoenix support and the end of the Phoenix Viewer’s useful life. From my perspective, it has been surprisingly quite.

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Beyond the Phoenix Viewer

Saturday Jessica Lyon, representing the Firestorm development team and support groups, spoke at the first Phoenix Hour since March 2012. This meeting was to announce the coming end of support for the Phoenix Viewer. That announcement could have been a sentence on the blog. So, why have a Phoenix Hour meeting to make the announcement?

Nature

Part of human nature is people having personality and beliefs. The nature of Jessica, the leader of the development team, is such that she is a volunteer. That says something, good I think, about Jessica. So, Jessica was doing her best to explain why they have chosen to end support for the Phoenix Viewer.

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Phoenix Viewer Support Ending

Today the Firestorm-Phoenix  team held and office hour meeting. The primary announcement was that the team will stop providing support for the Phoenix Viewer on December 31, 2012. I suppose about midnight.

Most of the rest of the meeting was about explaining why. I’ll get to the reasons why in another post. I’ll stick to what is going to be happening here.

The Phoenix Viewer will be available for down for some time. In 2013 the download links for Phoenix will be removed from the main site. One can still find them in the PhoenixWiki. The actual date has not been decided.

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Phoenix Viewer Office Hour

The Phoenix Team is going to hold an Office Hour… an open meeting in-world and streamed to the web. The meeting in-world will be at the team’s region: Phoenix Firestorm Support. This link lands you at the door to the meeting hall. You can probably figure out that single landing point is going to be stacking avatars like pancakes the day of the meeting. So, here is an alternate: PhFsSupport. It is about 20m east of the official landing point. Turn 180 and you’ll see the building.

Phoenix Meeting Notice
Phoenix Meeting Notice

The meeting will be Saturday at 1:30 PM SLT or PST… US West Coast time. The team is advising you get there 30 minutes early… Think about this. One region, one landing point, one entrance to the building… attending is going to be a problem.

The meeting will be streamed to the web: Phoenix Stream.

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Improving Second Life Player Retention

Penny Patton writes thoughtful articles on various aspects of Second Life™. Penny is the one that got me motivated to make a better and more proportional and to scale avatar and she has inspired me to write a few articles. She is currently writing about some of the challenges in Second Life retaining users.

Penny Patton's Latest
Penny Patton’s Latest

The first article is: A Critical Look at Second Life – Part 1 “Presentation”, which I’ll summarize. Read her article to get the full sense of her thoughts.

Player Retention

Penny questions something I seldom think about, why do people leave Second Life? I tend to look for what keeps people in SL. The difference is in whether one looks for things to do more of or things to do less of to keep people interested. Looking at both is a good thing. Whatever, Penny decided to take a ‘comprehensive’ look at the reasons people leave.

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