In Second Life we have recently had a round of problems with our inventories not loading correctly. You’ll see a number of articles here about solving those problems and restoring lost items. Much of the blame for lost items has been laid at the feet of various Third Party Viewers (TPV). But, tomorrow Linden Lab will be doing database maintenance. See: Inventory Database Maintenance Wed, Aug 25th at 5:00am PDT
It will be interesting to see if there is a reduction in the number of lost inventory items post maintenance.
Paisley Beebe did an interview on Treet.TV (I can’t find a video link – Audio Linkpage down to the Update! Audio Recording of tonights Paisely Beebe show) with Jessica Lyon and Arabella Steadham, members of the Emerald Dev Team, Sunday night 2010-08-22 about 7:30 PM SLT.
Prior to the Emerald interview Keiko Takamura was interviewed and A couple of comments were made about Emerald-Gate. Apparently things got complicated in SL and Paisley had to move the interviews to a secret location. Keiko was surprised at the passion of people in regard to Emerald, sort of an, OMG, they have pitchforks! — If you have not heard Keiko’s music, check it out.
Treet.tv Emerald Interview
Starting out we learn Arabella Steadham, the communication manager for Emerald, resigned Saturday (Friday?) Night… It seems she resigned because she was asked to lie. She could no longer work in the environment. (It is hard to say exact times things happened because of Arabella being on the other side of the Date Line from Linden Lab). After resigning and during an emotional period she met with Fractured and others of the Emerald team. They decided they could save Emerald. But, Fractured would have to give up control. They asked him to resign and turn over control. It took Fractured a bit of time but he agreed and the servers were turned over to Arabella and Fractured posted his resignation.
Today there is a new post about the Emerald Scandal on the Modular blog. Fractured Crystal apologizes and resigns from the Emerald Team. This is no small step. Whether it will be enough to save the viewer and restore people’s trust in the development team, time will tell. See: [Emerald] Off with his head
Whatever the case, it is a huge step.
The SLUniverse forum has been abuzz with people discussing the Emerald scandal and to some extent so has the SL blogrum. In both those discussions it is obvious people have lost trust in the Emerald Viewer and are abandoning it.
The Emerald team uses the hits on the login page to measure Emerald Viewer usage. It would be interesting to see the viewer usage stats leading up to Fractured’s resignation. Even without them I’m sure there will be speculation about what actually moved Fractured.
KirstenLee says this version of the viewer has many big changes in user interface, user interface useability, performance improvements, memory leak fixes, group chat fixes, and more.
The multi-layer clothes feature is now hard coded in… This is the feature that allows one to wear like 5 shirts layers. Torley has a video tutorial on this new feature. Basically the last layer added goes on top. Any layer can be made the top layer by removing it and adding it back.
More after I get to use it this weekend… I’ve got whatever it is that is going around… So, I’m not getting much done.
On July 13 a post appeared on the Emerald Modular blog. Concerning recent activities.. Sounded like a bit of drama. Not uncommon in connection with the Emerald Viewer.
Now another post appears. Recent News, August 14. Both of these seem like they are part of the ongoing drama we see related to virtual world and online communities. But then we start seeing other blogs and forums picking up the story and expanding on it. So, what is the story and who do we believe?
Trust to Rust?
Another problem is that some of the detractors of Emerald are lose wing nuts. That has to a great degree numbed the community to complaints about the Emerald viewer and dev team. This latest scandal is more fact based than drama based. There seems to be a real problem.
