Second Life EEP Coming… coming… soon…

The Second Life Environmental Enhancement Project (aka EEP) has taken way longer than anyone at Linden Lab thought. I suspect the reason for that is the old render engine. It is an ancient (in computer time) engine and the original programmers long ago moved on.

Linden Made Panel v6.4.0

Some problems encountered in the project lead the Lindens to bring in some specialists. They have been working on resolving some complex problems. About a month ago, I’m not following viewer development as closely as I used to and my sense of time frames is shaky, the number of problems fixed exceeded the number being reported. So, we are likely to see EEP release soon, probably in April. I’ve missed my guesses a few times now… Lindens are more optimistic.

I am more optimistic because Whirly Fizzle hasn’t found any EEP bugs recently.

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Second Life News Week #40 & 41

Flickr

There are new changes over at Flickr.

Ebbe

Ebbe Altberg, the Linden Lab CEO, talks about what investors should consider and ignore when investing in virtual reality. See Three Things to Focus On, Three Things to Ignore (Podcast).

Third-Party Dev UG Meeting

There are 4 viewers out. Plus, the main viewer. The Ordered Shout Down RC is looking good. From that I would gather it is the current likely bet for the next promotion. The Maintenance RC is doing OK. The project viewer for EEP has a couple of bugs yet to fix. New employees specializing in graphics now available to work on those. So, hopefully… A Voice RC viewer should be out next week, maybe.

Voodoo Moon
Voodoo Moon

From the Firestorm peeps, the Firestorm release is going fine. No real problems found yet. Adoption is good.

There was a discussion about BoM adoption and use. The opinion seems to be things in the fashion community are still way disorganized.

Blogger Awards

If you are looking for people that blog, vlog, or photograph Second Life then you just hit found the pot at the end of the rainbow, Ballot for the 2019 Bloggie Awards. The ballot is 38 pages of categorized URLs.

Voting is open until Oct 19, 2019. But, you have to vote in every category… tedious… before you can submit any vote.

Also included is ‘best’ at photo-friendly. So, if you are looking for places that provide interesting backgrounds and gorgeous scenery this is a handy list.

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Second Life News Week #37

Destinations Video

Experiences

Many of you will know Experiences have been borked. The Lindens have a fix, sort of… See their SL Blog post on their fix. See Experience Scripts Experiencing Trouble.

The bug is BUG-227526Issue with compiled experiences being lost when a script is copied in-world.

The Shrek Ears Thing

If you used Places Pages in 2017 then you noticed a problem back then. They were suddenly gone. Seems a developer ran a clear & reset script on the live database of Place Pages. Then they found out the database’s backups (plural) were scrambled.

The result was the database could not be restored. That data was gone. So, Place Pages had to be rebuilt by the page owner. It also meant ALL the SL backups were tested to make sure they would work if needed.

It was purely human error. A bummer. But, I bring it up now because from it we learned about Shrek Ears in the Linden offices. You’ve likely seen the movie or at least the trailer so you know what Shrek’s ears look like. But what they mean in Linden circles is unique and SL lore now. The full story is here, “Re-experience the fun of customizing your Place Page!” A Tale of Oops from Ops. Check it out to learn what the Shrek Ears thing is about. Then you’ll understand why some Lindens were recently wearing Shrek Ears… the recent problem with Experience scripts.

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Second Life News Week #36

General News

SL Travel

Ever wonder how the SL travel and places blogs find those awesome places?

It seems the Blogger & Vlogger Network has a list of them. (here) They also have a form one can fill out to add to the list. So, they find these places when people stumble-on or otherwise find them and add them to the list.

Only those who dream learn to fly
Only those who dream learn to fly

The list is titled Photogenic, Rezzable Sims. Rezzable? My first thought was griefers will LOVE this list. However, many of the locations require membership in a group to get rez-rights and a number of those groups have a Join Fee. About 20 of the 37 locations are listed as free. If there is a cost it is referenced in the listing. They also have the region’s maturity rating, PG, Moderate, and Adult. Nine are rated Adult, but not all 9 are hook-up places. And even those that are, look good.

The list apparently has some age. Several of the links landed me at places other than the obvious intended landing point but the correct region. However, a couple of regions were gone or repurposed.

I found Backdrop Cove (Map URL) in the list. Got some pictures. This place is not as crowded as Backdrop City. So, posing and setup was nicer. Also, you can rez stuff without having to join a group. They use a 60-minute return. It is a moderate region and the pose and animation stuff I saw was PG. Donations are appreciated. Please help out.

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Second Life News Week #34

General News

At the Server and Scripting UG meeting, Simon Linden tells us there are several server updates in the pipeline. This means we are likely to see a steady series of updates rolling out.

Oz Linden tells us that soon the server Release Notes will be moving to the new release notes system now used by the viewer’s release notes. Not everyone is happy about that. But, release notes are being moved out of the Wiki.

N552 Family Breakfast
N552 Family Breakfast

The SL Wiki has an update planned. When asked if the SL Wiki was to be phased out, Oz replied, “[2019/08/20 12:07]  Oz Linden: if I proposed killing the wiki, there a[re] Lindens who would show up with pitchforks…rest assured that it is well defended.

One of our background-priority projects that is getting some attention is updating the wiki software, actually … no predictions when that might happen, but Someday™”

So, the wiki is to remain.

There is and has been some discussion about some way of adding script cost… something like Land Impact. The idea is to push people to write more efficient scripts and to wear fewer of them. Rider tells us that is a BIG project and unlikely to happen any time soon. Plus, it is only a popular idea with landowners.

Slink @ Hair Fair – See the announcement here. The hair Slink made available at the fair has an interesting coloring HUD. Lots of coloring control.

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