Yeah, this is an old argument. I’m not going to answer the question. I have my opinion. But, I did see the question come up again in the SL Forum (reference). I thought one of the better answers was quite creative and insightful and funny.
Second Life
Things about SL
Second Life’s Not So New News
Yesterday Linden Lab posted in their blog about new improvements coming to Second Life. If you follow my blog, Ciarans’s or Inara’s, you already know most of what they wrote about.
Project Valhalla is the project viewer where they are changing from Webkit to Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). I’ve been writing about this change since 4/2014 (Reference – speculation). They Lab started talking publicly about the coming viewer change in early 2015.
Rendering Complexity / Quick Graphics – I’ve been writing about doing something like The Avatar Render Complexity feature since late 2014. I filed a feature request in December 2014 (BUG-7928). I doubt mine is the reason we got the feature. I suspect the reason for getting the feature was mostly discussion in Oz Linden’s Monday morning Open Source meeting. Whatever the case, it is close to being added to the main SL viewer.
Notifications – This viewer feature is a change in how we will receive notifications. This feature came on the radar in July 2015.
Mesh Importer – This improvement has been in discussion for a couple of months and made it to the main viewer a couple of months ago.
Inventory Robustness – It is hard to say when work on this change started. The Lab has worked on and been adding inventory improvements for a long time. This particular problem of losing no-copy-items that failed to rez is more recent.
If you follow the Server Deploys notices in the SL Forum, you probably had not have realized this feature rolled out.
HTTP Project – this is actually a much larger project than they convey in their post. It has been on going for a couple of years and appears will be continuing for some time. Parts get added as they are completed.
SecondLife.com – The SL Web Site is changing. They are removing Flash and if any QuickTime was used then likely that too. They are moving up to HTML5. CEF is how HTML5 handling is added to the viewer. These changes sort of go together. Parts of the web site are used by the SL Viewer, i.e., search, profiles, etc.
Since the viewer will real soon now be able to handle HTML5 via CEF it makes since for the web site to abandon Flash.
Not So New
Between Inara, Ciaran, and myself there are a few thousand SL Users that keep up on SL Development news. That is out of several hundred thousand monthly users. The SL Blog doesn’t show how many people have read a post. The forum does. It is rare any post in the forum gets a thousand readers. But, as the blog articles are in the splash screen of the SL Viewer, more people may read the blog.
So, while the news may be old to you, for most SL users their post is news.
Fabulously Free Staying Open
Oh YAY! Today I see that Fabulously Free is going to stay open. See: It’s Not Over! They changed their mind. Things are going to change, but they will stay around.
(Second Life’s Fabulously Free Closing)
Second Life Viewers Week 43
This week there are two updates from the Lab:
RC Second Life Notifications Viewer version 3.8.6.305981 – This is the one with changes in how notices are handled. Earlier I was wondering if the server change running on the RC Channels was related. No hard information, just speculation that there is probably a connection.
Second Life Servers Week 43
This week there has been no roll to the main channel. The same software will run as last week.
This week (Wednesday) there will be a roll out to the RC channels. All three channels will get the same package: Maintenance.
This package is said to have some bug fixes and to specifically fix: BUG-8222 – HI, Problems to open pictures in Group notifications ! this bug looks to be related to: SVC-7129 – Attachments to group notices malfunction after some time. This is an old problem we have lived with for years (March 2010).
Second Life: Business & Drama
Second Life™ is so much like real life. All the same problems, challenges, and drama present in RL are seen in SL too. Now we have the Maitreya Monopoly… First the drama story then the tech that makes this all so silly.
It seems blogger Sophee Mojo is unhappy with Maitreya or more accurately Onyx LeShelle the creator of Maitreya. The unhappiness has its root in the limited selection of clothes currently available for the Maitreya Mesh body or more accurately the limited set of designers. Sophee points to the developer’s kit for Maitreya that lacks ‘weighting’ information as a deliberate move on Maitreya’s part to control the clothes market. So, the unhappiness is expressed as complaints and accusations.