Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Yesterday a new post appeared on the Second Life™ Blog: New Merchant Requirement. The Lab is making Payment Information a requirement to sell on the Market Place (MP).
Making this requirement should stop some of the churn of accounts made by griefers and copyboters.
This will be hard on some international users of SL. Getting verified and having a means to move funds in and out of SL is easy for those of us in the USA. It’s more difficult in many countries.
Check it out:
[youtube C6raOfNYeEA]
And then this:
We’re close to the goal. Over US$1,000,000 with 3 days to go. $100,000 more to fund. We may see it fund tonight.
This week there is no roll to the main channel. Monday was a US holiday, which would normally through of this week’s rollouts. Since there is no rollout to the main channel, we should see the typical Wednesday rollout for the RC channels.
Blue Steel and Le Tigre will have the Experience Tools preparatory package running.
Magnum will have a maintenance release with bug fixes. One fix is: “Sim crossing on vehicle fails when parcel at opposite sim border is full.” (BUG-4152). Another is a case where a viewer with a high draw distance would not connect to distant regions which are within the draw distance area.
Obduction is the Cyan Worlds’ single player game currently in the Kickstarter process.
The latest update on Kickstarter tells us that Cyan plans to place the game on Steam. If your supporting this project or just curious, jump over to steam and have look. If supporting the game, please take time to login or sign up and rate the project. It will help get work out.
With 6 days left to funding, the project has funded US$869,605 of the $1,100,000 target, 79% of the target in 78% of the allotted time. It looks like it will fund, but it looks to be close. So, help out where you can; become a supporter and pledge funds, tell your friends, and help out at Steam’s Greenlight site.
Thursday morning (11/7) starting about 7 AM PDT Second Life™ will sort of be down. The Lindens will be doing some database maintenance. They will have the following impacts:
During this period, a number of Second Life services will be impacted. Some users may be logged off and may be temporarily unable to log in for a brief period. The maintenance may also disrupt transactions, logins, and account registration. The land store and land auctions may also become unavailable during this time.
Of course, it is unwise to rez no-copy items, attempt financial transactions, or modifying Market Place entries. Trying to build or script in SL will likely be flakey too.
You can see the post here: Expected Downtime Thursday, November 7. They say they will update the post when the maintenance is complete.
I’m distracted with real life projects. But, the main channel is getting a rollout from the RC channels today (Tuesday). It is a maintenance package with some bug/server crash fixes. There is not much in the way of details.
All three RC channels will get the same package Wednesday. This package is preparatory changes to the Second Life™ infrastructure to allow eventual rollout of the Advanced Experience Tools.
So, what is changing? No one is saying. We can assume most of the change is going to have to do with the permissions system. If that suspicion is correct, we can assume that this will be a very slow well tested rollout.
Consider. Linden Realms was news in March 2012. The first rollout of Advanced Experience Tools (AET) resulted in Griefer Monday (June 2012). The exploit was about a hole in permissions, which is why I thin the permissions system is being changed. After that fiasco the Lindens said the project was being re-thought and it disappeared from view. Now we only hear bits and pieces about it, like preparatory infrastructure changes’.
The AET project is approaching its second birthday.
Also, one has to wonder how the Lab is going to handle permissions to denote what items in SL and the Market Place can be sold on Desura…