Phoenix Viewer Office Hour

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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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Windows 8 Hands On

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Yesterday I was helping a friend with a new Windows 8 Laptop. Best Buy had an awesome deal for two days, about 70% off. Yay!

The previous laptop died and we recovered the hard disk and put it into an external drive case. All I needed to do was move the files over and get MS Office installed.

Since I had heard the Metro interface could be turned off, I started looking for how to turn it off. Plus there are a number of programs that purport to do it for you. One is supposed to let you switch back and forth. Well… they don’t work and Microsoft has removed the ability to turn off Metro. 

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Improving Second Life Player Retention

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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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#SL News Week 50

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Once again, there is no roll out to the main channel. Bugs in the release candidate channels prevented a promotion.

Blue Steel & Le Tigre

These channels will get the same package as last week, but with fixes for the found bugs.

Magnum

This channel get a slightly different package. It is the same package as is running on Blue Steel with the addition of additional bug fixes, an improved fix for the memory leak fix, and a new feature: longer animations.

Server-Scripting Dec 2012
Server-Scripting Dec 2012

In a short article I mentioned the animation change. Animation files were previously limited to 60kb. That limit has been changed server side to 120kb. The change will allow for 60 second animations that are more complicated.

A viewer change is required before we can take advantage of this server side change. No one is sure when the viewer change will hit Dev or Beta viewers. 

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Another Part of the Steam Puzzle

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We have all heard that SL is coming to Steam. We have some sort of lame reasons for why that is good for Steam and Linden Lab. But, a new thing is coming from Steam. See Erik Kain’s: Why Valve’s ‘Steam Box’ PC-Console Will Be A Game Changer.

It seems Steam is introducing its own game console. O.O

Think about that. If Steam’s console is as much of a game changer as Erik thinks it will be, Second Life will be very well placed to gain users. Sort of makes me wonder if the Lab knew this was coming.

Check out Erik’s article and see what you think.