This will be a rather long post as it’s a review of the year, this is the fifth in a series of annual posts, the other four look at different years… I think you’ll have worked that out already! This post isn’t made any easier by Linden Lab not being as active in their blog as they once were. This was also a very difficult year for me personally which meant I took a large break from regular blogging between April and September, with only sporadic posts appearing, so I’ll have to delve elsewhere for some information for the year, fortunately there are plenty of resources such as Inara Pey, Nalates Urriah, Tateru Nino and New World Notes amongst others, as well of course as Linden Lab’s underused blog, it still has some useful posts. Also a special mention for Tyche Shepherd and her awesome surveying which provides so much useful information.
I’m also doing things a bit differently this year as these posts are getting pretty epic. This is the full post but as it’s pretty TLDR, I’ve also broken the post down into four quarterly posts elsewhere, the information will be the same other than this initial commentary, but it may be easier on the eye to read in smaller chunks. To read the quarterly reviews go here.
2012 brought us viewer improvements, Pathfinding, Advanced Creator Tools, Direct Delivery and a lot of bug fixes by Oz Linden and his team as well as new scripting functions. I’ll miss plenty out in this review, I’ll also include trivial aspects. Some of the issues can be summed up in the following photo:
However there’s a lot more than that to cover, so let’s get this rolling.
January
The year started with the news that the mesh clothing parametric deformer, paid for and funded by Second Life residents, was going Alpha.
Mesh itself got a boost with the news that the 1920’s Berlin sim was embracing mesh.
Direct Delivery, the new funky way of selling items on the SL Marketplace went beta.
Bryn Oh’s art installation of Immersiva, which had been previously subsidised thanks to the generous nature of Dusan Writer, had to close due to financial difficulties.
llSetMemoryLimit a new scripting function to set the upper limit a script can use in terms of memory usage, got rolled out.
The Simple Inventory Project Viewer was launched for testing, this was a project aimed at improving how inventory performs.
Avatar Rendering Cost was replaced by Avatar Draw Weight, with this being a new performance tool to show us how costly our avatars are.
Duran Duran got their very own section on the destination guide, it’s still there today.
February
Linden Lab issued a call to bloggers to submit articles for their blog. This wasn’t exactly well received by many in the blogging community due to exclusivity clauses, amongst other reasons.
Linden Lab acquired the LittleTextPeople game studio as part of their exercise in branching out beyond Second Life.
Bryn Oh’s Immersiva, which had been earmarked to close down in January appeared to have been rescued by an indiegogo crowd funder. Cartoonimals and the International Space Flight museum were also rescued from the brink but there was no such luck for Circle Broom’s Laurel Arts Isle as tier and the economy started to bite.
AngusGraham Ceawlin was part of a free Angus campaign as his avatar couldn’t login without crashing, Izzy Linden came to the rescue… well Izzy posted news of the rescue anyway!
There had been talk of Blender dropping support for Collada, the Mesh import type used in Second Life, but thanks to the work of the likes of Gaia Clary, not only did Collada support stay, Second Life compatibility became a feature of Blender too.
Linden Lab announced changes to the third party viewer policy which raised concerns about innovation with third party viewers, but they seem to be going along just fine.
As part of Direct Delivery, received items went into beta testing. The original idea was that the received items folder would be where all your inventory would arrive, feedback from the community changed this idea.
A hoo-ha arose over Linden Lab’s proposals to remove from view the online status of other users. The proposal was due to suggestions of privacy violations, but with Phoenix removing the feature from their viewer, Linden Lab held back after feedback from the community that the proposed change would break a lot of legitimate content.
March
Whereas Linden Lab’s call for bloggers had received short shrift from some back in February, others were more positive and a blog post from Strawberry Singh appeared on the official blog.
Rodvik Linden (AKA The Head Honcho Mr Humble) announced that last names would not be returning. This was disappointing to many, but apparently the existence of last names had been disappointing to many when they signed up.
Away from Second Life, Kitely announced that you would no longer need a Facebook account to sign up, many of us cheered.
Linden Lab gave us a preview of the advanced experience tools that they had been using in Linden Realms. This included Teleport Agent, temporary attachments and user experience permissions. The road wasn’t exactly smooth but it was most certainly progress.
The all new, all singing, all dancing, Direct Delivery was pencilled in to launch on March 21st. This would be problematic, but that’s no surprise for a newly launched system.
Philip Linden and Second Life’s first ever non Linden resident (also builder of Governor Linden’s mansion) Steller Sunshine, both turned ten this month.
Isablan Neva announced that Lothlorien and Fate Gardens would be closing on March 31st.
Linden Lab announced that a new Amazonian destination would be open to premium members, The Wilderness was unveiled and demonstrated some of the new pathfinding tools.
Tyche Shepherd informed us that class 7 sims were on the rise and particularly in estate sims, indicating Linden Lab were rolling out new hardware. I noted that there had also been a decrease in the number of class 7 Linden owned sims, so some had switched sides but there did appear to be an increase of around 4,900 class 7 sims.
April
The teething problems with Direct Delivery meant that initial migration deadlines for getting rid of magic boxes had to be pushed back, there is still no definite date for migration.
Pathfinding started to get rolled out for testing and I volunteered a sim for the tests. I experimented with some patrolling prim cubes, unfortunately I haven’t got much further!
Fantasy Faire 2012 ran from April 21 – 30th, it was extended by one day, I took a look at a few stores.
Inara Pey reported that Linden Lab had obtained the rights to sublicense Havok. Linden Lab produced a page on the Wiki for this. The result was that TPV’s had to abide by LL’s agreement to obtain the sublicense, which is perfectly fair.
After their call to bloggers earlier in the year, Linden Lab made a more quiet call to specific artists regarding images for their website. Strawberry Singh being one of those asked to produce work for Linden Lab. This created a small ripple of damned if you do or damned if you don’t when there was some criticism of the nature of this call for assistance not being open to all. However the results were widely greeted in a positive light.
May
Fantasy Faire 2012 announced they had raised a very impressive USD$25,080 for Relay For Life.
Nalates Urriah reported that changes to how land impact was calculated were afoot. This was partially intended to reduce the impact of the script penalty on Mesh or inworld prims created with convex hull.
Inara Pey reported that Linden Lab were sponsoring starter homes for Anshe Chung Sims….. this is not something I see as a good idea in any way, shape or form. Seriously, what were they thinking? I can understand giving your bigger customers discounts, that’s normal business practice, but giving them access to your customer base like this is plain wrong.
Tateru Nino informed us that Linden Lab were ending the solution provider program at the end of the month.
Simon Linden brought us news that Region Idling was coming to Second Life. The idea was to reduce resources on empty areas of the grid to give more resources to busier areas.
June
Linden Lab blogged about those new community images on the homepage.
Linden Lab also blogged about a SL9B category for inclusion in the destination guide for venues celebrating Second Life’s ninth birthday.
Podex Exchange announced that they were offering a real pre-loaded Visa Electron card that could be loaded with Linden Dollars and then used outside of Second Life.
A hoo-ha arose over Linden Lab’s Flickr pic of the day posts when Whiskey Monday rather surprisingly found one of her photos used without being informed about it. The end result was Linden Lab creating a new flickr group with new terms and conditions.
A summer fun photo contest was announced, with a top prize of 5,000 Linden Dollars.
Gaia Clary brought us news that Blender 2.64 would include presets for Second Life, to make it easier to make content for use in Second Life.
Second Life’s 9th birthday got into full swing and came complete with a special blog.
Away from Second Life, Cloud Party was making waves but also causing headaches due to needing a Facebook account to utilise the service fully.
Also away from Second Life, Blizzard were getting themselves into a pickle by restricting content for Diablo III for users who made digital purchases of the game. The restrictions were temporary but pretty damn annoying, I killed the Skeleton King umpteen times before they fixed it.
Evidence of the accuracy of Tyche Shepherd’s reports about more class 7 sims was highlighted by Linden Lab’s blog post on Project Shining. This involved projects we’d hear more about later in the year such as Project Sunshine, server side texture baking, object caching and interest lists and utilising a http library. All of these are aimed at improving performance.
July
Nalates Urriah informed us of a new informal user group, the content creation improvement user group. The user group still appears on the wiki, but is not listed under the official user groups. The meetings were chaired by Geenz Spadz, Siddean Munro and Oz Linden. More on some of the aims of this group would come with an August announcement.
AvaCon announced that due to changes in terms and conditions from Linden Lab they had declined to organise the Second Life Community Convention. Fleep Tuque posted a personal opinion on the matter in which she suggested the organisers had been chewed out for not producing an event like Blizzcon. There were similarities to this year’s Blizzcon, that didn’t take place either!
The Linden Endownment For Arts announced that they were going to commence round three of grants. These allow arts themed ventures to use twenty regions that have been donated by Linden Lab for five to six months.
Linden Lab announced that the first set of advanced creator tools had been launched, these were Teleport Agent and Temporary Attachment.
Relay For Life’s themed lap weekend was on Saturday July 14th with a host of participants and entertainers assisting. Overall this year’s relay for life in Second Life raised USD$375,385.
August
Tateru Nino brought us news that CFO Bob Kormin was leaving Linden Lab. Mr Kormin had at one time been temporary CEO, so this was a high profile departure.
Linden Lab brought us news of a new open source project to improve graphics rendering, the project is a collaboration with the people behind the Exodus viewer, results should be seen in 2013 and it looks like being an exciting development.
Linden Lab also told us that Second Life will be expanding to Steam. This has potential but we’re still awaiting the blog post telling us Second Life has expanded to Steam. Changes to the viewer, such as a create account option when you perform a new install suggest this will happen in early 2013.
Inara Pey reported on how third party viewers were starting to introduce pathfinding tools into their viewers, which was another leap forward for the tools.
September
Linden Lab announced changes to the Jira, which were quite frankly a bit cack. New bug reports would only be seen by the reporter, Lindens and select few residents. This was not a good move for users and remains a big annoyance for me.
Meanwhile in the forums, Lorca Linden had a big pathfinding update, informing us that pathfinding tools should be in the main viewer by the end of September.
Also in the forums, Commerce Team Linden announced that the migration date for magic boxes had been postponed indefinitely. Direct Delivery was still encountering some technical difficulties for some.
The Seanchai public library were continuing their excellent work this month with readings on Sherlock Holmes, New stories of Alice in Wonderland and getting into the spirit of talk like a pirate day. They were also taking their reading to other sims such as Raglan Shire, Magicland and Fruit Islands.
The HP Lovecraft community in Second Life opened a festival running from September 22nd – 30th to celebrate his works.
Hamlet Au over at New World Notes was reporting how Johnny Cash’s childhood home had been recreated by Arkansas State University in Second Life.
October
Away from Second Life, Kitely announced that were now offering unmetered regions. Prior to this Kitely had charged for metered usage… I think maybe you could have worked that out yourselves!
Linden Lab emailed those who had signed up for their affiliate program to inform them it was ending on October 16th.
Merchants were calling for a meeting with Lindens regarding concerns. This would lead to further issues later in the year as Merchants struggled to be heard.
Tyche Shepherd’s weekly survey on the size of the main grid revealed that private regions were down 9.9% for the year to date, this would get worse before the end of the year.
Linden Lab reported performance improvements, informing us that there had been a 7% improvement in teleport performance in peak concurrency hours and an 86% reduction in group query times. Good stats.
The Communications Hub User Interface Project Viewer was unleashed as Linden Lab worked to improve communications in Second Life. At this point I pondered whether these recent blog posts indicated that Linden Lab were going to continue to make better use of their blog, unfortunately they didn’t.
Linden Lab continued to work on improvements as Oskar Linden posted in the forums that the snack release channel being used to test large group fixes.
Copyright infringement reared its head as claims were made that CBS were clamping down on infringing Star Trek related content in Second Life.
Buzzfeed carried an article as part of a tech confessional from a former Linden who talked about walking in on users having (virtual) sex, being a Second Life celebrity, and why it was such an inspiring job, oh and furies!
November
Oskar Linden confirmed that speculation about his departure was unfortunately true. This was greeted with disappointment in many quarters.
The Third Science Fiction Faire opened.
A new Interactive game sim appeared in the shape and form of The Garden. Grace McDunnough, Trav Rexen and Salome Strangelove were the brains and beauty behind it.
Linden Lab launched a contest for proposing new marketplace categories. They also launched a 50% discount for new premium sign ups on the quarterly plan.
Unhinged – A Festival for Eku’s head was launched. This was a month long festival to help pay for surgery for Eku and was promoted by Nephilaine Protagonist. The event was a roaring success with Eku being able to pay for the surgery with the help of this fundraiser.
A boost for Machinima arrived this month in the shape and form of The Machnima Expo. Sponsors included iPi Soft, Unity3, 3DConnexion, Muvizu, Reallusion, Moviestorm, Open This End and AViewTV.
Merchant frustrations were starting to boil over and this was exemplified by a petition asking Linden Lab to address the concerns of merchants.
Linden Lab were getting positive press for their other products, with TechCrunch running an article looking at them. Creatoverse and Patterns have both been launched but we’re still waiting for Dio and the very interesting looking Versu, which is a result of the purchase earlier in the year of LittleTextPeople.
I noticed that the graphics subsystem in the beta viewer seemed to have been improved, although I was confused as to why my graphics settings were ultra. This was more evidence of performance improvements this year.
New World Notes readers voted Inara Pey’s blog as their favourite Second Life related blog.
I discovered the marvellous machinima of Flufee!
The Register listed Second Life in a list of ten technology fails, this came as a surprise to those of us still using Second Life! Failure is way off the mark for Second Life.
Nalates Urriah blogged about issues surrounding the beta grid. We’re still awaiting Linden Lab’s decisions on how to best go about addressing the issues.
Away from Second Life, the citizens of Paragon City found themselves left without heroes (or villains) as MMO City Of Heroes closed down.
December
The usefulness of third party viewers was exemplified by the release of Firestorm (4.3.1.31155) , this included some funky photo tools.
Darrius Gothly launched virtual landmarks, a product inspired by Toysoldier Thor. The idea is basically that if your store moves, these virtual landmarks will follow you.
The Christmas Expo opened and contained many delights, including a new breedables game in the shape and form of Dwarfins!
The usefulness of an open Jira was exemplified by the feedback and bugs reported on the Jira for the CHUI project viewer resulting in Linden Lab putting a survey regarding the viewer on hold. Unlike the main Jira, the CHUI Jira section is open to all, there’s a moral in this story.
Linden Lab started to improve resources on the Wiki with Jeremy Linden embarking on putting together a good building practices section.
Away from Second Life, Cloud Party unleashed a Marketplace with cashing out available for US residents. That link also includes information about the royalties system merchants can utilise, which is a nice idea. Alas Cloud Party still required a Facebook account to fully utilise, many of us booed and hissed.
Annoyed merchants exemplified a lack of a merchants user group by turning up at Nyx Linden’s mesh user group meeting to voice their discontent. This was unfair on Nyx and the regular participants in the meeting but the involved merchants felt they had no choice, let’s hope this doesn’t happen again.
Education in Second Life appeared to be alive and well as Indiana University North West carried a story that they were utilising Second Life.
The Phoenix team announced they were ending development of the old Phoenix viewer, this came in the light of the onset of project sunshine, server side baking. This will build as an issue in the next couple of months as the code gets rolled out, but most folk should be fine if they change to a viewer that is still being developed.
Linden Lab continued to demonstrate steps to improve the Second Life experience by inviting residents to test threaded region crossings. This is an ongoing project.
Linden Lab announced proposals for new categories on the marketplace. There’s still time to have your say on this, with the survey open until January 10th.
The CHUI project viewer got another update.
Away from Second Life, Cloud Party, which had earlier this month announced improvements announced that you no longer need a Facebook account to use the service fully, however you will need to link a credit card. However, this is a good improvement in the options stakes.
Private regions and mainland had contrasting fortunes during the year, with Tyche Shepherd informing us that private regions losses for the year were now 12%. However on the other hand, Tyche’s mainland census revealed that there was only a small drop in land ownership on mainland during the last quarter. Mainland appears to be holding up well, although Abandoned Land is at a record high, Linden home regions still enjoy 97% occupancy.
Further Reading
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