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.