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.