2012 Reviewed – The Full Monty

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:

Protest Gnomes

However there’s a lot more than that to cover, so let’s get this rolling.

Continue reading “2012 Reviewed – The Full Monty”

2012 Reviewed – October To December

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!

Continue reading “2012 Reviewed – October To December”

2012 Reviewed – July To September

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.

Continue reading “2012 Reviewed – July To September”

2012 Reviewed – April To June

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!

Image For Fantasy Faire 2012 Should Be Here
Fantasy Faire 2012

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.

Continue reading “2012 Reviewed – April To June”

2012 Reviewed – January To March

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.

Continue reading “2012 Reviewed – January To March”

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