I was having a chat at some ungodly hour of Sunday night with Delicia Whipsnaps Inara Pey about Linden Lab’s lack of shouting from the rooftops about what they’re doing. Examples that sprang to mind were the new privacy controls on parcels that allow you to make yourself invisible to outsiders and outsiders invisible to yourself, numerous bug fixes, Mesh allowing you to halve the number of prims you’re using in terms of prim equivalency (or land impact as it will soon be known) when you link them, 64 x 64 meter prims and how Vanderbilt University School of Nursing have been using Second Life as a training faciltity which is a really good use case for Second Life and one Linden Lab should be highlighting.
Linden Lab are getting on with a lot of things behind the scenes, a cursory glance at the Server deployment forum shows this week’s release includes:
- Adding additional metric collection information
- LSL enhancements to catch and prevent shape changes that would cause a return
- Support for calculating Resource Weights and Land Impact for all objects
- Several crash fixes
- Region/parcel crossing fixes
- Miscellaneous fixes
- llCastRay() enabled.
I don’t know what llCastRay() does, even after reading the description but I do know people have been asking for it for quite a while, so for those who do know what it does, this is quite an exciting development, the problem is that it’s quietly announced. This happened with llRegionSayTo, after it was released people were asking when it was going to be implemented because it was quietly announced.
This week’s main channel deploy includes bug fixes and new features, precisely the things people claim Linden Lab don’t do and yet, Linden Lab seem to be a bit shy with coming forward about it. Obviously not everyone wants to know about all the fixes, or cares about them, but if Linden Lab lead the discussion by making more information clearly available, then those who are interested can discuss it and they don’t just discuss this in blogs, contrary to popular belief, people do discuss matters inworld.
Recently I was discussing with my chief Elf, who is a Phoenix viewer user, that we had new build tools to build larger prims, “Megaprims you mean, they’ve been around for ages” noooo! The new native large prims, I had to pass her one and let her rez it whilst she was logged in with Phoenix before she could get her head around what I was saying, which probably says a lot about how I explain things but that’s not the point!
There is an issue of course with how Linden Lab present discussions, the Blog, which to me has lost oomph, is actually very active lately. I feel it has lost oomph because when I login, it’s not in my face, if there’s too much information there then people will pass it by, if there’s not enough information though, people also pass it by. Directing people to the right places is difficult, but those monthly updates don’t carry enough weight, maybe they could do columns, where for example Oskar could have one where he just tells us what’s happening on the server front, they could even turn off comments and just present it in a magazine style and then let the users discuss the issues on the forums, blogs and inworld, but at least then Linden Lab would be going some way towards leading the conversation.
Linden Lab staff have always beavered away fixing and improving things, sometimes they make decisions we don’t agree with, and right now poor Brooke and the marketplace team seem to be taking a fair amount of flak as they try and deliver direct delivery, a concept I’m not a fan of at this stage but we’ll see what happens, however where on the main blog do we even see talk of the direct delivery project or how people get involved with the vendor api I’ve seen mentioned fleetingly?
I feel Linden Lab could do a bit more to get the conversation going, some developments will delight people whereas some will scare the living daylights out of people but that’s par for the course and the more Linden Lab talk, the more discussion we will see elsewhere, be it tweets, Facebook, Google + which has opened its doors to all and sundry (except pseudonymous users and those with funny real names), blogs, forums or wherever, idle chat gains attention.
How about an inworld kiosk that gives you a version of the latest news inworld that people could put on their sims? That might have potential, I’ve seen fashion magazines that do that.
Maybe Linden Lab are scarred from how some of the old blog posts used to pan out in the comments, however like I said, they could turn off comments and just let us all get on with it if they choose, at least spread the word further and wider by leading the conversation, it’s not easy, but more could be done.