Linden Lab – Page 193

January 13, 2012

What Is Live Chat For?

This evening I arrived home from work and after indulging in a traditional Friday evening meal of Fish and Chips opened my email to find an an offline IM regarding a sim being offline. Logged in and sure enough the sim was offline. Therefore I decided to contact concierge live chat, for the first time in quite a while.

After being pointed to the SL Grid Status page that indicated that hardware maintenance was in progress, I was eventually told to file a ticket, the live chat operator informing me that all offline region reports should be submitted via a support ticket and that this was pointed out in a previous blog post. I couldn’t recall reading about this in a blog post, but then again I rarely notice the blog these days. However I think I’ve found the blog post in question, it’s in the SL Grid Status report linked from the original SL Grid Status report I was pointed to:

“Ongoing Issue with Offline Regions

[POSTED 10:28AM PST, 12 November 2011] We are aware of a problem that causes regions to go offline more frequently than normal. Our developers were alerted to the issue over the weekend and continue to work around the clock towards a solution. We understand how disruptive this is to your inworld experience. If your region is offline, please go to your support portal and submit a case using the following types: “Land & Region” > “Report an Offline Region”. This queue is being closely monitored to ensure the fastest turnaround possible. We will post an update as soon as we have more information on resolution.”

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January 12, 2012January 12, 2012

Blender To Drop Support For COLLADA? No Need To Panic

The Mesh Forum has a post from Masami Kuramoto pointing to a mailing list discussion, which suggests that Blender, the hugely popular open source 3D creation tool, may soon drop support for COLLADA in release builds, if you’re unsure what any of this means, COLLADA is the format that users export their creations to from within Blender to make it Second Life compatible in terms of Mesh. The opening to the discussion reads:

“Hi,

As everybody noticed current collada importer/exporter is very buggy which seems to make this format almost useless in Blender. And what’s much worse — we don’t actually have developer who maintains this area.

We discussed this already with Campbell and found that OpenCollada itself isn’t actually maintaning — there are only few commits in several months. Ofcourse it doesn’t mean this library is useless and all bug from our tracker is related on that issues, but still.. Maybe the time have come to re-think this importer/exporter (investigate if it’s possible to fix issues in clear way, check if design is good enough — not sure, haven’t touched this code deep myself)?

Here’s our proposal: – Move all collada-related issues into it’s own tracker. Like it was done with BGE, it might help finding volunteer to fix them. Also, people will see that it’s not actually core stuff and that it’s community-supported. – Disable collada in release builds. It’s not useable and only seems to be making artists disappointed.

More optimistic targets would be find volunteer to pick up this stuff who will make it usable (maybe rewritting this stuff from scratch..)

— With best regards, Sergey Sharybin”

This initially looks like a massive blow to Second Life’s Mesh implementation, but in reality it isn’t.

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January 10, 2012January 10, 2012

Direct Delivery Goes Beta!

Errr …. Errr what can I say! CommerceTeam Linden must have been hitting me with psychic rays and realised I was blogging about the lack of information about Direct Delivery! Around the time I was proof reading my blog post, the mysterious figure of CommerceTeam Linden posted in the merchants forum that Direct Delivery is going beta! I’ve now decided that CommerceTeam Linden wears a cape, with a hood … and possibly has red eyes. I did contemplate editing my previous post, but I’ve decided that some of the points are still valid and it will stay!

Anyway, on with the information, thank goodness there’s information. First of all, check out the instructions page. Read this carefully, especially if you’re a merchant as you’ll need to download the special project viewer if you want to test listing items.

Merchants should also be aware that there’s a special beta version of the marketplace that you’ll need to login to, which you can find here. This was definitely closed earlier this evening, I swear!

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January 10, 2012

Just What On Earth Is Happening With Direct Delivery?

Direct Delivery, the much anticipated new feature from the marketplace, is still in development. Well I say much anticipated, it has been that long since there’s been any real public announcements about it that many people have probably forgotten about it. However that brings us back to Linden Lab and communication.

Direct Delivery, for those whom aren’t familiar with it, is a feature that will remove the need to have a magic box inworld to sell items on the Second Life Marketplace. Instead of having a magic box, merchants will be able to store items in a special system folder in their inventory and customers will receive items in a special system folder in their inventory.

There will be some politics about this, namely that it further undermines the inworld land market, but Linden Lab seem to love the Marketplace, despite the glaring potential for it to undermine their own land product. However that’s a different discussion for a different day.

Now there is some information about Direct Delivery, on the Wiki there’s an FAQ. The FAQ informs us that Direct Delivery will be going beta on Aditi (Beta Grid) for all merchants in December … did this actually happen?

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January 10, 2012January 10, 2012

2012 Is The Year For Linden Lab To Shout To The Top

The year generally doesn’t start well, January, sick and tired you’ve been hanging on me and then we head into February, which is like a month of bloody Tuesdays. Then finally we hit March and find ourselves heading towards full technicolour at long last.

However Second Life isn’t like that, it’s not cold in Second Life, which is just as well as I’ve just concluded a land deal with a Pixie clad in stockings. Oh ho ho it’s magic, you know, never believe it’s not so. However I do have some hopes for the new year, one is that Linden Lab start bloody well talking to us again, they have been way too quiet.

2011 brought us Mesh, a new prim counting system that has an impact on all users due to additional physics shapes such as convex hull, Land Impact replacing object counts on land in newer viewers and from Linden Lab, officially, via their blog, we heard nothing. The Harpo speaks routine when Linden Lab eventually do announce something doesn’t really cut the mustard.

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