Linden Lab – Page 195

December 19, 2011December 19, 2011

Paid Classifieds – Relevancy v Price

Inworld paid classifieds have generally been pretty straight forward, best price wins. However there’s a frustrating aspect of this, one which was at one time addressed by the paid classifieds bar only showing exact phrase matches. The problem is that if you search for say: Medieval Market, you’ll get the top paid results that use either of those words, rather than the phrase or both words:

The above search was done searching everything, so groups, places etc. will be in the left hand side, on the right hand side are paid classifieds which automatically sort by price. The results on the left hand side are relevant, the results on the right hand side, they aren’t really relevant.

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December 14, 2011

Exit The Dragonfish?

In November 2009 it was announced that Linden Lab had struck a deal with Dragonfish, the payment processing arm of 888.com. This was discussed on the official forum back in the day. This was followed by a beta billing option entitled local payments, which you can read about here. Basically local payments allowed people to pay Linden Lab via a currency other than US Dollars, which will explain why US residents may have no idea what I’m talking about, US residents were never put in the local payments beta.

However over the last week or so, those of who were in the local payments beta, many of us not through choice, will have received an email informing us that local payments beta has ended:

Dear Ciaran

This email contains important information that affects your Second Life account and requires action in order to continue any payment transactions with Second Life.

Due to the conclusion of the Second Life local payments beta program, it is required that you add a new credit card or PayPal account by going to your billing information page on Secondlife.com.

Best Wishes,

Linden Lab and the Second Life Team

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December 9, 2011December 9, 2011

Save Our Release Candidate Channels

A look at server deploys for this week has uncovered another goodie in the shape and form of a new function, llGetParcelMusicURL(), however a look at the Server/beta meeting minutes for this week reveals a baddie in the shape and form of hiding server channels, this should be resisted, despite the reasons for wanting to do this being fairly reasonable, it’s the wrong solution.

Let’s start with the goodie, in scripting it’s common to have setters and getters. There’s no great mystery to what they do, setters as you’d exepect set values and getters, as you’d expect, get values. We’ve long had a setter for parcel music in the form of llSetParcelMusicURL() , this is used to set music streams on parcels and requires permission to do so, often the scripted object will need to be deeded to the group, well it will be on group owned land, people who have used radios and televisions on group owned land will be familiar with this procedure. However there had previously been no getter counterpart, although Jira SCR-31, requesting the creation of llGetParcelMusicURL() was created almost four years ago.

However we haven’t had the getter, until now, it’s currently only available on the Le Tigre RC channel but will soon be grid wide I’m sure. This function will return the parcel music URL, as you may well suspect already! Like it’s counterpart you may need to deed the object to a group for it to work and it won’t matter if the parcel music url has been set manually or via a script, as long as you have permission to get the URL, you will be able to do so.

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December 6, 2011December 6, 2011

Region Crossing Improvements In The Pipeline

Taking a look at this week’s server deployment I notice nothing that stands out and excites me. The new profile system is getting closer to whereby anyone on your inworld mute list won’t be able to hassle you on your web profile, that will be fully rolled out when the code is in all versions of the server release.

However there is something in the works that looks interesting regarding region crossings, the truth is that this will be a long time in the works before it makes life much improved, but they are getting there with something called “Threaded Crossings Project“, keep your eyes on the Blue Steel Release Notes for this. The more technical term for this is: “threaded RPC/thread state machine mechanism” I have no idea what this means, but I’ll keep an eye on it anyway, to do so initially I had to go back to the Beta Server user group meeting of November 17th, there wasn’t one last week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA.

If you’re unsure of what the issues are with region crossings, Carmilla Linden sums up the current problems in their opening comment in that meeting : “The existing region crossing code is a horrible piece of crap” after that it gets quite geeky!

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December 2, 2011December 2, 2011

New Licensing Method On Marketplace

I’ve had a busy week off the field, so have had my Second Life time severely curtailed this week, which was a shame as I had a lot planned, and all the more disappointing as I intended to put my day on Strike on Wednesday to good effect in Second Life to make me feel better about losing a day’s pay!

However, I’ve been glancing around the forum and blogsphere and notice a little introduction to the SL Marketplace, which I spotted on this forum thread over at SLUniverse, started by Voodoo Radek. There’s a new licensing feature: “User Licensed” which looks like it’s designed for full perms items, when the system permissions are not the permissions you’re intending to sell the item as, for example textures need to be sold full perms so builders can apply them to their builds, but texture makers don’t want people reselling or giving away their textures and often don’t want the builds those textures are applied to being sold full perms, which is where this new permission comes into play.

So rather than the standard copy/Modify/No Transfer permissions you’ll now see on listings, things like this:

If a merchant had ticked User Licensed as an option, there wouldn’t be a cross through User Licensed, if a merchant has ticked to see the product description for permissions, it would look like this:

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking there may be some confusion between User Licensed and see product description for details!

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