Second Life – Page 200

December 26, 2012December 26, 2012

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.

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December 24, 2012December 24, 2012

Tyche Shepherd’s Awesome Mainland Census December 2012

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd has again unveiled the magic powers of her survey bots to produce the latest quarterly mainland census over at SLUniverse. The survey was last ran in September 2012. The latest census, which should be read in full in the link, reveals that mainland regions are at a record high, but that the number of parcels, owners and estimated income are all down since September’s survey. Abandoned land has reached a record high.

Keypoints

Overall number of parcels down 3.1% from 153,263 to 148,524.
Unique parcel owners down from 69,773 to 68,664.
The top 22 Non-Linden owners increased their mainland holdings from 6.2% to 7.4%.
The top 3 Non-Linden owners increased their holdings from 3.1% to 4.2%.
Abandoned Land at around 10.6% to 11.6% of all Mainland – an equivalent of 714 to 783 full regions an increase from around 9.8% to 10.9% or 714 to 783 regions.
Estimated Monthly Mainland Tier US$926,089 , down by an estimated US$17,846 or 1.9%.
Number of mainland regions 6,729 a record high, up 2 from 6,727.
Linden Home Regions occupied plots 41,435 (97%) down from 41,689 (97.6%).
Land For Sale 30,556,368Sqm down 11.7% from 34,618,224Sqm.

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December 24, 2012December 24, 2012

User Groups And Wiki Need Greater Visibility

I was recently taken to task over my suggestion that Linden Lab’s communications are poor because I don’t go to user group meetings. I used to go to a lot of office hours when I was a lad in Second Life and after they were changed into user groups, I went to a few of them. User group meetings are not vastly different to office hours, even back in the day some office hours had agendas, such as Bridie’s bug triage meetings, whereas despite Jack’s best efforts, agendas never really took off with Jack’s meetings. However the point that I don’t go to user group meetings and therefore miss out on discussions is a fair one, discussions with Lindens do happen at user group meetings.

The thing here is that there are just four user group meetings officially listed:

Content Creation/Mesh Import – Discussion on content creation, currently focused on mesh import.
Server/Sim/Scripting – Simulator issues and technology.
Open Development – Open source policies, resources for contributors, and progressing contributions through the Snowstorm process; for open source contributors.
Server Beta – Anything pertaining to server changes and public beta testing.

There used to be something like four a day covering a wide variety of topics, now we get around five a week (Open Development is scheduled for Monday and Wednesday). However leaving that aside, these meetings are useful, user groups provide a high level of richness, although they are poor in terms of reach. The minutes are usually updated on the wiki for each user group, so if you can’t attend the meetings when they happen, you can catch up via minutes of chat logs.

However finding out about the existence of user group meetings isn’t exactly straight forward and surely something can be done about this. I know where the wiki is, but when you look at the main second Life website, it’s really not obvious that user groups even exist, let alone that there’s a wiki.

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December 24, 2012December 24, 2012

Private Estate Losses Reach 12% For The Year

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd reports a net loss of 106 sims this week in her awesome survey post over at SLUniverse. Linden owned regions increased by 16 this week, but private estates were down 122. This makes the year to date loss of private regions from the grid 2,863, which is 12% down for the year.

The increase in Linden Regions comes from the arrival of 18 Linden Realms staging regions, so it looks like we may get some new fun sims to explore. However amongst the losses are sims owned by Dell, IBM, The US Army and The British Council. However the vast majority of the 122 losses are not corporate sims.

The good news for Linden Lab is that the size of the main grid still stands at 28,097, of these regions 20,994 are private regions with the other 7,103 being Linden owned. This means there’s still a very healthy amount of usage, but the trend remains downwards.

By my estimates private region ownership is somehwere around the level it was at in June 2008, although in June 2008 we had seen some large growth during the year.

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