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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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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1920’s Berlin Starts To Embrace Mesh

A few days ago I blogged about Mesh adoption and used 1920’s Berlin as an example of a sim that wasn’t currently allowing Mesh, the reasons for which had been detailed in a blog post, which can be read here. 1920’s Berlin sim owner and driving force Frau (Jo) Yardley has been stating that the stance was not an anti Mesh stance, but merely a no Mesh yet stance, Frau Yardley made this point in the original blog post and in comments, including in my original blog post.

However, now that we have hit the new year, 1920’s Berlin is moving towards mesh adoption, slowly but surely, as they enter 1929 in their story, a new blog post has appeared saying that Mesh is coming, which can be read here.  Two of the main reasons cited are that Mesh is already on the grid and that Mesh can save prims.

Frau Yardley writes: “To show you how Mesh will look in Berlin I have just placed our very first Mesh object in berlin. Go visit our old deaf Cordelia, behind Alexanderplatz Bahnhof. You know her old street organ that she has been playing for ages. I have put a Mesh version right next to it. Look at the quality and how many prims it uses, 18 vs 3! That should make clear why we really have to move on to Mesh!

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Mesh Clothing Parametric Deformer Goes Alpha

First of all, Happy New Year to everyone.

The Mesh Clothing Parametric Deformer project has now reached an alpha release. At the end of yesterday’s MetaReality Podcast the news was broke that it would be released tomorrow .. which is today! Warning, the MetaReality podcast was live and the podcast posted is uncensored, I haven’t listend to it all yet so it may contain naughty words. A video has been released to show the code in action and to point out that it’s not finished:

This project is to make mesh clothing in Second Life more viable, the problem so far with Mesh clothing has been getting it to fit. This project goes some way to addressing that.

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2011 Reviewed

This will be a rather long post as it’s a review of the year, this is the fourth in a series of annual posts, the other three look at different years… I think you’ll have worked that out already! This post isn’t made any easier by Linden Lab messing around with their blog, meaning links that were working at the time, no longer working. However that just means I get to read them again and catch up, so there is a plus side to that.

2011 brought us viewer improvements, Mesh, lot of bug fixes by Oz Linden and his team as well as new scripting functions. On the downside, Linden Lab’s use of the blog to inform us of new features and tools was pretty poor to say the least. I’ll miss plenty out in this review, I’ll also include trivial aspects, so let’s get this rolling.

January

Blue Mars reversed several gears and announced it would become an app for the iPhone and iPad, as is the way with these things, links in the linked article no longer work.

The Grid merger between adult and teen grids was in operation, this doesn’t seem to have caused many complications at all, with the exception of over zealous word filters but we’ll come to that later.

FJ Linden blogged about improvements, including talk of a new group chat system, improved region crossings, web based profiles and announced that the group limit was being raised from twenty five slots to forty two.

I moved my blog back here, after three and a bit years of being a guest blogger on Nobody Fugazi’s Your2ndPlace. Nobody Fugazi had generously allowed a few of us, including Marx Dudek, Arthur Fermi, Sarah Nerd, Jezebel Bailey and Konner McDonnell to blog on his site but as he no longer had a Second Life account and he was pondering what to do with the site, I suggested that he should concentrate on his own projects, none of the others threw anything at me over the suggestion!

New CEO and Aston Villa fan Rod Humble blogged about how he had been getting immersed in Second Life, exploring, building and scripting in his first few weeks and wearing a Toga too! I noted how he had a warm welcome, and also suggested Second Life would benefit from a better system for implementing NPC’s.

SL Marketplace changed its ratings system to match the three inworld maturity ratings of General, Moderate and Adult and promptly annoyed merchants because of how over zealous the word filter for automatically changing the maturity rating of a listing was, this one runs and runs.

Inara Pey reported that Esbee Linden was leaving, courtesy of Daniel Voyager reporting it! Daniel changed his blog during the year so old links don’t work.

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