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A red-letter day for Second Life, Second Life 2.0 viewer and more
Over about the last 60-90 minutes, Tom Hale's been delivering a keynote at the SL Pro! conference held in Second Life. There are multiple hefty announcements from Linden Lab involved, and some of that should be reaching the official Second Life blogs as you read this. Golly, what do we have among all of this? We've got the Second Life 2.0 viewer public beta, which should be available right now. We've got the new third-party viewer registry and third-party policies being announced today; We've got changes in the names of content-ratings. We've got the official release of open source viewer Snowglobe and the announcement of Snowglobe 2; and all capped off with a slew of supporting FAQs, guides, video tutorials, wiki pages and what-have-you!
Looking forward to Second Life 2.0
While it has been called Viewer 2009 once or twice, almost every Linden Lab staffer who mentions it calls it Second Life 2. Once on the drawing-board as a major overhaul of Second Life both at the server and at the viewer (client), the idea of a huge developmental jump was abandoned some years ago, and all of the features slated for Second Life 2 were added to Second Life 1, incrementally. Well, except for the last item on the list, the user-interface. Essentially Second Life seems to now everything SL2 was originally planned to be, sans the new interface.
Linden Lab chases new logo for Second Life Snowglobe viewer
Linden Lab has launched a contest on 99designs to obtain a new logo for their Snowglobe Second Life viewer. The prize has been prepaid to 99designs and the chosen winner will be paid the sum of US$295 by them. Of course, a logo to these requirements would normally cost quite a bit more through normal channels. We can't help thinking that if Linden Lab were truly thinking of this as community-sourcing, that they'd be offering commercial rates to the winner. As it is, the proffered prize is much closer to the bottom of the range of logo-design prizes on 99designs than it is to the top.
Snowglobe viewer 1.1 released for Second Life
Snowglobe, Linden Lab's community-developed after-market Second Life viewer has hit another milestone with a 1.1 release. This version mostly focuses on bug-fixes, but has a few additional enhancements. A nasty race condition in texture-fetching has (hopefully) been resolved, reducing viewer crash-rates, bump-mapping has been corrected, the minimap has gotten some tweaking and tuning, and more. Read on for the complete list.
Linden Lab warns Second Life users to avoid bulk permissions feature
Linden Lab recently warned Second Life users to avoid the use of the new bulk permissions editor, a feature which was added in the 1.23 viewer. There's a lot of confused conversation and observations about the matter, some of which are contradictory, because what is happening is confusing. Some claim that the bug makes content fully-permissive. That's not entirely the case. The essential problem that is at the heart of JIRA issue SVC-4444 is that the bulk permissions feature fails to correctly and completely communicate with internal grid systems at some level and under some circumstances. All the while appearing as if it has actually done what it is supposed to have done..
Linden Lab releases Snowglobe 1.0 for Second Life
A while back, Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale announced a new Second Life viewer development project. That project ultimately grew along lines similar to that of third-party viewer project, Imprudence, breaking down many barriers to user contributions, and adopting a more agile methodology. After only a couple of release-candidates, the result is already available. One of the biggest developments you might see in the Snowglobe viewer is that the map is now an order of magnitude faster to load, rather than taking several fractions of forever, as is traditional. This is the start of a new texture-transfer pipeline, which we can reasonably expect to become standard in future viewers, and to encompass more kinds of textures, however there's a new caching architecture which should benefit all textures.
