Following-on from the announcement that Second Life will soon be available through Steam, it appears the viewer itself is going through some small changes in order for it to be better used with SL.
Yesterday, I downloaded the latest Development version of the viewer. As per usual, I performed a clean install, removing the older version & the associated user and log files. On starting the viewer, I was surprised to see the log-in screen displayed with an additional pop-up:
Clicking Create Account pops-up the familiar “Do you want to open your web browser” dialogue box, prior to taking you (on clicking OK) to the SL sign-up page. I confess I have not (as yet) run through th actual sign-up process to see if that has changed in preparation for the Steam tie-in, but I’ll be doing so around the time the tie-in is announced as being live, if only out of curiosity.
Clicking Continue from the prompt will allow you to log-in using an existing account, and the prompt to sign-up is not repeated the next time you launch the viewer.
Alongside the new pop-up message, the actual log-in area of the viewer splash screen has been tidied-up and made more presentable.
Assuming these changes are a part of the preparations for the link-up with Steam, they would appear to answer how users coming to Second Life via Steam will be directed to the sign-up pages. As such, it will be interesting to see what, if anything, will be done to make at least the initial sign-up page more informative as to what Second Life is, or whether this will be handled directly through the SL page(s) on Steam itself (I personally suspect the latter).
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
I personally created a new account a few days ago and logged in a non-Linden Lab viewer as First Login. All I can say is that on Third-party viewers, or at least on Radegast, the initial outfit you choose is NOT automatically loaded, and when opening a normal “graphic” viewer, you are asked your gender. Which will, indeed, short-circuit the avatar you choose on the Second Life web page (I took one of the Linden Robots) and give you the test avatar of the gender you choose. (I choose male). Whatever Linden Lab is up to, they need to work a bit on the uniformity of the thing.
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Interesting!
It was actually because I suspect that the sign-up process might be in a state of flux that I held up nosing around further than merely opening-up the initial sign-up page. The official blog post announcement) made it pretty clear LL were going to press early on the matter, simply because eagle-eyed developers may have spotted the code sitting in one of the viewer repositories and guessed what was going on. As such, I do suspect they have more work to do behind the scenes to ensure everything is a relatively smooth end-to-end process (and which, one hopes, leverages whatever Steam itself can offer to help people get started, to the fullest!).
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Yes, I suspect that nothing is going to be ready before 24h after the official “ready” stamp..
Okay, bad jokes aside, what worries me is that Second Life is all but a game. It is a sandbox, and there’s people not familiar with the (sadly) harsh and insulting atmosphere of the gaming world. Let’s hope that people who will stay in Second Life that went here from Steam will be a bit more adult than the grief-happy residents (crashers, annoyers, etc) we have.
Speaking about griefers, I think that it is WAY too soon for Linden Lab to open our doors to the mass machine of cheating and hacking industry that gaming is. Seriously, we can’t even fix the estate bans issue ( see https://jira.secondlife.com/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?requestId=14958 ) and there’s no viable way to ban someone forever. and by someone I mean the typist. There’s so much work to do to make Second Life malicious-proof and I think we’re far from there.
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Where is the Second Life I led?
Coding new projects, left us for dead!
Where is the fun I used to find?
I’d have more fun, debugging bind!
A Steam-driven game is quite all right
Yes, during the day
It’s easy to play
But, oh, what a bore at night,
So I repeat what first I said
Where is the Second Life I led?
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You, sir, are a poet! 🙂
Well done!
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“Be not afeard. The grid is full of noises,
Rock rumbles, and shimmering teleports, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand glittering crystals
Will hum about mine HUD; and sometimes jingles,
That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches of gamers
Ready to drop upon my sims, that, when I wak’d,
I cried to dream again.”
– Caliban Linden
(With apologies to Wm. Shakespeare, esq)
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