It’s that time of year again, the closure of 12 months of ups and downs, ins and outs and numerous other goings-on in the so-called metaverse and the galaxy therein with call Second Life. As with previous years, that means it’s time for me to take a look back over the last 12 months as seen through the pages of this blog.
You can read Part 1: January through June, here.
July
- July kicked-off with initial news on the main Relay for Life SL weekend starting to emerge
- I gave a personal look back on SL9B
- Crap Mariner announced the 100 Word Story Challenge for RFL SL
- Following more silliness on Twitter, I offered-up the lyrics for “One Night in SL” (With apologies to Murray Head!)
- LL got cheeky and asked for feedback on SL9B
- Lumiya added OpenSim support
- my.secondlife.com went borky
- AvaCon announced they would not be organising SLCC 2012 after agreement could not be reached with LL
- Rocky Constantine caught sight of another Lab-related faux-pas when the name of another new product popped up unexpectedly
- The Lab moved to further simplify age verification for SL
- With two possible mesh clothing deformation systems out there, I looked at the options
- Mid-month, RFL-SL kicked off the main weekend
- Pathfinding roll-out on the Magnum RC channel, and the advanced creation tools were redeployed to an RC channel after the June issues
- I looked in more detail at the Shining Project, the HTTP library project viewer for which arrived at the end of the month
- It looked like a fix for the snapshot tiling issue was on the way
- Away from SL, I popped back into Cloud Party as land rentals started; Kitely restructured their
- payment system; Sally Ride passed away
August
- LL confirmed the arrival of the “first set” of advanced creation tools grid-wide
- Former CFO and interim CEO Bob Komin departed LL after speculation about his future, when Tateru Nino confirmed he had left the hallowed halls of Battery Street
- I caught up with the state of the Marketplace and the fact that Direct Delivery migration had been pushed back from August to October
- Birdland, the premier nightclub / lounge in SL made a triumphant return
- I previewed the forthcoming arrival of the Mars Science Laboratory on Mars, and the actual EDL phase of the mission at the start of a new ongoing series of reports
- Toysoldier Thor proposed a radical and innovative solution to the age-old headaches of state / outdated Landmarks with his Virtual Landmarks idea
- In lieu of (then) cohesive documentation from LL, I provided a detailed look at pathfinding, including available resources and a little later in the month, had a little play with pathfinding inside buildings
- After much confusion concerning the impact of pathfinding on region performance, Lorca Linden spoke up on the matter
- After a long wait, Exodus updated; and a little later in the month, Lumiya got a facelift
- The first major details of Burn2 appeared
- After efforts elsewhere, I contemplated the idea of a better build floater
- It was confirmed that, following a proposal by members of the Exodus viewer team, normal and specular maps would be coming to SL, and would work with mesh, sculpts and prims – but not with the avatar mesh or system layer clothing, as I explained in an in-depth look later in the month
- After some TPV developers poked into the viewer code, Linden Lab confirmed that the viewer will be made available via the Steam service for games; shortly after this, some of the changes necessary for the Steam link-up appeared in the SL development viewer; later in the month I speculated on the Steam link-up, which was getting some negative responses from the SL community
- Dolphin viewer became the first TPV to announce it would be ceasing OpenSim support once a sub-licence arrangement has been reached with LL for accessing the Havok libraries; Firestorm had already confirmed OpenSim support will continue in a fork of the viewer
- I hit 1,000 posts with WordPress …
- The Phoenix / Firestorm team launched their own Support / SL orientation island
- I offered some thoughts on Premium membership of SL for those considering the jump
- LL sought to improve support for users on TPVs
- I closed the month with a look at two of the HTTP library projects: texture fetch and Group Services
- Away from SL: Kitely announced support for “big worlds”; and Neil Armstrong passed away.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 