Wishing everyone all the very best for 2014. Thank you for taking the time to come read this blog, give feedback and comments, and for all your retweets, replurks, loves and support throughout 2013. It has been and is, deeply appreciated.
Day: December 31, 2013
2013: a year in review (3): September – December
It’s once again that annual time of reflection. The winter is with us, the old year is slowing dying, the new year awaits, and it is time to look back across the highs and lows of the virtual year as seen through the pages of this blog. This year has been even busier for me than previous years, so rather than give you a sea of text to wade through, I’ve opted to break things down into three more manageable offerings, starting with January through to April, and have tried to limit myself to bullet-points to the various links. I’ve not attempted to dot every “I” and cross every “T”; rather my aim is to highlight the main items of news for each month (or those which raised a smile), and those aspects of other VWs I had time to cover and well as a look back on some personal elements of my SL times over the year. For those into art and SL exploration, I’ve also summarised installations and regions visited by month in the hope that doing so will stir your own memories of those events / places.
- January-April can be found here
- May-August can be found here.
September
Second Life and the Lab
- The SL viewer gets a “request teleport” feature & a group ejection notification
- Yurzuru Jewell launches Idobata, a handy text-to-speech tool for Second Life. Later in the month he launches Keshiki, a screen capture tool for tutorial makers
- LL’s tie-in with Amazon sees SL appear on the UK and German Amazon sites
- The Lab starts opening advertising on its web properties to SL businesses and merchants
- Concern over the extent of changes to creators’ rights as made in August to LL’s ToS start to grow. I contact the Lab directly on the matter and receive a statement from them on the matter. As upset grows about the changes, some start quietly to try to get things suitably resolved, while I follow-up on ideas that the changes were due to the Desura acquisition. Towards the end of the month an in-world meeting is announced, and I offer a post-meeting personal perspective
- LL issue viewer-side support for their new particle capabilities
- The Lab announces SLShare, an opt-in means people to link their SL and Facebook accounts. The capability appears in the viewer near the end of the month, and appears reasonable enough
- Singularity adds the ability to export your own textures when exporting your own content to Collada files
- Lette Ponnier offers some sage advance to those wishing to improve their SL user experience
- Exodus releases a materials-ready version
- The San Diego Union-Tribune publishes a detailed story on Fran Seranade, first broken in the SL blog circuit by Hamlet Au in February). I cover the story and poke LL about it as a result, the story become the most-read article on this blog for 2013, with just under 4,000 readers within the first 24 hours of the Lab promoting it alone – thank you, Peter & LL & all who visited!
- Chris Stokel-Walker, a UK journalist provides an astute look at Second Life
- On top of new platform improvements, the Lab launches a new promo video
- My interview with Rod Humble makes it to issue #49 of Prim Perfect magazine
- Cocoa updates adversely impact Mac users
Platform News
- Week 36: Monty’s server-side HTTP updates start deployment, but require a viewer-side update. These updates include the new GetMesh2 capability and its associated debug, Mesh2MaxCocurrentRequests, both of which are designed to stop people exceeding the server-side capabilities with unreasonably concurrent mesh download requests
- Week 37: JSON gets some updates; recursive rezzing as a means of griefing gets nerfed, although later updates are required
- Nyx essentially nixes any idea of extensive, in-depth changes to the current SL avatar
- A fix arrives for an issues whereby some avatars were unable to access parcels running on regions on the Magnum RC
- Week 39 sees increasing reports or region restart issues, while there is further informal discussion on the idea of an SL avatar 2.0″; region crossing issue return with a bite
- The Lab issues some stats on materials, Monty Linden dives into issues with tethered cellular connections
Art Reviews
- UWA, the Centre for ME/CFS & other invisible illnesses and Virtual Ability launch the Freedom Project
- The Portuguese Way – LEA
Events
- Firestorm celebrates its third anniversary
- BURN2 announces selected artists for 2013
- Virtual ability announce the 3rd annual international disability rights affirmation conference and panelists from around the world
- Grendel’s 7th Element Hunt
- The Michael J. Fox Premiere Party for Parkinson’s Disease set to be held in SL the event raises L$425,000 ($1700) in just three hours
Pey’s Travelogue
- Biminist
- Honah Lee Islands
- Deadpool
- Toru
- Artists Garden
- Pangloss
- Collins Land (2)
- Savoir Faire / Serenity Gardens
- The Looking Glass
- Cyprian Garden
- Moonlight Teahouse
Personal Notes
- Blake Sea became my playground (again) while flying my lovely Spitfire
- I move to Blake Sea and take-up residence in a themed estate there
- It is confirmed that Voyager has left the Solar System and that, surprisingly, Mars may have far less methane than might have been thought
October
Second Life and the Lab
- Patterns gets a website overhaul and the dev team hold live streams with users
- Western Digital (Asia) launch a short film competition with a special machinima section suitable for SL film makers
- LL announces it’ll be offering all IndieCade nominees & official selections a Desura distribution deal
- World’s End Garden announces closure
- LL seek to re-vamp Desura client open-source project after the SL viewer open-source model
- The LL ToS changes continue to rumble on:
- Machinimatix refocus terminology in their products & Bryn Oh resigns from the LEA
- I point out that (unfortunately) the wording in the ToS is very common
- An in-world legal panel is announced to address concerns and answer questions
- Qarl Fizz quits SL
- I provide audio recordings and also transcripts from the in-world legal discussion
- Designing Worlds plans a special programme on the subject
- Lab runs a Halloween photo contest with L16K in prizes
- CastAR gets immersive capability to place it on a par with Oculus Rift and $500,000 in first 3 days of modest kickstarter
- The Lab announces a “mobile beta” programme for accessing SL using OnLive streaming
- The CtrlAltStudio viewer has an unofficial first pass at including SL viewer UI elements when using Oculus Rift
- Firestorm discuss their upcoming 64-bit Windows release with me prior to launching their 4.5.1 beta update and Windows Alpha 64-bit versions
Platform News
- Week 40: Andrew and Maestro Linden continue to try to pin-down the cause of recent region crossing issues; Baker starts working through the viewer-side code for his group ban list work; render weights and their associated calculations are tweaked. Additional bug-fixes are announced
- AIS v3 officially pointed-to as coming soon
- Week 42: upcoming viewer-side interest list changes are previewed, and viewer-side code is made available to TPVs for testing purposes; Monty Linden starts into HTTP work directly related to HTTP pipelining
- Unfortunately, the interest list viewer proves itself determined not to make in through LL’s QA, delaying the release
Art Reviews
- Overto Omonto – Per4mance MetaLES
- Colour Key – LEA
- Moving Rafts and Gaia Theory Project – LEA
- Mixed Pixels – Art India
Events
Pey’s Travelogue
- Alki
- Harrowdale
- World’s End Garden
- Avedon Park
- Calas Halloween special at SilverMyst
- Nagare
- Tudor Rose
Other Worlds
- InWorldz launches a unique means of RL exercise while spending time in-world
- Cloud Party jumps on the Oculus Rift bandwagon
Continue reading “2013: a year in review (3): September – December”
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 