Day: May 17, 2017

Second Life – Ozimals closes

Posted on by Inara Pey
Ozimals donated a limited edition bunny and Puffling to help raise funds during Filling the Cauldron, to help Second Life creator Elicio Ember and his family

Update, May 18th, 2017: As per the  comment below from Neobokrug Elytis, further information pertaining to the situation has been published via Google Docs here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-_7k-VigxufaTM5b18yVXpvZU0/view, offering additional information on the situation from the claimant’s perspectives.

Update, May 17th: As per the comment below from Sue W, the Ozimal blog, including the post referred to in this article, has been cleared down.

Sonya Marmurek indirectly brought this to my attention via an image posted to her Flickr stream: Ozimals, the brand of breedable rabbits and Pufflings is closing its doors with immediate effect.

The cause is apparently a Cease and Desist letter forwarded to Ozimals founder Malkavyn Eldritch. No specific details of the cause of the letter have been made available. However, Malkavyn broke the news in an Ozimals blog post on Tuesday, May 16th, 2017, which reads in part:

At 8:00 am on Monday, May 15, 2017, I received a Cease and Desist letter from legal counsel representing Edward Distelhurst and Akimeta Ltd. This letter demands that I cease all use of Ozimals intellectual property.

I don’t personally agree with this claim, but I do not have the means to fight this in court, therefore I have no choice but to comply.

As of the morning of Wednesday, May 17, 2017, my products and their associated games will cease to function.

This means:

All databases supporting the bunnies and Pufflings will be off-line.

Support, both in-world and through the ticket portal, will cease.

All Ozimals in-world groups will be closed.

Pufflings will cease to function.

Any bunny who is Everlasting will continue to function, as he or she does now: without cost.

Any bunny who is not Everlasting will be unable to eat and will hibernate within 72 hours.

This is not the first time Ozimals have faced a legal situation, having been involved in a lengthy dispute with Amaretto Horses which ran from late 2010 through 2013.

Alongside her image, Sonya notes:

If you read this before it’s too late, there’s free eternal timepieces and other goodies in the Ozimals main store to make sure you can keep your bunny pets with you even when the servers go down.

Whatever the ups and downs or ins and outs of this situation, Ozimals have proven extremely popular across Second Life, and  Malkavyn closes his post with an apology and thanks to all those who have supported Ozimals over the years:

It was never my intention for the time we’ve all spent with the bunnies and the Pufflings to end like this. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of the support this community has given me over the last seven years. I wish there was more I could say.

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SL project updates week 20/1: server, viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

Crystal Garden Estates, Quararibea Cordata Island; Inara Pey, May 2017, on Flickr Crystal Garden Estates – blog post

Server Deployments

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest updates and news.

  • There was no Main (SLS) channel deployment or restart on Tuesday, May 16th.
  • On Wednesday, May 17th, the three RC channels should be updated as follows:

Simulator Operating System Update

The build of the simulator code using an updated version of Linux was initially deployed to LeTigre in week #19. However, it was rolled back on Thursday, May 11th and replaced with the server maintenance package originally deployed to the Magnum RC channel that week. The reason for this can be found in BUG-100667, “Krafties HUD does not work on LeTigre regions only”. The BlueSteel deployment should hopefully correct this issue.

SL Viewer

The Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer was updated to version 5.1.0.505089 on May 11th. If you’re on a 64-bit version of Windows, make sure you click on the correct download link to avoid receiving the 32-bit version.

On Friday, May 12th, the Maintenance RC viewer, version 5.0.5.326168 was released. This viewer includes improvements to Trash purging behaviour designed to assist with avoiding inventory losses and the new UI controls for the new parcel access overrides – both of which have been previously noted in these updates, with the latter being deployed to LeTigre this week.

The new Trash purging warning, giving a count of the items about to be permanently deleted from the trash folder – one of the new behaviours in the Maintenance RC viewer designed to help combat accidental inventory loss through Trash deletions

In addition, the Maintenance viewer has additional fixes and UI improvements, including a contributed feature which allows users to search and replace asset links in their inventory. This should greatly simplify updating links related to a product when it has itself been updated. The default media playback volume has also been reduced, in keeping with recent requests from some Community Gateways.

Outside of these two viewers, there have thus far been no other changes to the viewers in the pipeline, which remain as:

  • Current Release version: 5.0.4.325124, dated April 3rd, promoted April 19th – overview
  • RC viewers:
    • Voice RC viewer, version 5.0.5.325998, re-released on Friday, May 5th
    • Project AssetHttp project viewer, version 5.0.5.325940 dated May 4th
  • Project viewers:
    • 360-degree snapshot viewer,version 4.1.3.321712, dated November 23rd, 2016
  • Obsolete platform viewer version 3.7.28.300847 dated May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.

Terrain Issues

The golfing community has noticed an apparent behaviour change affecting wither the terrain or scripted golfing systems. The change manifests in a number of ways, for example: indicators which should only be triggered when a ball registers as being in Linden Water triggering when the ball is on land; golf balls apparently penetrating the terrain and being marked as deep under it; balls hitting prim objects and bouncing wildly, etc.

The problem has been noted a multiple golf course and appears to affect all popular golf systems – those by Fa Nyak or Cowley, for example. The issues have been around for about 5-6 weeks, and reports are that they are getting worse. They don’t appear to be linked to issues of “lag” either in the viewer or at the simulator end (e.g. due to the volume of avatars in a region), as the problems can pop-up with just two people playing a round; they are also somewhat inconsistent and difficult to deliberately reproduce. A JIRA has been requested on the problem to help the Lab investigate.