Tag: SL News

Linden Realms open to all

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update Dec 2nd:I spoke to Tiggs Linden today regarding the HUD issue, and he has now fixed the problem.

Linden Labs have announced that Linden Realms, the crystal-hunting game is now open to everyone.

Portals are now available across the grid, allowing users to teleport to the game areas.

Some six “island clusters” of 12 regions each have been established to provide space for users to play the game without undue lag. From the map, it would appear another two further “islands” of 12 regions apiece may be under development for further expansion of the game, should they be deemed necessary – or perhaps they’re being prepared for the next Linden Realms project?

Linden Realms 12-region game “island” (l) and another Linden Realm area apparently under development (r)

Note that you cannot teleport directly to the game areas – you must go through one of the designated portals.

Game Portal

I reviewed the game a while back, the objective is to collect crystals, avoid various rock monsters and other obstacles and, as a side benefit, earn L$ (but don’t look to make a fortune – that not the point!).

I took a quick look at the expanded gaming areas earlier, and did find there seemed to be a slight issue: some people were arriving and failing to receive the game HUDs. As these also provide instructions – and the LL blog post announcing the game to be open doesn’t mentioned them at all, I actually encountered quite a few very confused people wandering around wondering what was going on and what they were supposed to be doing. I actually tried the portals at Barbarossa, Eldervale and Degrand – and failed to receive a HUD through any.

Hopefully, this issue will be fixed in short order.

The game is a lot of fun – and there is a rumour further quests may be added; if true, I’m not overly sure it’s a good idea. The aim of the game (from LL’s perspective) is to introduce mechanics and features that are to be made available to all – as such building an entire multi-quest game smacks a little of biting the hand of content creators – who are the people who should be using the tools to make engaging, fun and very different experiences for people to enjoy.

That said, I recommend that if you have 30 mins to spare – and once the initial rush has died down (and the HUD issue fixed), why not give it a try?

Viewer 3.x to get a speling cheker

Posted on by Inara Pey

Spelling checkers are something TPV users tend to take for granted; or if you’re a Guardian reader, quite possibly for grunted (sorry, a little English humour….). We’ve been able to bask in the glory of having our misspellings highlighted ready for us to correct (or in some instances, had them auto-corrected, depending on the sophistication of the checker code itself). Those using the official Viewer, however, haven’t been so lucky.

But that is about to change. Enter Storm 83. A year plus old, barely watched or voted upon, and now a coming soon feature. So as Oz comments on the JIRA, “Everyone thank Kitty for volunteering to contribute this feature!” Kitty being Kitty Barnett, who is the assignee for the project, and who has been a prolific contributor to TPV code, including RLV/a.

It’s not clear exactly how the feature will be integrated – different TPVs have added it in various tabs within Preferences. However, if we take Kitty’s own Catznip Viewer as a lead (given it is based on Viewer 3), one might hazard a guess and say that rather than being hidden away inside Preferences, as is the case with come TPVs, the Spell Check option will get a tab of its own.

With Catznip the spelling checker is very straightforward: simply tick the check box to enable. American English is the default, but other options are available from a drop-down menu. Spelling errors are then underlined in red in chat, and right-clicking on them will display a nice little menu listing alternatives as well as an option to add the word to a custom dictionary, should you prefer. One suspects the Viewer 3 functionality will be similar.

I’ve no idea whether the dictionary will include the ability to download other language dictionaries, a-la the likes of Phoenix and (shortly) Firestorm. I’ll hopefully take a closer look once the code reaches a Development Viewer or enters the Beta code base.

 

Premium Memberships discount offer. Again

Posted on by Inara Pey

Not too long ago, Linden Lab ran a 50% limited-time Premium Membership offer.

They’re now doing it again. This time the offer is for longer – an entire week, starting at 08:00 SLT/PST today, Monday 21st November, and ending at 08:00 SLT/PST on Monday 28th November.

As with the original offer

  • The discount only applies to Quarterly membership billing plans
  • Only the first quarter will be discounted the rest of the year will be charged at the full Quarterly membership rate.

There’s even a cheesy video this time – although I still dispute some of the claims made:

  • More space? How, exactly? 512sq m (even with a Linden Home), isn’t a huge amount of space
  • More privacy? Again, how, exactly?
  • More Access? Really? Where?

Fact is, as far as these claims are concerned, they can all be matched via Basic membership, and I still find LL’s use of them as promotional tools mildly misleading. For space – you can rent land (OK, making a payout, but the space will be way more than the free 512 from Premium); you’ll get privacy to the same degree as Premium (if you have your own land – right down to the same parcel settings). Access? simply go PIOF and age verified (no longer the big bad bogeyman it once was), and you’ll enjoy the same access.

It’s going to be interesting how well this is received – not they we really got any indication as to the success of September’s promotion.

What will be more interesting is whether or not this may lead to a repeat of the Land Sale that LL held towards the end of October to follow-up on the Premium drive, and if so, how long for – both schemes original ran just for a weekend in their first outings.Should LL opt to run with the Land Sale again, then it could come up as a little Christmas enticement (assuming they’re not seriously contemplating doing anything drastic with tier in the New Year).

So, if you feel up for going Premium, now’s the time to try – you might want to read my reports on the upgrade process and things like Linden Homes and the Premium Sandboxes. That said, I actually don’t think the Quarterly membership, even with a single discount offers that great value for money – if you want to go for Premium, best to go directly for Annual. Yes, you’re making a greater commitment, but the return on your membership is greater – and you arguably have greater protection against account suspension due to a payment error / failure.

New LSL functionality allows scripts paying out L$ to determine outcome of transfers

Posted on by Inara Pey

A frend in-world pointed me towards the SL forums today, and an interesting post from Kelly Linden on upcoming functionality which will allow scripts that pay out L$ to determine whether or not the transfer is successful, fails or is refused by the recipients.

The new functions are called llTransferLindenDollars and transaction_result.

Kelly Linden provides further information:

key llTransferLindenDollars(key id, integer amount)

  • Attempts to transfer amount of L$ from the owner of the object to id.
  • Requires PERMISSION_DEBIT.
  • Returns a key used in a matching transaction_result event for the success or failure of the transfer.

transaction_result(key transaction_id, integer success, string data)

  • LSL event triggered from an llTransfer* call (currently only llTransferLindenDollars).
  • transaction_id matches the return value of the llTransfer call. If the transaction was successful the id will match the transaction id shown in the transaction history on secondlife.com.
  • success is TRUE if the transfer succeeded otherwise FALSE. 
  • data will contain a CSV of destination id and amount transferred on success and an error tag on failure.

Kelly further explains:

llTransferLindenDollars has all the exact same limitations and restrictions as llGiveMoney – no more and no less. The only difference is that the result of that transaction is routed back to the script when llTransferLindenDollars is used.

Technical details:

L$ transactions in Second Life are managed by a service internally termed “L$ API”. This includes llGiveMoney and direct agent to agent transfers – and anything else that transfers L$. The new function doesn’t actually “pull the transaction data from the LL servers”, it just passes back the results from using the L$ API.

It is true that this service operates on HTTPS hence the possibility of it giving an “HTTP status code other than 200”. This is expected to be extremely rare. As for the incident today on the beta regions: in order to reproduce this error (and ensure it works as expected) QA forced a configuration change such that this particular region host believed the L$ API existed at a nonsense address. Resetting the configuration to default fixed it of course.

To be extra clear:

  • There are no cases where llTransferLindenDollars could succeed when llGiveMoney would fail.
  • There are no cases where llTransferLindenDollars could fail when llGiveMoney would succeed.

There are some rare edge cases, mostly relating to LSL limitations:

  • LSL scripts do not process more than one event at a time. If the script gets reset, the object taken, or the region restarted while the transaction_result is pending in a queue (because the script is busy in another event) then the result may get lost. This risk can be mitigated by using scripts that are mostly idle while waiting for the transaction_result event. This is not unique to the new features but applies to all events in LSL.
  • LSL scripts have a max event queue size of 64. If the event queue is full new transaction_result events will get dropped. This risk can be mitigated by ensuring the script handling the transaction_result does not build up a queue of events. This is not unique to the new features but applies to all events in LSL.
  • The only script in an object which will get a transaction_result event is the script that called llTransferLindenDollars. This is similar to how the http_request event works.

This functionality is currently undergoing testing on the Aditi Beta grid on channel DRTSIM-111 in the following regions (SLurls): Bethel, Fortuna and Sandbox Wanderton.

You can follow / join the discussion on these functions in the SL forums.

Wait, what? Web Profiles gain a Trending tab?!

Posted on by Inara Pey

I confess I don’t know if this is new, or I’m just blind and a little stupid (don’t answer that!), but my.secondlife.com has gone more Twittery, introducing a TRENDING tab.

The tab is accessed via the HOME tab on your web profile, and like Twitter, pops up anything that is proving popular among those using the Feed function – presumably based on a combination of replies & number of loves received by a message.

I freely admit this may have been around a while and I’ve simply missed it, or it was recently added and I simply missed the news. I’ve been rather absent from active engagement on Twitter lately due to work and things so could have missed the news there; and I do keep forgetting to tend to my own my.secondlife.com feed). As such, I only noticed it today, and did (rather forlornly) ask:

If it *is* new…then it’s an interesting new option that allows greater interaction between SL users (LL, why aren’t you telling us about these things?). If it’s been around a while, feel free to pat me on the head sympathetically before moving on :).

Viewer 3.2 UI JIRA

Posted on by Inara Pey

More people are trying-out the new FUI (apparently “Flexible User Interface”, and not “phooey” as someone jokingly insisted!) in Viewer 3.2, and some interesting JIRA are starting to appear.

If you’ve made the hop, you might want to consider taking a look at some of these and adding your support to any you agree with (remember to WATCH rather than VOTE – or do both to be on the safe side!):

  • VWR-20738: add ability to organise buttons in Customise Toolbars floater
  • VWR-27209: a Navigation bar only option to top bar of UI
  • VWR-27222: add Estate & Statistics Bar buttons and include multi-use separator in Customise Toolbars
  • VWR-27318 / VWR-27330: provide the option to use either the toolbars or the Sidebar
  • VWR-27358: allow the Chat Bar and an “IM Bar” to be docked, as if a button-like element, to the bottom bar area
  • VWR-27388: make any menu option draggable to the button bar
  • VWR-27448: recover the ability to dock windows at the edge of the screen and have them behave like tabs
  • VWR-27455: make the button bars on Viewer 3.2 dockable to top/bottom or right/left (depending on the edge) and not only on the middle
  • VWR-27457: create a “Quick Preferences” button for rapid access to frequently used preferences
  • VWR-27463: add Picks, Places, and Destinations to menus
  • VWR-27599: some floater window sizes and positions are sometimes reset to default after a crash, and all are on viewer update

While the following are not strictly Viewer 3.2 related, some may feel they still apply:

  • VWR-26688: allow notifications to be positioned to a different area of the screen

Note that I don’t pretend that this is an exhaustive list, nor have I included any JIRA for 3.2.0 through 3.2.2 marked as “fix pending”. Finally, JIRA listed above should not in any way be taken as a personal endorsement on my part – they’re simply what came up in search & while perusing the results!

Update 17th November

  • Adding EXP-1449 left click drag to control avatar not working, when “single click on land” action set to “move to clicked point”.