Archive for the 'New Releases' Category
Friday, February 13th, 2009 by: Blue
[2009-02-25 @ 11:10 AM PST] The new blogs are UP NOW! blogs.secondlife.com (note the extra “s”, the singular will also redirect to the new blogs soon).
[11 AM PST] WE’RE SO CLOSE!
[8 AM PST] Pardon the mess, it’s temporary. We’re upgrading to our new blogs! Stay tuned…  -Torley
UPDATE – Due to some last minute technical naughtiness, the launch of the new blogs has been delayed to early next week.
I’m disappointed about the delay of course, as I can’t wait to get started blogging in earnest. If you are disappointed as well, I apologize. But you know the old saying: When life gives you lemmings, make lemmingade! And so without further ado…
Welcome to BLUE’S TOLD-YOU-SO COMPETITION where you can turn snark into valuable prizes! The game is simple. Just come up with the ultimate told-you-so to go with any event, whether it’s the delay of the new blogs, McCain losing the election, or your boyfriend getting towed for parking in a handicapped spot…it’s up to you. I’ll even get you started with an example:
Yoz: Hey Blue, we have to delay launch due to some technical issues.
Blue: Told ya we shouldn’t be using that Commodore64.
The best comeback wins one lucky resident a dream date with me, your pal Blue, to an exciting inworld location as part of my SL Travel Blog. Yes you heard right. Immortalized…on a BLOG. How can you resist? Just write your comeback on a notecard with the title TOLD YOU SO and drop a copy on me inworld. Even if you don’t win, a witty dis is its own reward!
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The Second Life Blog was once a place where the Lindens talked casually with you about policy, their projects, recent news, the future of SL, etc. Residents regularly told us that they loved having access to such broad insight into the company and frequent communication with the full range of Lindens. And Lindens loved the ongoing dialog with residents.
Over time however, as more Lindens came to participate, the blog got a bit manic. Some of you complained that reports of temporary performance issues would eclipse larger conversations related to long term plans and features while others believed that tutorials and opinion pieces were distracting them from the hard news of inworld issues they needed to know about in order to run their businesses.
In other words, we outgrew our single channel blog. It was no longer serving people’s individual needs. Perhaps worse was that the signal to noise ratio in comments had gotten bad enough that Lindens weren’t able to depend on them as a way to clearly hear the range of needs and desires of the community. As such we had to limit blog participation to a smaller number of Lindens on certain types of topics and move extended discussion to the forums.
We knew it was important to get back to using the blog as a key means of constructive two way conversation with the community, so we put together a shopping list of must-haves for a new blog suite which included…
- Individual channels of communication for each subject
- Numerous means of accessing channels (including RSS and email subscription)
- Discussion format sub-blogs for extended conversations with threading, voting etc…
- Private sub-blogs for communities working in Second Life (like educators and Solution Providers)
After comparing options, we believe we’ve found one that will best suit our ongoing needs. We expect that it will allow us to get back to the days when any and all Lindens could participate freely and hope that it will provide a convenient way for you to engage us on a wide variety of topics.
So we hope that you’ll join us here, on Thursday the 19th of February, for the launch of a whole new Second Life Blog, where it will be the good ol’ days all over again!
See you then,
-Blue
Posted in Announcements & News, Blog Improvements, Blogroll, Business, Community, Community Gateways, Concierge, Customer Service, Education, Enterprise, Forums, Land, Marketing, New Releases, Tips & Tricks |
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We’re happy to announce a new First Look for SLim, a new voice and text instant messaging client.
SLim’s technology is provided by Vivox (www.vivox.com) and developed in partnership with Linden Lab to work with the Second Life viewer. SLim enables Second Life Residents to conduct voice or text conversations with member of their Second Life friends list….whether they are logged into the virtual world or offline. While the Second Life viewer will still serve as the primary inworld communication engine, SLim is capable of running on most computers, and offers users a voice-enabled instant messaging client that extends the value of the Second Life Grid beyond the virtual world.
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I’m delighted to announce that Mono is ready to launch as part of the 1.24 Server deploy starting today.
Mono is an open source technology that improves the stability and speed of scripts – particularly calculation-intensive ones. In some of the internal benchmarking we’ve done, scripts running on Mono ran up to 220 times faster. This extra speed both increases the gamut of scripted applications that can be developed in Second Life and also makes Second Life more responsive when running existing scripted applications that have been converted to run on the Mono scripting engine.
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As your login splash screen may have already told you, an optional viewer upgrade is available today… Announcing the Second Life 1.20 Viewer! It features improved reliability and a more flexible UI architecture so you can select the color of the User Interface. It also brings several improved features and many important bug fixes. Download it here! For those of you who’d like more detail on what’s in the new viewer, please read on. (more…)
Back in early May, we blogged to let you know that we were seriously considering whether Linden Lab should continue supporting Mac OS X 10.3, “Panther,” which was first released by Apple back in 2003.
As we wrote then, our tracking shows that very few of you, about 1/4 of 1 percent of all of you, the entire base of Residents, are still using Apple’s Mac OS X 10.3 when logging into Second Life.
The vast majority of responses from you confirmed that you agree, it makes sense to free up the Linden engineers from working to support an operating system used by so few Residents, and instead we should let them move on to other work which will benefit a much larger group.
We wanted to make sure there was plenty of time for the news to spread, and now, a little over two months later, it’s time to actually cease support of this relatively little-used OS.
What does it mean to “stop support”? Basically, it means we stop new development for the SDK (software development kit ) of that operating system, and also stop doing QA testing on OS 10.3.9.
What will you notice? If you are one of the few logging in with Panther, OS 10.3.9, you can still do so today, even though we are officially now not supporting it — and that may be true for some time.
Exactly how long we can’t guarantee, because Linden engineers will no longer be testing to make sure that new releases will work with Panther (OS 10.3.) So, eventually, there may be a time when some new element will interfere significantly enough to result in folks who will not be able to log in with OS 10.3 on their hardware. At that time such folks would need to upgrade their OS in order to do so.
What if you plan to keep using OS 10.3? We will continue to support the 1.19.4 viewer, which does work with Panther, (OS 10.3.9), and we will do our best to give reasonable notice before we stop supporting 1.19.4. So to be clear, stick with that viewer if you don’t plan to upgrade from Panther. Residents still using OS 10.3 will be able to log in to SL with Panther, 10.3.9, using the 1.19.4 viewer, they will just not be able to update to new Second Life versions, as new versions of the viewer which will continue to be released with improved stability and additional features will not support OS 10.3.
Please be careful to note, as we blogged yesterday, that the most recent optional Release Candidate will not run on a PowerPC running OS 10.3.9:
IMPORTANT: Known Issues with RC14
At this time we’re not considering dropping any other operating system.
Our general approach to supporting older releases of operating systems on any platform is to fully support the current and most recent OS for each platform. For example, we will actively support both Vista and Windows XP until such time as Vista is replaced with Microsoft’s next major operating system release. Similarly, we all support the most recent releases of Mac OS 10.5 and 10.4. Again, in all cases, we will attempt to provide at least 60 days notice prior to dropping formal support for any operating system, as we did in this case.
I’ll note that I personally run Second Life on one of two MacBook Pro laptops, one running Tiger (OS 10.4,) and one running Leopard (OS 10.5.4.)
[To briefly recap the history of the last five years of Mac OS: Panther, OS 10.3, was first released in October 2003, and updated to 10.3.9 in 2005. Apple has followed Panther with two more recent versions of the Apple OS, “Tiger” (OS 10.4,) released in April 2005 and “Leopard,” (OS 10.5.4,) released in October 2007 and most recently updated in June 2008.]
Today we are releasing a new Release Candidate, 1.20 RC14. If you have already been using the Release Candidate (RC13), you will be required to update to RC14 with the latest bug fixes. But, the Release Candidate is always an optional series of viewers that you may choose not to use — or use side by side on your computer with the main viewer offered on our Downloads page (and at get.secondlife.com).
This RC14 includes a few last polishes to the Classic and Silver skins, as reported broken in the previous iteration. We have also resolved a few outstanding behavior issues to Snapshots, and to Unmuting a muted Resident (VWR-1735)…. These were small features that were introduced along the way in RC7, but needed more complete thinking and revision based on your feedback in the Issue Tracker. In RC14, these now behave logically/as expected for those features.
We expect this to be the final Release Candidate in the 1.20 viewer series, barring any Showstoppers that you may find. Please of course continue to report any new issues (large or small) in the Issue Tracker, and be sure to set “Affects Version/s” to “1.20 Release Candidate”.
- When this version 1.20 becomes an official version of the Second Life viewer, it will NOT be a mandatory upgrade; you will still be able to log in with the current viewer 1.19.1.4 or the earlier 1.19.0.5 version. (Those versions will simply let you know that a new 1.20 version is available, if you wish to download.)
To get started with this RC14 viewer, visit the Test Viewers download page (NOTE: use the links at bottom of page, under Test Viewers).
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Update 2008-07-16 05:40am : We have reverted the ~1000 hosts on 1.23.1 to 1.22.4.
Update 2008-07-15 05:28pm : An issue with names showing up as “(???) (???)” in estate ban lists is showing up on the regions which have been updated to 1.23.1. We tentatively plan to revert those regions back to 1.22 by tomorrow morning, and will probably slip the 1.23 roll-out by another day. We will also be analyzing server crash data from this pilot roll to look for other issues not previously identified, before making a firm decision. – Joshua Linden
Update 2008-07-15 02:22pm : The pilot roll to 1174 regions is complete. However, because of an error Prospero made when starting the roll, there are about 300 regions that will remain down for another 10-20 minutes. For this, he apologizes.
We have identified and fixed the memory leak that was in server version 1.23.0. As such, we will be rolling out server version 1.23.1 to Second Life this week. This includes all of the fixes from 1.23.0– see 1.23.0 blog post for a full list of changes– as well as a fix of the object text newline bug (SVC-2633), and the memory leak.
The server will be rolled out according to the schedule
- Tuesday, sometime during the day : a pilot roll to 1000 regions. We are going to do a larger-than-usual pilot roll to have a large enough sample to verify that there are no other memory leaks beyond the one we’ve discovered and fixed.
- Wednesday morning, 5AM-10AM : we will deploy server version 1.23.1 to half of Second Life.
- Thursday morning, 5AM-10AM : we will deploy server version 1.23.1 to the rest of Second Life.
As usual with rolling restarts, this is a change on the server side; there will be no required client udpates associated with this rolling restart. Regions will receive warnings starting five minutes before they are restarted. There is no way to delay the restart of a given region. Regions should restart within 10 minutes of going down. If your region stays down for more than 20 or 30 minuets, please contact support.
Update 2008/07/11 11:15PM : The deploy is complete. (Apologies this wasn’t posted at 11:15PM last night.)
Update 2008/07/11 08:45PM : The backwards roll to revert servers from version 1.23.0 to 1.22.4 has begun.
Update 2008/07/11 04:44PM : We have discovered a somewhat increased crash rate and a likely memory leak affecting some simulators in version 1.23.0. This has not yet had a widespread effect on the grid. However, if we leave it running, problems may compound. We will be reverting all regions on 1.23.0 to 1.22.4 in a rolling restart starting at 8PM tonight.
Update 2008/07/11 1:04PM : We have verified the fix on the Preview Grid. We will re-roll the hosts that were rolled this morning tonight (Friday night) starting at 8:00PM. This half of the roll will take ~3 hours, and will affect all regions on 1.23.0. Tomorrow morning, according to the original schedule, we will deploy 1.23.1 to all hosts currently on 1.22.4.
Update 2008/07/11 12:00PM: A bug (SVC-2633) was identified shortly after the roll completed. A fix has been made and has been deployed to the “Second Life Beta Server” channel of the Preview Grid for testing. The plan is to re-roll the regions with a “1.23.1″ update as soon as the fix is verified and when we can be sure that the roll will not affect grid stability. Watch the Grid Status Updates feed for additional info.
Update 2008/07/11 07:48AM : The first-half rolling restart is complete.
Update 2008/07/11 05:16AM : The first-half rolling restart has begun. We are disabling the land store for the duration of this morning’s roll.
Update 2008/07/10 08:50PM : The pilot roll to 310 regions is done.
Update 2008/07/10 08:00PM : The pilot roll to 310 regions is beginning now. (The error with the central servers mentioned below by Joshua was fixed, and the central servers are all now running version 1.23.0.)
Update 2008/07/09 07:47PM : we are postponing the rolling restart again by a day. We may need to postpone it until next week; we will make that call tomorrow (Thursday). At the moment, the plan is to have the pilot roll Thursday evening, followed by half-grid rolls on Friday and Saturday morning. The schedule below has been updated to reflect this.
[FYI - The initial slip (Tue -> Wed) was due to a subtle bug discovered during internal testing that would have affected voice chat for a small fraction of residents - this was not caught during earlier testing or reported by Beta Server testers on the Preview Grid. The next slip (Wed->Thu) follows an initial roll-out of internal web service updates on Wednesday night - errors were detected during the roll-out, so the code was immediately rolled back, we are currently investigating the issues. -- Joshua Linden]
Update 2008/07/08 03:56PM : we are slipping the rolling restart times by one day, so that the pilot roll will be Wednesday evening, and the full roll will be Thursday and Friday mornings. The schedule below has been updated to reflect this.
We will be deploying server version 1.23 to Second Life in a rolling restart next week, following the schedule:
- Tue, 07/08, Thu, 07/10, 7:30PM : a pilot roll to ~300 regions
- Wed, 07/09, Fri, 07/11, 5:00-9:00AM : a rolling restart of half the grid
- Thu, 07/10, Sat, 07/12, 5:00-9:00AM : a rolling restart of the rest of the grid
Each region will be down for about 10 minutes; regions will receive warnings starting 5 minutes before they are restarted. If your region stays down for more than 20 or 30 minutes, please contact support. There is no way to delay the restart of any given region. No client upgrades will be needed as a result of this rolling restart.
Please help us ensure this code is as bug-free as possible! Test this code on the Preview Grid.
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Today we are releasing a new Release Candidate, 1.20 RC13. If you have already been using the Release Candidate (RC12), you will be required to update to RC13 with the latest bug fixes. But, the Release Candidate is always an optional series of viewers that you may choose not to use — or use side by side on your computer with the main viewer offered on our Downloads page (or get.secondlife.com).
This RC13 introduces… drum roll… the feature VWR-5059 which enables you to switch the look and feel of the User Interface between 2 options: the classic grey color or a lighter blue/silver theme. Go to Preferences>Skins. (Side note for SL historians keeping track: As you know, the multi-month project was code named “Project Dazzle”– but that’s really the name of the architecture juggernaut work that got us to refresh the UI. In the final presentation in 1.20 Viewer, we opted to call the resulting color option by a simpler name, ‘Silver’.)
EDIT 2008-07-10 11:30PST: To be clear, the feature VWR-5059 allows you to switch between the 2 pre-installed skins only, as requested by many Residents in this 1.20 viewer. This is not the complete Skinning architecture outlined in the Skinning project… which is a long term project and takes more time. Resident-created skins will still need to update their instructions to install them, if they are posted on the SL wiki. (more…)
Today we are releasing a new Release Candidate, 1.20 RC12. If you have already been using the Release Candidate (RC11), you will be required to update to RC12 with the latest bug fixes. But, the Release Candidate is always an optional series of viewers that you may choose not to use — or use side by side on your computer with the main viewer which is always offered on our Downloads page (or get.secondlife.com).
As I mentioned in the last RC announcement, we are currently developing code which will enable you to switch the User Interface between the classic grey color or a lighter Dazzle theme (as requested in VWR-5059). But this feature is not yet tested and ready to be released. In the meantime… we are releasing RC12 with the thread monitoring “watchdog” again disabled. Also, we have also eliminated the proposed change to Snapshot behavior that appeared in RC6– in which Uploading a Snapshot would crop your screen to enforce a powers-of-two dimensions.
Please continue to report any new issues in the Issue Tracker and be sure to set “Affects Version/s” to “1.20 Release Candidate”.
To get started with the new Release Candidate, visit the Test Viewers download page (Note: use the links at bottom of page, under Test Viewers)!
Release Notes for Second Life 1.20(12) July 2nd, 2008
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Fixes:
* Fixed: VWR-7178: ‘Upload a snapshot’ cannot take full screen snapshot; limited to square images
* Fixed: Allow the –set option to be specified multiple times on the command line
* Fixed: Disable the thread monitoring (watchdog) in settings again for the Release Candidate
Localization Fixes:
* Fixed: VWR-7086: floater_buy_land.xml still contains messages regarding First Land
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