Second Life's Emerald client facing obsolescence originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Yesterday, Linden Lab's interim CEO Philip Rosedale and CFO/COO Bob Komin did a talk and Q&A session in Second Life focused on where things were at, and where things were going. This week, on The Virtual Whirl, we're going to take a look at that session and see if some sense can't be made of it all.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: Linden Lab goes back to basics

The Virtual Whirl: Linden Lab goes back to basics originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 31 Jul 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

This week, we cover the final installment of our summarized history of Second Life and Linden Lab (check out the first installment or the second, if you missed them). It's only possible to cover a tiny fraction of the events that took place in the space we have here, but the highlights paint an interesting picture.

We'll be working our way from 2008 to June 2010, and looking at what future directions we expect from there.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: A brief history of Second Life, 2008-2010 and beyond

The Virtual Whirl: A brief history of Second Life, 2008-2010 and beyond originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 10 Jul 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Service-based viewers for Second Life are a little different to the standard kind of viewer software that users might be used to. Standard viewers are downloaded to your PC, run on them and talk directly to the servers. Service-based viewers (also sometimes referred to as 'cloud-based') are either running on a remote server through a web interface, or running on a cloud (or other remote system) and sending data and graphics to a thin client that you run locally. The ill-fated Vollee client was one such example, and Comverse is another.

Most Some of the (relatively few) extant viewers for mobile devices (iPhones, iPads, et al), and web-based Second Life viewers like AJAX Life are service-based viewers (as are a number in development), and Linden Lab seems bent on closing them down.

Continue reading Linden Lab guns for service-based Second Life viewers

Linden Lab guns for service-based Second Life viewers originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The other day we covered a lawsuit by Corey Fahy (AKA Belial Foulsbane in Second Life) vs Linden Lab, various third-party viewer developers, content creators and others.

While there doesn't seem to be any case to really answer (because you can't copyright a name, method, process or algorithm, and Fahy seems ineligible for legal costs and statutory damages in any case) things definitely took a turn for the weird last week.

Continue reading Fahy vs Linden Lab: This just gets weirder

Fahy vs Linden Lab: This just gets weirder originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Last week, on Thursday 8 April, Corey Fahy in Philadelphia filed a lawsuit against Linden Lab and more than 25 others, in the Pennsylvania East District Court (case number 2:2010cv01561, assigned to judge Joel Harvey Slomsky). Fahy alleges that an algorithm in one of his Second Life products has been subjected to copyright infringement, accompanied by the usual requests for damages, statutory damages, ten times damages, attorney's fees and all that.

Where do we even begin? We'll spare you most of the cruft and go straight to the heart of the problems that we can see with this particular lawsuit.

Continue reading Fahy vs Linden Lab: No case to answer?

Fahy vs Linden Lab: No case to answer? originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

As we previously predicted, the Second Life 2.0 viewer is going live today, meeting the originally slated release target of Q1 2010, if only by a few hours. The 2.0 viewer has been in public beta since 23 February.

In addition to the new viewer, its rearranged user-interface, slate color scheme and slick Shared Media implementation, today sees the launch of two new Orientation experiences and a selection of new starter avatars to select from (we wonder if any of them are blue).

Continue reading Second Life 2.0 goes live today

Second Life 2.0 goes live today originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Last week, the promised update of Linden Lab's Third-Party Viewer (TPV) policies crept out onto the Second Life Web-site with little fanfare. After the fuss caused by the tangle of legal incompatibilities, muddled terminology and ambiguous phrasing in the first version, the Lab said it would go back and address the problems, and get the policy document fixed.

So, you'd think they'd have gotten it right this time around, right? We certainly did. We were wrong.

Continue reading Second Life third-party viewer policies get an update but still fail to do the job

Second Life third-party viewer policies get an update but still fail to do the job originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Imprudence project has released version 1.3(beta 1) of their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers, and the only third-party viewer that we're certain complies with all of the source and asset licensing.

This edition merges all things Imprudence with the codebase for 1.23, providing one of the fastest and smoothest viewers currently available that we're aware of, along with the usual featureful experience.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.3.0(beta 1) released

Imprudence 1.3.0(beta 1) released originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The hallmark of a good license is that it is clear, easy to understand and unambiguous. The gold-standard for a good contract is that it is all of the above and provides all parties with equal amounts of protection. There are bonus points for not conflicting with rights guaranteed by law, or with other prerequisite licenses or agreements.

Linden Lab's Third Party Viewer (TPV) policies, as published on Tuesday, regrettably reflect none of these ideals. We'd go so far as to say that it's the worst day's work that we've seen come out of the Lab to-date. So much so that almost immediately after publishing them the Lab has sent them back to legal for both clarification and rewriting.

Continue reading Second Life third-party viewer policies not well received

Second Life third-party viewer policies not well received originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Over about the last 60-90 minutes, Tom Hale's been delivering a keynote at the SL Pro! conference held in Second Life. There are multiple hefty announcements from Linden Lab involved, and some of that should be reaching the official Second Life blogs as you read this.

Golly, what do we have among all of this? We've got the Second Life 2.0 viewer public beta, which should be available right now. We've got the new third-party viewer registry and third-party policies being announced today; We've got changes in the names of content-ratings. We've got the official release of open source viewer Snowglobe and the announcement of Snowglobe 2; and all capped off with a slew of supporting FAQs, guides, video tutorials, wiki pages and what-have-you!

Continue reading A red-letter day for Second Life, Second Life 2.0 viewer and more

A red-letter day for Second Life, Second Life 2.0 viewer and more originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Over the last few weeks, Linden Lab staff have been talking about a few upcoming Second Life projects during their in-world office-hours sessions. Now the Lab has always been quick to stress that the accuracy and reliability of information obtained through those venues is questionable, and that we shouldn't assume that anything said at them is actually accurate.

With that in mind, we went back to the Lab about several identifiable (or at least apparent) projects to get the skinny on them and find out what's actually happening with them, and where they're at.

Continue reading Linden Lab investigates new/updated technologies for Second Life

Linden Lab investigates new/updated technologies for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're going to take a selection of reader questions that we've received in comments and in the virtual mailbag and do our best to offer up some useful answers. Join us as we whirl through the mail.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: Questions from the virtual mailbag

The Virtual Whirl: Questions from the virtual mailbag originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Welcome to The Virtual Whirl, a new weekly Massively column covering virtual environments generally. The term 'virtual world' is slowly seeing less use, being supplanted by the more general 'virtual environment', but the world term still has a fair bit of life left in it.

Virtual environments covers a whole lot of ground. From William Crowther's original efforts in 1976 that based a game in a virtual version of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, virtual environments have been a part of gaming, artificial intelligence and behavioral research, modeling, telemetry and process control and more.

Nowadays we're seeing Second Life, Blue Mars, There.com, IMVU and others trying to find places in non-game contexts, like content-development and prototyping, publishing and performance, entertainment and social, education and business; efforts that are met with varying amounts of success.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: Community guide to Virtual Worlds

The Virtual Whirl: Community guide to Virtual Worlds originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab says it hopes to have a public beta of the Second Life 2.0 viewer in February, presumably targeting an official release in March. Given that the Lab wants to move forward with quarterly planned viewer releases, this means that the current Second Life 1.23 viewer will lose official support at approximately the end of June.

Linden Lab says it has already finalized features and the user-interface at this stage, and is not planning on making any substantive changes between now and release. Any work beyond bug-fixes and stabilization for the viewer is to be deferred to the mid-year 2.1 release.

Continue reading Second Life 2.0 viewer for February/March

Second Life 2.0 viewer for February/March originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Quite a delicious seasonal treat for those that use the third-party Second Life viewer from the Imprudence project, as they've got a test-build out today with all the usual goodness, but rebased against the 1.23 source tree.

What the heck does that even mean anyway? Well, it means that the Imprudence viewer now supports adult content ratings and restrictions, and is compatible with a larger variety of third-party features and extensions than previously.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.3 merge test build for Second Life

Imprudence 1.3 merge test build for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Imprudence project has released version 1.2 of their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers, and after some months in beta (and a couple of false starts), the latest release version of this viewer is available.

There are some user-interface changes this time around, the ability to backup and restore your own intellectual property, an improved radar/minimap, improved third-party simulator support, RLVa support, optional vertical IM tabs, double-click go-to and teleports, more world map data and a host of other tweaks and features.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.2 viewer for Second Life

Imprudence 1.2 viewer for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Back in 2007, Linden Lab formed regional partnerships with companies to operate localized portals for the Second Life platform, called the Global Provider Program (also sometimes referred to by the Lab as the Gold Provider Program, though distinct from the Gold Solution Provider Program). Linden Lab identified three non-English regional markets that it felt were priorities for support and localization: Brazil, Korea and Germany.

The first of the providers was Kaizen Games in Brazil, followed by Barunson Games (then called T-Entertainment) in Korea in October 2007. Bokowsky and Laymann might constitute a third partner in this program for Germany, but the the actual arrangement there isn't very clear.

Continue reading Second Life Global Provider Program troubled?

Second Life Global Provider Program troubled? originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Back, just before Halloween, a Linden Lab staffer accidentally sent an email intended for internal circulation to a mailing list containing quite a number of Second Life users. We were sent a copy a few minutes later, and the email was widely circulated among developers of third-party Second Life viewers by Halloween.

What caught people's eye about the email was how harsh it was when it came to describing aspects of the upcoming Second Life Viewer 2.0 user-interface (the key feature of that software). It certainly didn't pull many punches leveling criticism at various design choices that were obviously in evidence in the evaluation version that had come up for testing.

And for just that reason we are, after a little thought, rather heartened by it.

Continue reading Leaked test feedback offers insights into Linden Lab design processes

Leaked test feedback offers insights into Linden Lab design processes originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Mark Kingdon, Linden Lab's CEO, has been a bit of a mystery figure since his appointment about a year and a half ago. While he has not been uncommunicative, it's been hard to get a very good sense of the man at the helm of Linden Lab, his passions, interests and direction.

We were very pleased, therefore, when he took the time to sit down with us and answer a whole grab-bag of questions, about himself, about Linden Lab, and - of course - about Second Life. Bear with us, because we've got a lot of ground to cover.

Continue reading Exclusive interview with Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon

Exclusive interview with Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Yesterday, Linden Lab made an announcement regarding third-party (or after-market, if you prefer) viewers that has so far elicited a vociferous response from some of the more outspoken Second Life users, and those involved in after-market viewer-development. The announcement largely revolves around upcoming policies that have yet to be decided.

This is compounded partly by there being two announcements. One directly emailed out and one on the blog, both of which carry somewhat different information. The announcement is a lead-up to a series of "brown bag" sessions which are advertised to determine the details of the scheme.

Continue reading Linden Lab to alter third-party Second Life viewer policies

Linden Lab to alter third-party Second Life viewer policies originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

While it has been called Viewer 2009 once or twice, almost every Linden Lab staffer who mentions it calls it Second Life 2. Once on the drawing-board as a major overhaul of Second Life both at the server and at the viewer (client), the idea of a huge developmental jump was abandoned some years ago, and all of the features slated for Second Life 2 were added to Second Life 1, incrementally.

Well, except for the last item on the list, the user-interface. Essentially Second Life seems to now everything SL2 was originally planned to be, sans the new interface.

Continue reading Looking forward to Second Life 2.0

Looking forward to Second Life 2.0 originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Imprudence project has released the next beta in this release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers (and just about the only one whose licensing status we've been able to verify with confidence).

The new beta has some changes to the pie menu (which often makes people just a little tense), updates Kitty Barnett's RLVa support, fixes 24 bugs including some search and appearance problems, two crashes and some assorted UI weirdness that crept into the last build.

The first round of Windows binaries in this beta release had a minor installation issue, but fresh installers were issued quickly and have sorted that out.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.2 beta2 viewer for Second Life

Imprudence 1.2 beta2 viewer for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Now, we must admit that we find this one both amusing and appropriate. In short, Linden Lab has sent 50 or more Second Life users who were using the after-market NeilLife viewer on the spank-bus to ban-town. Not just for using the viewer, but for copying content that they shouldn't ought to have.

What's clever is how Linden Lab caught and detected them.

Continue reading Linden Lab rounds up and ejects a bunch of copyright infringers

Linden Lab rounds up and ejects a bunch of copyright infringers originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Imprudence project has started a new release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers, and the new 1.2 beta contains a number of delicious treats.

The new beta features a grid manager, new minimap radar with some useful features, optional support for Restrained Life (using RLVa), a selection of Emerald viewer features, object backups (for your own creations only), and a heap more. Our personal favorite is the option to have a draw-distance slider on-screen, as it is perhaps our single most-commonly used UI feature.

Continue reading New: Imprudence 1.2 beta viewer for Second Life

New: Imprudence 1.2 beta viewer for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has launched a contest on 99designs to obtain a new logo for their Snowglobe Second Life viewer. The prize has been prepaid to 99designs and the chosen winner will be paid the sum of US$295 by them.

Of course, a logo to these requirements would normally cost quite a bit more through normal channels. We can't help thinking that if Linden Lab were truly thinking of this as community-sourcing, that they'd be offering commercial rates to the winner. As it is, the proffered prize is much closer to the bottom of the range of logo-design prizes on 99designs than it is to the top.

Continue reading Linden Lab chases new logo for Second Life Snowglobe viewer

Linden Lab chases new logo for Second Life Snowglobe viewer originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

We'd like to caution our Second Life readers about a dodgy Second Life viewer that's currently doing the rounds under rather dubious circumstances. The viewer is calling itself Neil Life, and purports to include some content-ripping features over and above those normally available to users.

One particular feature of the viewer, apparently related to a permissions exploit, appears to have triggered Linden Lab to perform an emergency update to Second Life to close the exploit last week.

The viewer was widely advertised last week with distributed notecard advertisements in-world which purported to have been created by famed resident, Gwyneth Llewelyn. In actual fact, a copy of one of her existing notecards had simply had the text replaced so that it appeared that she had authored it.

(This is one of the main reasons we don't generally accept the provenance of notecards in Second Life)

Continue reading Dodgy Second Life viewer doing the rounds

Dodgy Second Life viewer doing the rounds originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Snowglobe, Linden Lab's community-developed after-market Second Life viewer has hit another milestone with a 1.1 release.

This version mostly focuses on bug-fixes, but has a few additional enhancements. A nasty race condition in texture-fetching has (hopefully) been resolved, reducing viewer crash-rates, bump-mapping has been corrected, the minimap has gotten some tweaking and tuning, and more. Read on for the complete list.

Continue reading Snowglobe viewer 1.1 released for Second Life

Snowglobe viewer 1.1 released for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab recently warned Second Life users to avoid the use of the new bulk permissions editor, a feature which was added in the 1.23 viewer. There's a lot of confused conversation and observations about the matter, some of which are contradictory, because what is happening is confusing. Some claim that the bug makes content fully-permissive. That's not entirely the case.

The essential problem that is at the heart of JIRA issue SVC-4444 is that the bulk permissions feature fails to correctly and completely communicate with internal grid systems at some level and under some circumstances. All the while appearing as if it has actually done what it is supposed to have done..

Continue reading Linden Lab warns Second Life users to avoid bulk permissions feature

Linden Lab warns Second Life users to avoid bulk permissions feature originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

During the first part of the year, Linden Lab spent some time working on a new installer for Second Life. Development seemed to halt in April, but it is still a rather interesting little tool.

Weighing in at a measly 350KB under Windows, the application downloads, installs, then runs the much larger Second Life viewer, and does so quite quickly and painlessly while displaying an assortment of positive marketing messages. The whole process takes a couple of minutes, depending on your network connection.

Continue reading A sneak peek at the unreleased Second Life setup tool

A sneak peek at the unreleased Second Life setup tool originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

A while back, Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale announced a new Second Life viewer development project. That project ultimately grew along lines similar to that of third-party viewer project, Imprudence, breaking down many barriers to user contributions, and adopting a more agile methodology. After only a couple of release-candidates, the result is already available.

One of the biggest developments you might see in the Snowglobe viewer is that the map is now an order of magnitude faster to load, rather than taking several fractions of forever, as is traditional. This is the start of a new texture-transfer pipeline, which we can reasonably expect to become standard in future viewers, and to encompass more kinds of textures, however there's a new caching architecture which should benefit all textures.

Continue reading Linden Lab releases Snowglobe 1.0 for Second Life

Linden Lab releases Snowglobe 1.0 for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab has released the new viewer, bringing Second Life up to 1.23 a few days earlier than expected, off the back of a very short release-candidate cycle.

The new viewer brings three things with it: The new Adults-only continent (formerly Ursula and now Zindra), user-verification by documents or payment-status, and a new Adults-only content rating that opens up Second Life to more extreme sexual and violent content.

Continue reading Second Life moves to 1.23, opens adult continent, allows more content

Second Life moves to 1.23, opens adult continent, allows more content originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC4 is the fifth release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). It's looking increasingly like the objective is to release before the Second Life sixth anniversary (23 June).

Barely any changes this time around, so either Linden Lab isn't really aware of any showstoppers or doesn't perceive them as such. The context menus have had one small reversion, there are updates to the Mac crash reporter, and a fix relating to object updates that affected poseball visibility.

Continue reading Second Life 1.23 (RC4) now available

Second Life 1.23 (RC4) now available originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Imprudence project has reached the end of the second release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is now in official release. Imprudence is one of our favorite Second Life viewers.

Context (pie) menus have been reorganized again, there's improved support for sound and streaming media through gstreamer, some backported fixes from the official 1.22 viewer, and confirmation popups have been added for a number of operations. There's also a Mac version, which last year's 1.0 release lacked due to hardware and development constraints (though only for Intel-based Macs, unless there's significant demand for a universal binary.

Continue reading Imprudence 1.1.0 for Second Life

Imprudence 1.1.0 for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC3 is the fourth release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). The 1.23 series is being fast-tracked, as it is scheduled to go live by the end of June.

We're expecting this one or the next one to be the last before official release -- because frankly, there's not a lot of time-left before the Lab's self-imposed deadline. Probably the biggest reason you'd want to try this one out, is that it fixes a bug introduced in an earlier official viewer where cached information was discarded too aggressively, leading to things that should have been cached having to be redownloaded.

Oh, there's a bunch of good bug-fixes besides that, but that's really the one you want. Read on for the rest.

Continue reading Second Life 1.23 (RC3) now available

Second Life 1.23 (RC3) now available originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The 1.23 Second Life viewer with the necessary support for Adult content is still being rushed to meet a June deadline, the exact reason for which seems a little unclear. There's some outstanding issues with the viewer release-candidates, but it seems fairly low on actual showstoppers and looks likely to make an official release in the roughly one fortnight remaining.

Definitions for the content ratings have been finalized, though they show little noticeable deviation from Linden Lab's originally proposed drafts. It appears that all the changes have been simple explanatory wording changes. The PG rating holds a couple of surprises, though.

Continue reading Second Life adult content updates: Viewers, namechanges, grannies and grade-schoolers

Second Life adult content updates: Viewers, namechanges, grannies and grade-schoolers originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC2 is the third release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). The 1.23 series is being fast-tracked, as it is scheduled to go live by the end of June.

This release features six crash-fixes, problems with window-sizing, and issues with trees. Restore-to-last-position has been disabled, to prevent potential inventory-loss. There are some more pie-menu changes, but some of the changes in the previous candidates have been reverted.

Continue reading Second Life 1.23 (RC2) now available

Second Life 1.23 (RC2) now available originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 21 May 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC1 is the second release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). The 1.23 series is being fast-tracked, as it is scheduled to go live by the end of June.

The last RC's propensity to false-trigger at least one anti-virus program has been sorted out, along with several fixed to appearance updates (though if you try a strip-tease, you'll likely crash the viewer), along with a bunch of bug-fixes that include some crashes and a failure to startup.

Continue reading Second Life 1.23 (RC1) now available

Second Life 1.23 (RC1) now available originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 08 May 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC0 is the start of a new series of release candidates, apparently scheduled to complete by the end of June.

This release features a number of changes, including the promised Shadow code (which is more than a little experimental), and the new support features for Adult content. While it has only been out for a day, there's quite a bit of controversy over a reordering of texture layers on the avatar head, which reportedly breaks a lot of skin content and makes avatar faces that use them appear 'clownish'.

Certain European locale settings may cause this release to crash on startup, and the viewer itself may be unusually slow to start up.

Continue reading Second Life 1.23 (RC0) now available [updated]

Second Life 1.23 (RC0) now available [updated] originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 01 May 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Thanks to a piping-hot, fresh build of the Second Life viewer, we've been able to get a better look at the upcoming content controls that are due in the next major release of the Second Life viewer.

As expected, there are now three content ratings available (though it is uncertain as to what their final names will actually be. Using "PG" as a content rating, for example, has legal issues): PG content, Mature content and Adult content.

While it hasn't yet been determined exactly what content will fit into each category (actually, we barely have any idea about the existing content categorizations half the time), the actual usage and integration looks pretty straightforward.

Continue reading Upcoming viewer changes for Second Life adult content

Upcoming viewer changes for Second Life adult content originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.