Yesterday, the 9th, has had several meanings for me the past couple years.
Other than the obvious (my birthday), its the anniversary of Uru Live’s Shutdown, for which I’ve been rather bitter and vocal about in the past. Because of that, and the activities of last year, it also became a symbol or indicator of what the year would be like, see what I would participate in.
Well, two things happened that day which could bode well for an exciting year.
First, Marie S. of the DRC posted a [small, yet appreciative][DRC] note for the day stating “we are anticipating being able to gather again with you in one place next week.” Yay! Very nice birthday gift, thanks!
Then, a couple hours later, Linden Lab (aka [Second Life][SL]) opened a new Preview. There were three basic things on this pending release:
- Estate (Island) Tools makover. More like overhaul, IMHO, and for the better. There’s more than what’s being discussed on the notes, even the wiki’s, to explain here. Suffice it to say, if you own an island sim (or several) there, you should be happy.
- A better ‘following’ camera when in a vehicle. Before it was locked (though settable by the scripter). This should make things more natural.
- Better communication on the backend, aka ‘Grid,’ for stability and scalability. Though mostly transparent to the client users, its a big step towards cleaning up the grid architecture and makes individual simulator ‘regions’ more autonomous. From the notes, many of the major functions are going through a couple central servers when it crosses the region boundries. This change will have the regions talk to each other direct, and thereby also make the grid more like a peer-to-peer network too.
There were also some scripting changes made, mostly in the data gathering for sims/regions and individual parcels.
As I said, a lot happened yesterday, and I’ve overall been happy. But between these two events, I can definately tell that my life just got *very* interesting…
–Alan
[DRC]: http://www.drcsite.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=235
[SL]: http://secondlife.com
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