Michael Linden's Blog
Now open for Resident inspection — Bay City! Regions intended for a vibrant urban experience, double primmed for your pleasure. Roads, parks, a movie theater and city services are already in place, maintained by Linden Lab. Close to the offices and shops of Nova Albion, with broad canals usable for travel and tourism — but with broad, clean beaches and plentiful vegetation.
Rail and water trolleys carry the Residents of Bay City about; a balloon tour provides dazzling aerial views of the city. Connections to the world at large by ship, seaplane, dirigible, road and rail are available.
In just over a week, auctions will begin for the many attractive parcels in Bay City’s first twelve Regions. Ranging in size from about 512 square meters to nearly 2000 square meters, the parcels cannot be terraformed, joined or divided by their owners. Buyers will receive a package of textures and objects to help with their building projects.
Governor Linden said in a pre-recorded statement, “We hope that the Residents of this new city will produce interesting and attractive structures, in styles appropriate to the period 1930 to 1960 when most of our buildings were erected. In any case, the Residents of Bay City will form a unique and bustling community.”
Bay City — easily reached by Route 66 from Nova Albion, or by sea via the Straits of Shermerville.
“Bay City — the City by the Bay.” Directions Today: Bay City is so new it doesn’t show on the map yet, but it is there, and it’s worth a visit! To get there, open your Map in-world, search for Cape Haven, and teleport there. Bay City will be SOUTH of you.
You can open the Mini-Map to see which direction you need to go, just fly up above the water (in Cape Haven you land on the ocean floor) and then fly due South to visit the new Bay City — the City by the Bay.” [Edited to add directions for today, -- Katt Linden]
So our gangs of skilled Moles are ready with the components to expand the Second Life road network. We’ll try to match the roads to the terrain, and to the existing road styles … but our eager little insectivores have some creative ideas, too.
For the first wave of expansion, we’ve identified half a dozen routes in the “Atoll” continent. Here are the proposed routes and the survey. Make your choice!
We’ll give the survey until at least Friday to run, and then we’ll put the LDPW to work. Wave when you see a mole in a distinctive orange vest, and remember to “give ‘em a brake” when you’re driving in a construction zone.
[UPDATE on 1 May 2008] We’ve had 653 responses to the poll as of 2:18 pm SLT today. 35.9% of the respondents chose Route 1 as their first choice, followed by Route 2 with 25.8%. Route 2 had 25.7% of the second choice votes, followed by Route 1 with 20.0%.
Routes 5 and 6 never got more than 7% each in the first and second choice polls … third choice voting was spread pretty evenly among all the routes.
Our moles will begin work immediately on Route 1. Thank you for your votes and the discussion!
“What is well done is done soon enough.” — Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas
We’re going to have some kind of poll or voting process very soon to let Residents choose the first set of new roads being built. There will be maps to show the roads in the public wiki. The “Highway Moles” have been working on systems of bridges, roadway, signage, etc. to make these new routes extra nifty!
The Department of Public Works is ready to open Bay City to public inspection pretty soon — probably next week! The connection from the Nova Albion regions is being massaged by skilled Linden Lab engineers even now.
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Work proceeds apace on the Bay City regions as LDPW Moles build their little hearts out and we expect to be nearing completion by month’s end. So far they’ve show themselves to be as industrious, professional and fun loving as any insectivore you’re likely to meet and the content being created is certainly on pace to set the standard in these new urban spaces.
Thoughts on scripting:
– Bay City has a couple of major scripting requirements, drawbridges and the trolleys. The physical trolleys will run at a fixed height, and at a fixed north-south distance in each Region they’re in — thus they should move pretty smoothly over Region boundaries. Scripting will deal with starting and stopping at drawbridges, stops, and the ends of the line. Drawbridges are pretty much “door” scripts, but we want some “coordinated” activity of various objects when bridges go up or down, and some limits or pauses to prevent malicious “flapping” of the city’s bridges. Some of the bridges will be “paired” (two-leaf) bascule bridges; and we may try to have coordinated light signals or such … maybe.
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Members of the Governance Team will be holding office hours on an island in the Kremer region ( http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kremer/164/137/27 ) . We’ll be answering questions from the community about the Terms of Service and Community Standards, providing help on how to have an un-troubled Second Life, and giving some information on how the team resolves abuse reports.
However, the team can’t accept abuse reports at the meeting; tell you about the status of any reports; discuss the outcome of any reports or situations; or discuss the account status of any Residents.
Office hours are listed at:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Office_Hours/GTeam
See you there!
For quite a while now Second Life has been home to a variety of jumbo-sized prims, megaprims, and other larger than the usual ten-meters-maximum prims. The original “megaprims” were produced by Residents’ manipulation of the client last year; “new” ones cannot be made, but the existing supply can be (and are) copied and distributed. Linden Lab doesn’t support or encourage the use of these prims, but our policy up until now has been ‘live and let live’.
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A big part of the 1.15.0 release was a revamp of the systems behind the Group (and Conference) IM mechanisms, moving from a single server to a distributed set of systems. Obviously, this migration didn’t go without a hitch.
This bug summarizes both the problem and the pain pretty well:
We have fixes for the following issues undergoing testing internally, and they should be deployed early next week. Unfortunately, to deploy them will require a short grid downtime (20-30 minutes). Once we have tested the fixes, we will announce a time for this update.
- “X has left the session” is not seen when someone has spoken then left the group IM session
- “X has left the session” message sent when it shouldn’t
- Group IMs take up to 5 minutes to get through to you after a teleport.
There is one more case that will unfortunately require both a server and viewer update. We will evaluate the timing of releasing this based on feedback - kicking everyone off the grid for 1-2 hours and requiring a new download is not something we take lightly, and while the problem is irritating, we don’t want to make the cure worse. The issue is:
- ”Group chat IM reopens and error is received when attempting to send a message after user has closed group chat session”
Please report additional issues seen in the 1.15.0 release at our Issue Tracker [ http://jira.secondlife.com ].
We anticipate making an optional viewer update available within the next week or two with many accumulated fixes.
Our apologies in advance for the inconvenience, and our thanks to the Residents while we continue to improve Second Life.
[UPDATE 9:25 PM] Charity and I found and fixed one cause of vending machines and llEmail failing. We’re aware there are still problems. The problem is usually with in-world objects that receive email. In general, sending llEmail is not affected and newly created/rezzed objects are not affected. In some cases, restarting the server of the affected region can address the problem. We’re still working on it. I’m sorry it’s still broken. James Linden
[UPDATE 6:19PM] The problem is not related just to email. We are experiencing continued login issues, the friends list loading slow and IMs and are not always successful after a teleport. There may also be issues with group IMs failing and the map not updating as quick as it should. We have a operations working on it and it should be all resolved soon. We’ll keep everyone updated as it develops. Thanks! - Chadrick Linden
[5:44pm] — Linden Lab has received reports of trouble with e-mails between scripts, and from scripts to outside of Second Life — all using the llEmail function. The engineers are looking into it; if there is a problem, we’ll fix it as soon as possible! — Michael Linden
12:01pm - After yesterday’s update, we had reports of some problems in Second Life subsequent to the version 1.15.0 update — issues with land transfers, logins, IMs, and the LindEx.The land transfer problem was quickly fixed; but to apply the other fixes, we needed to shut down Second Life for about an hour (or so), starting at 10am PDT on Thursday, 26 April. No new client download was required.
The downtime ran until just after noon. Very sorry about that!
KNOWN ISSUE: a remaining problem will cause Residents to not get group IMs/conferences for a minute or so after teleporting. The engineers are looking into this issue. - Michael Linden
It’s another update-ey day in Second Life. While the regular flavor Grid is inaccessible, feel free to leave comments here!
[If you're in need of an SL fix, you can still log in to the Beta grid!]
12:30pm - Grid’s back up and accessible; log in and have fun! - Michael Linden
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