Hello everybody! This week on KBAotW, I’d like to introduce you to a little feature called Media On A Parcel. With Parcel Media, you can share your movies, music, images, and even webpages with other Residents on your land. Movie night, anyone?
As always, if you have questions about Second Life, and you think the answer should be in the Knowledge Base, please stop by Documentation Office Hours today at 2pm PDT. We love to hear from you! You’ll find our valiant and scholarly Documentation team lounging on couches at our usual pier-shaped office in Beaumont.
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]
Friendly greetings! Torley, enthusiastic teacher of Second Life skills here. For your ease-of-use, I’ve reorganized the big page o’ Video Tutorials so you can faster find what you want to learn. One of the new features is that when you view the lists for “Tip of the Week” (30+ of ‘em) and “Quicktips” (75+!), columns can be sorted by category! Also, I’ll be updating the main page regularly to show highlights from my most recent videos. Experience for yourself.
In addition, I’m continually working on longer-term plans for easier searching of vidtuts, including getting more of them in our Knowledge Base and plugging them in other places as-needed; it’s good to have lots of knowledge, but even better to be able to find it.
With that being said, it’s only fair I share 20 more quick tips with you! Filmed in Second Life 1.20 Release Candidate, most of these have been suggested by some of you (thank-you!), and they’re a delicious assortment of hints ‘n’ tricks that you’ll learn something new & useful from! As I like to advertise,
“Short on time? Quicktips deliver your knowledge in 2 minutes or less, guaranteed.”
Edited for Clarity: Sorry for the confusion. The new rules do not prohibit a group from sending more than 200 messages. They do mean that if a group has more than 200 notices stored, starting with the 201st, the group can expect those notices to be regularly removed from storage in the database.
Group messages older than 14 days or in excess of 200 can be expected to be deleted from the database (once each day.) – Katt
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As part of our ongoing effort to provide you with the highest quality Second Life experience possible…we have identified and tested an issue that should help alleviate load on the databases.
Starting Tuesday, 6 May, 2008, all group notices that are older than 14 days will be removed from storage in the database. (Notices were previously held for 31 days.)The reason for this change is to help reduce load on the database. Note: Nearly *every* group that uses notices in Second Life will be effected by this change, which will be ongoing.
Groups will now be limited to 200 notices *per group* each day. Older messages, over the 200th, will be regularly removed from storage in the database. There are about 135 groups we expect will be impacted by this limit. The owner of each of these groups should see a message in-world Tuesday, notifying them of the change.
Please note that in both cases this process would remove the *oldest* notices, if any. This will start on Tuesday 6 May, 2008, and is intended to help stabilize the databases.
As part of our ongoing effort to provide you with the highest quality Second Life experience possible, part of our process is to ask ourselves, periodically, if we’re working on the right things.
Today we’d like to let you know we’re seriously considering whether Linden Lab should continue supporting Mac OS X 10.3, “Panther.” 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.
We’d like to let the Linden engineers stop working on supporting an operating system released in 2003, and instead move on to other work which will benefit a much larger group of Residents.
If we do stop supporting that version of the OS, it would not be until 60 days from now, to make sure there is plenty of time for the news to spread.
To briefly review 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,) released in October 2007 and updated Feb. 2008.
What would it mean to “stop support”? Eventually we would stop developing for the SDK (software development kit ) of that operating system, and we would also stop doing QA testing on OS 10.3.9.
What would you notice? If you are one of the few logging in with that OS, you would still be able to do so the day we stop supporting it — for some time. Exactly how long we couldn’t guarantee, because we would no longer be testing and developing to make sure it does work.
Another HOT topic I’ve been asked to do! Sculpted prims are enjoyed by the masses, but making them is a mystery to many because they’re mostly modeled with external tools. Fear not, for with Sculptypaint by Cel Edman, I show you in a little over 10 minutes JUST HOW EASY it can be to make sculpties. Even if you’ve never built anything before.
With your newfound sculptie skills, you’ll be able to astound, amuse, and amaze avatars of the opposite and/or same gender. Watch the video, follow along, and feel good about yourself:
You can download the same sculpt & surface textures I used in the video for examination.
You can also watch another video showing that sculpties + shiny + atmospheric rendering (WindLight) rocks! (All those shapes were made in Sculptypaint in a few minutes.)
LAND is GRAND and here we STAND… in a continuing quest to amplify your awesome, Torley of Linden presents almost a dozen new Second Life® Video Tutorials having anything and everything to dowith LAND! What is it? How to buy & sell? How is it managed? What about shaping the ground? Need to eject troublemakers and set your parcel to deter them?! Oh my gosh… have you ever wanted to know what all those options in About Land do? Here are your answers and more, in almost 2 hours of FREE vidtuts!
Here’s the whole list. They’re loosely arranged in an order you should watch them for maximum benefit and I weave a story through several — but feel free to skip around:
00:07 - What is land in Second Life? 01:43 - Regions, parcels, & prim limits 04:23 - Premium accounts & land ownership 04:56 - Searching for land 05:14 - Different kinds of land for sale 05:34 - Differences between Mainland & Estates 10:00 - Increasing your knowledge of what land to buy 10:33 - Teleporting to land you’re interested in 11:09 - About Land basics 12:33 - A few words of advice…
Land use introduction
00:36 - What are allowed land holdings? 00:54 - Managing land use on SECONDLIFE.COM
Region & parcel prim limits
00:13 - What are prim limits? 01:18 - A note about “primfficiency” 02:06 - Shared parcel prim limits within a region 03:13 - Abandon Land demo
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!
Looking for cool places to visit within Second Life? We are too! We’re pleased to announce that the Second Life Showcase is coming to the 1.21 viewer release, which is planned for Release Candidate in 2-3 weeks and in final form in 6-7 weeks.
For a sneak peek at this new feature, please visit Second Life Showcase on our website. The Showcase is an editorially-managed guide that highlights a variety of inworld venues and intriguing locations to new and existing Residents. For more info, read our Second Life Showcase FAQ; it includes information on how to suggest a venue for feature placement. We are currently developing an easier way to nominate inworld experiences for the Showcase from within the viewer, so keep an eye on this blog for more news!
The Second Life Showcase is all about quality over quantity. Our internal editorial team periodically selects new and/or popular venues to rotate into the various featured spots within the Arts & Culture, Fashion, Hot Spots, and Music categories. This new feature complements, but does not replace the more comprehensive Search tools within Second Life. However, it will be replacing the old Popular Places tab.
Since many of the inworld builds created by our community — small and large alike — are both amazing and overlooked, we’re introducing Second Life Showcase as an additional way for Residents to discover interesting places to visit. We hope this feature will make it easier and more effective to help those hotspots shine (instead of Popular Places). (more…)
Jeremy Linden
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