Jira improvements coming next week

Linden Lab has just announced that the Jira will return, new and improved, next week.

I quote;

Today, we’re happy to announce some changes to our JIRA implementation – the system we use to collect, track, and take action on bugs reported by users. You’ll see these changes take effect next week.

Recently, this system was working in a way that wasn’t very transparent, and it frankly wasn’t a good experience for the users who care enough about Second Life to try to help improve it, nor was it the best set-up for the Lindens tasked with addressing these issues. So you can see why we’re happy to be changing it!

Moving forward, we’re going to make our JIRA implementation a more transparent experience. All users will be able to see all BUG issues, all the time. You’ll be able to search to see if there are duplicates before submitting an issue, and if there’s a bug that’s particularly important to you, you can contribute your info to it and see when it’s been Accepted and imported to the Linden team.

You’ll also be able to comment. Before an issue is triaged, everyone can comment to help isolate and describe the issue more clearly. Do remember, there are some basic guidelines for participation that need to be followed. Once an issue is Accepted and imported by Linden Lab’s QA team, the original reporter will still be able to comment, as will Lindens and a small team of community triagers – a group that includes some third party Viewer developers and others selected by Linden Lab for having demonstrated skills in this area. This group has been invaluable in helping to keep the bug database orderly and cross-referenced as well as troubleshooting bugs before they’re triaged, and we’re glad to have their continuing help with this process.

Lastly, “New Feature Request” is back! If you’ve got a great idea for a feature, you don’t need to slip it through the system disguised as a bug report – just select the “New Feature Request” category when you submit. Commenting for this category will work just like for bug reports, and submitting improvements through this category will make things much easier for the Linden team reviewing these. Please remember that JIRA is an engineering tool – it’s not meant for policy discussions and the like nor is it a replacement for the Forums, where you can have all kinds of stimulating discussions.

If you’re one of the many who have taken the time to submit a bug report through the JIRA system – thank you! We really appreciate your work in tracking down the issues, and it’s a significant help to us as we continue to improve Second Life.

We think these changes will make for a better, more transparent and more productive experience for all of us, but if you have additional ideas on ways to improve our implementation, you can share them with us in this Forum thread.

This is a great step forward!

And it is also great to see a link added to the forum where people can discuss this news.

SL grid grows for the first time since March 2013

The amount of private estates in Second Life has been getting smaller and smaller for a long time, not a pretty sight.

But according to Tyche Sheperd, who keeps track of all these things, the amount has actually risen week on week for the first time since March 2013.

I wonder if this has something to do with the new wave of optimism that is flooding since the new CEO Ebbe Altberg has taken over and managed to make a rather good first impression.

On the 24th Tyche announced that the grid grew by 14 regions.

I quote from the SLUniverse forums;

The grid actually grew this week by 14 regions , Private Estates had net growth of 15 while Linden Owned dropped by 1

Total number of Main Grid regions is now 26145 ( 19163 private estates & 6982 Linden owned)
60 new regions were added and 17 returned to the grid, with 63 regions removed (20 were renamed and 0 came and went since last report)

A modest growth this week , the first time the Grid has grown week on week since 31st March 2013 . The growth was distributed across a range of estates – no particular estate exhibiting a significant change in size due to new regions.

Adult rated regions were also up this week by 29 to 4526 (17.3% of the grid) while General rate also grew by 9 to 3540 (13.5%)

Breakdown of current regions by Ownership and Classification:

Estate – Adult: 4180
Estate – General: 1916
Estate – Moderate: 13052
Estate – Offline: 15
Linden – Adult: 346
Linden – General: 1624
Linden – Moderate: 5012

Interesting stuff!

The Ebbe Effect?

We’ll have to wait and see if the growth continues.

 

 

Second Life can get you pregnant and other google results

Google Autocomplete gives you suggestions that may help you find something a little faster.

You see these appear while you type your search into google.

They are based on real searches that other people have done in the past, collected by Google and sorted by popularity.

Combining what people search for a lot with your personal search history gives you all sorts of interesting suggestions.

Other factors are also used to determine what to show as well as popularity, but all suggestions come from real search activity by Google users, according to Google.

In a way it gives you an idea of what people in general are looking for.

I tried a few Second Life themed searches, the results were rather interesting, funny, depressing and weird.

It may help us a bit figuring out the reputation problem has.

Anyway, here are the results, share the ones you got here!

Stephen Fry about Second Life

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stephen fry

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how we could promote Second Life and find a way to deal with some of its bad reputation.

I hate being modern, hip and groovy, but today a lot of messages are spread trough the use of ‘meme’s; a single picture with a short text or quote.

I’m sure you’ve seen them pop up now and then.

In some cases they go viral, which sounds disgusting but is a good thing, it means a lot of people share them and they get talked about, a lot.

So I reckon that making our own meme’s about Second Life, its bad reputation, misconceptions, and potential, is a cheap, fun and easy way for us to promote Second Life.

Of course it would be even better if Linden Lab did something like this, but well, Second Life is our world too, so we should stick up for it now and then, even if LL is not spending money on a new advertisement campaign or does not confront journalists who use 2007 screenshots to illustrate their articles about SL.

Anyway, I just made this meme that fights the bad reputation SL has.
The name Second Life has caused many a joker to make that 10 year old remark about how they don’t need a second one because their first one is so great… yeah right.

I think that Stephen Fry is a good name to promote SL with, like him or not, he is intelligent, famous, has a few million twitter followers, is a good writer and well, clearly has a very busy, successful and interesting life.

So I used a quote of him to promote Second Life, I think it will surprise a few people that he said that.

To be honest, he said this in 2007, I have no idea if he still uses Second Life, he may have grown sick of it.
I’ve asked him, but no reply yet.

I hope that perhaps Linden Lab will consider using someone like Fry to promote SL.

Or at least some interesting people, famous or not, who are SL users but who don’t fit the stereotype.
Show the world that Second Life is used by intelligent, educated, funny, pretty and nice people who actually also have a busy active and interesting first life.

I am sure there are a bunch of celebrities who used Second Life and still do, getting them to promote it might be a good idea.

Start with asking Stephen Fry if he still uses it!
If not, get him excited (again) about Second Life, send him the Oculus Rift the second it goes commercial… with the SL oculus ready viewer already installed…
He is known for being crazy about tech gadgets and such, he will love it.

While we’re on the topic, do you know of any celebrities who (still) use Second Life?
Getting some of them to talk about it or even just mentioning their names can give SL more publicity and reputation boosts than all the advertising they could buy.

Stephen Fry has 3 million twitter followers, imagine if he, just once, mentioned still using and loving Second Life…

Ebbe talks ToS

Ebbe Altberg, new CEO of Linden Lab is continuing his wave of communication, much to the delight of SL users everywhere.

One of the topics people are most keen to hear him talk about is the ToS debacle that I’ve written about before here.

Today on the official SL forums he said the following;

I’m still getting up to speed on that topic. I’ve had several discussions about it. It’s not a simple topic.

Trust me. It’s not becuase we have an intent to arbitrarily profit from your stuff without your permission. That would be very bad for us as we’re all about user to user. We could seriously harm ourselves if we started doing that.

But, the edge cases and the potential cost to us in certain scenarios are quite substantial.

Making the spirit and the language match up seems to be very difficult. I’ll learn more over time but for now I can’t promise anything other than what I said above.

Another step in the right direction!

Update;

Nobody knows what may happen in the future. But we have no intent to steal your stuff. I can imagine scary scenarios that are more likely to happen, that none us have control over,  that would concern me more. I don’t see how SL as we know it could be successful if we started to steal your stuff. I certainly don’t see a business model based on stealing stuff that could last very long…so I don’t really see the logic in this conversation. It sounds scary to some of you but how it could really become a real problem I don’t really know.

Linden Lab drops dio, Versu, and Creatorverse.

Just a day after Ebbe Altberg, new CEO of Linden Lab told me that he had already supported decisions that would simplify the Linden Lab portfolio, this press release went out;

After careful consideration, Linden Lab has decided to cease development and support for dio, Versu, and Creatorverse. We’re grateful for those who took the time to experiment with these products in their early days, but ultimately we have determined that due to a number of factors, we and our customers will be best served by focusing our efforts on continuing to provide exceptional service and compelling new experiences for the users of our other products.

Although it is of course sad to see these products go and very disappointing for those people who still use them, it is good news for the people of Second Life, because it looks like this will allow Linden Lab to concentrate more on their main product, Second Life.

Will Ebbe re-open the Jira?

After just one week with Linden Lab the new CEO Ebbe Altberg has been very actively communicating with his user base via a chat with bloggers, twitter but also the official Second Life website forums.

This to much delight of many.

He is answering questions and being straight forward about problems and solutions and dropping hints left right and center about things to come.

Although as a cynical old woman, I have to say that we’re still in the honeymoon period and that previous CEO’s also started with much enthusiasm and public contact with us, this didn’t always last.

Anyway, on the SL forum he was asked about communication between Linden Lab and us in general and the closing of the Jira.

Innula Zenovka asked;

“I understand, though I don’t agree with, the reasons the jira was closed.   However, it really is a major inconvenience when confronted with unexpected behaviour from scripts or the viewer, not to be able look it up in the jira to see if it’s a known issue or not, and what work-rounds might be available.

A while back, a friend contacted me to ask why a teleporter he’d made was working in some sims and not others.   We spend about half an hour trying to make it work, and decided it must be sort of bug.   I spent another hour or so playing with it in various sandboxes, and then writing up a jira about it,  explaining what the problem was and which server channels were affected, only to discover it was a known issue, was to be fixed in the next week’s roll-outs and that I’d just wasted a couple of hours because I couldn’t look it up for myself (which, in the past, would have been the first thing I’d have tried).

Scripters in particular, but all serious content creators, I think, used to use the jira as an important reference tool when investigating problems, and I’m very unhappy we no longer have it.”

To which Ebbe replied;

“Yep, that’s why we will figure out how to open things up again…plan is in the works…”
Pamela Galli wrote;

“In the opinions of many, a good place to start is to make the JIRAs public again so we will know whether an issue is a bug that has arisen, or something on our end. Very often, residents working with Lindens have identified, reproduced, and even come up with workarounds if not solutions to problems. Closing the JIRA felt like a door being slammed, esp to those of us who are heavily invested in SL.”

To which Ebbe replied;

“Funny, both engineering and product heads here also didn’t like that jira was closed and want to open it up again. Proposal for how is in the works! I hope we can figure out how to do that in a way that works/scales soon. ”

Of course this doesn’t say much, it leaves a lot to the imagination, but could it be that the Jira will be reopened?

Either way, it reinforces Ebbe’s other comments on improving communication between us and Linden Lab.

If things keep going the way they are now, we’ll soon be asking if Linden Lab will stop bothering and leave us alone! 😉

Fitted Mesh comes to Second Life

Linden Lab just made this announcement ;

Today, we’re happy to announce that Fitted Mesh is available in the main Second Life Viewer! As we’ve previously blogged, Fitted Mesh gives Second Life content creators the power to craft mesh garments that make avatars look their absolute best. We’d like to thank the vibrant community of creators for their thoughtful feedback and help testing this feature.
For more information, check out the video below, then update your Viewer to the latest release and get creative with Fitted Mesh!

And added this nice video;

This is great news, I just hope it comes to the viewer I use asap!

Suggestion for solving the large texture problems in SL

Large textures are a huge problem in Second Life, I know, I’m guilty of causing that problem myself.

If you want to make something look really nice from far but also up close, you are easily tempted to use the biggest texture allowed in SL, 1024 pixels by 1024 pixels.

In most cases this is absurd.

if you want to build a big building with a one texture façade that has lots of little details and that has to look good up close, then it makes sense.

If you prefer using 1 large texture that consists of several smaller ones so you can wrap it around a mesh object without having to use many different textures, it makes sense.

However people don’t always seem to care about the size of textures or they don’t even know they are using large images in stead of regular or small ones.

This becomes a problem when you live in a full sim with up to 100 other people who all enjoy rezzing stuff.
Yes, that is where I live.

A 1024×1024 texture takes for ever to rez, that is all the grey stuff you see in SL.
And when there are lots, it slows things down.

A 1024×1024 pixel texture uses 16 times as much memory as a 256×256 texture!
And when texture demands get too high, frame rate suffers.

As I said, it makes sense to use them in some cases but in many other cases you can use smaller ones without any noticeable loss of quality.

Linden Lab can’t solve the problem of people who use large textures on purpose, because they need big textures or just because they are lazy or don’t care.

For instance, some designers make little shoes, handbags, jewelry and sunglasses with lots of huge textures.
This makes the objects look great and who cares that they cause sims trouble somewhere outside the shop?
But really, nobody would actually notice if you use a 512/512 or 256/256 texture for the sole of that shoe, the backside of that earring or for those 80 individual pieces of diamond on your necklace…

I am trying to cut down on large textures, I promise.
But when someone in SL sends me a texture they want me to use as wallpaper in the house they rent or for whatever other reason, it is often a very large texture.
That means I will first have to download it (and usually remind the sender to give me a full perm version), then I have to open photoshop and make the texture smaller, then upload it again and pay 10 Linden for the pleasure of all that hassle.

But Linden Lab could do something about people who accidently upload large textures, who are perhaps not so good with image editing software or who just don’t know about the whole large textures issues.

Here is what I think Linden Lab could/should do, consider it as a free gift to the next CEO 😉

Add this to the texture upload window;

First of all, a nice big red warning that lets the user know he or she is uploading a large texture, the red question mark button below that warning will give them some information on why large textures are not always a good idea and rarely needed.

But when the user then clicks the change size the SL viewer rezzes several different sized versions of that picture, for instance 512×512, 256×256, 64×64, depending on the size of the original texture of course.

The user can then decide to easily, without any image software hassle, decide to upload a smaller texture.
You wanted to upload that 1024×512 pixel image, the uploader warned you, you saw that the quality really wasn’t that bad at a 512×256 resolution and uploaded that version in stead, easy, quick and we’re fighting lag.
Everybody happy.

You may think that it will be a hell of a lot of work for LL to add this to our viewers, yes it probably is although the viewers can already rescale images, try uploading a picture that is 2000×2000 pixels big, it will automatically be converted to 1024×1024.

But even if it is a lot of work for LL, it will be worth it.

Not only will a better use of textures make SL look better, it will also make it run a lot smoother.
Lag is and will be the biggest complain users have and getting rid of a lot of the big textures will make a difference.

 

Fitting mesh clothes coming to SL!

This is great news and an improvement many people have been desperately waiting for for a long time.

Linden Lab announced that they are releasing the Fitted Mesh project viewer.

The idea is that this will allow mesh clothes to fit to your body in stead of having to fit your body to the clothes.

I am not that much into fashion and gladly wear the same virtual outfit every day for months.

But my avatar is based on me in RL and I am not a Barbie or catwalk model, so unfortunately every 1920s outfit I’ve bought would not fit me unless I was willing to change my body and as I spend all my time roleplaying, I don’t suddenly want to look completely different.

Also a much thinner avatar just wouldn’t be me.

So for the last couple of years I’ve been avoiding mesh clothes, but now it seems they may even fit me.

This viewer is experimental, so it could still be a little while before this goes grid wide, also it seems it will only work on clothes specially made to work with this system.

So don’t expect to suddenly be able to fit into all your mesh clothes.

But it is coming!

If you’re interested in the technical details, want to see some screenshots and read about how it all works, follow this link to the excellent article by Inara Pey on her blog here.