Within the last few hours Linden Lab have announced that the CEO of Linden Lab Ebbe Altberg will be appearing at a live Town Hall chat session on Thursday 13th September 2018 at 9.30am SLT/PDT.
Ebbe Altberg will be talking about the latest updates on whats being worked on in Second Life and what is being planned including specific updates on the product development roadmap.
Ebbe will be answering questions from the selected submissions from the Second Life community. The location of the live town hall event will be announced near to the actual date of the session.
I am looking forward to attending this town hall chat session because they are always pretty interesting. Read the full blog announcement below…
With SL15B behind us (and SL16B to look forward to!) we thought it was time to have another Town Hall, and give Residents a chance to ask about Second Life and hear the latest news on what is being worked on and planned in Second Life. We’ll also share specific updates on our product development roadmap, as discussed earlier this year.
Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg will be appearing at a “Town Hall” chat session on Thursday, September 13th 2018 at 9:30 a.m. (SLT/Pacific). This is your chance to interact directly with Ebbe as he discusses 2018 and beyond.
Got a question you want to ask? Post it in the Community Forum thread “September 2018 – A Conversation with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg” in advance of the Town Hall. Questions will be selected from all submissions made prior to Sept. 10, so make sure to weigh in now!
Don’t forget to mark your calendars for Sept. 13 to see if your question is selected. On that day, you can join us live for the Town Hall meeting. Location will be publicized closer to the event – stay tuned!
We’ll see you inworld soon!
Don’t forget to mark your calendars and please spread the word.
Islandz is the new official name for the new grid opening soon after the closure of InWorldz recently.
Islandz will be a closed grid and will not be hypergrid enabled.
On Sunday 19th August Beth Reischl started the setup for the database recovery apparently and once that has been completed then work can start on the OARS.
So far no date has been set for the opening of Islandz. Stay tuned for further updates very soon.
According to the latest sims report on the SLUniverse Forums it looks like Second Life has a brand new continent north east on the map. There are 80 SSP brand new regions at the moment which are closed to the public. It appears these regions (SSP1 – SSP80) are marked as Linden owned at this time.
It will be interesting to see what these regions will be used for and whether it will be open to the public in the near future.
New SSP continent
Tyche Shepherd mentioned this information on the new continent – see below
A brand new 80 region terraformed continent appeared on the grid last week . Currently closed to the public it’s composed of 80 moderate rated contiguous regions names SSP1 to SSP80 ,I’m assuming these are Lab owned (though it’s nearest neighbours are Private Estates) and have marked them as Linden Lab owned.
Hopefully the lab will let us know soon about these new regions.
The Shelter in Second Life will be celebrating it’s 14th birthday on Monday 20th August 2018. The Shelter has been a safe place for new avatars in Second Life to get started with the basics, socialise with others and get started exploring the grid.
It’s definitely one of the oldest resident run help organisations since August 2004 in Second Life. The Shelter was one of the first places I visited on the grid when I transferred over many years ago. I loved attending the events over the years here.
On 16th August a new Sansar release became available which includes more SimpleScripts, three new options when taking snapshots and Edit Mode improvements. This is another exciting release with tons of new features to enjoy from the Sansar team.
Now when you take a Screenshot in Sansar, you will have the option to share to it your Profile on Sansar.com. In the future we hope to bring this feature into the Sansar client.
More SimpleScripts
We have three more SimpleScripts that have being added to all users inventories. In addition to the ones we released previously, we adding the following:
SimpleDispenser
SimpleMedia
SimpleObjectReset
SimpleDispenser allows you create an object that can spawn otherobjects. For example, you can create an Vending Machinethat, when you hit a button (SimpleInteraction) spits out a Soda Can.
The script also comes with options to clear all objects spawned by SimpleDispenser, as well as giving them a directional velocity when spawned. You can visit Dice Dispenser to see an example of this script in use.
SimpleMedia allows for media switching between different videos from YouTube or Twitch. Combined with a SimpleInteraction and you can create a set of channels that you can hop between at the push of a button.
SimpleObjectReset can be put on an object, so that when our friends – SimpleInteraction or SimpleCollision – are activated, the objects are returned to the position they were initially set at.
You can see this at work with all of the games in the Greenwall experience from Bowling, to Shuffleboard, to Cornhole – many of these games will have a “Reset” button to return all of the game pieces to their starting position.
If you want to learn how to use SimpleScripts in your experiences, or want to find out how to get started creating your own world in Sansar – tune into our weekly stream on Twitch.
That’s what’s new, let’s dive into what is improved!
Add to Calendar
Our recent “Add to Calendar” feature on the Sansar website, is now being brought into the Sansar client! Now you can add it to your calendar to make sure you never miss an event, you can even add an event to your Google Calendar, or other 3rd party calendars.
Edit Mode improvements
These improvements to Edit Mode are one of the biggest parts of today’s release, and expect more improvements in the next release towards the end of August/start of September.
Scene Objects
You can now rename an object in the Scene Objects window, and each object in the Scene Objects window will now have a unique icon to help identify items.
Toggle Visibility and Selectability per Object
Tired of trying to select something, but something else keeps getting the way? Now you can hide specific objects by either making them invisible to you (that will still be visible in the experience). You can also make an object “unselectable” so that you can’t click on it unless you want to, such as the walls of house you have finished placing.
Generate Scene Reports
We’re looking at ways to surface more information about experiences for our advanced creators. So now we’re adding Scene reports! You can now export a .CSV breakdown of every object in your scene, including: Object Name, Estimated Size for Download, Number of Textures, Number of Triangles.
Other improvements include Locking Persistence – a new session will now remember what objects you “Locked” from movement. You can now also import lights in a .FBX file allowing you to set lights to an object before you bring it into Sansar, and those lights will still be editable in Sansar.
The biggest change is that we are doubling the number of parameters in a script from 10, to 20. We are certain our scripting community will be excited to utilise the newfound creativity this can offer them, especially since we have added HTTP capabilities in our last release.
The annual Rockcliffe Conference 2018 will be happening on 9th – 10th November at the historic Fort Mason Center near San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Check out the schedule here.
Theme: The Future Present. The Annual Rockcliffe University Consortium Conference (RUCC) takes traditional conferencing methods and converts them into experiential ones. Attendees can expect a dynamic mixture of sessions, excursions, and critical discussion, all around the topic of innovative technology and its application to education, and how the two can impact our students’ preparedness for the digital world and a continually disrupted job market.
The deadline for registering for Rockcliffe’s Annual Conference on technology and education is 31st August 2018. Only a few weeks to go left to register.
The conference will be live streamed into Second Life for all those that can’t attend in person. If you can make it to the conference then you can expect all of this.
Keynotes
“Learning for the Future: Tinkering with the Schema of School” with Dr. Pamela Redmond, Touro University
“To Boldly Go: Education, Technology, and Captain Kirk” with Dr. Chris Haskell from Boise State University
Experiential Play sessions that focus on how the learning experience is influenced by the learning environment, including an opportunity to experience the California Academy of Sciences;
Workshop sessions that will focus on innovating the way we teach;
Hands on Play sessions with a focus on Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) allowing users to create, share and reuse interactive online content; and
Roundtable sessions on deconstructing experiential learning components and how they impact on learning.
In the last week other OpenSim grids have seen a boost in new users switching over. The Kitely Market sales grew by 300%, DigiWorldz and Discovery Grid saw increased growth in sales recently.
The new grid Infiniti Grid is under development and I’m sure we will hear more information about it soon. It would be great to see Relay For Life and other annual events come back again.
On 2nd August 2018 Ilan Tochner the CEO of Kitely announced a new record of a 300% sales jump on the Kitely Market since InWorldz shut down last week. This is a huge jump in sales growth for the popular Kitely Market.
DigiWorldz and Discovery Grid saw increased growth in sales during the past week. Other grids most likely saw increased sales too.
InWorldz, one of the oldest and largest OpenSim grids, has recently shut down. Since then, many InWorldz residents have moved to other grids in search of a new home. Thanks to Kitely Market, we now have some hard data that shows the scope of this exodus, as well as which grids were the preferred destinations for InWorldz residents.
We have seen a remarkable 300% spike in Kitely Market sales since InWorldz has shut down, as users that moved to new grids began restocking their avatar inventories. InWorldz didn’t allow its residents to use Kitely Market, so for many of these users this is the first time that they’ve been able to buy from our marketplace.
We saw Kitely Market sales begin to rise on July 26, a day before InWorldz shut down. The graph below compares sales from the week since InWorldz shut down, to the average weekly sales in the three weeks before that. Kitely’s own grid experienced the biggest growth in absolute numbers, but DigiWorldz and Discovery Grid experienced the most growth relative to their previous sales levels.
On 31st July 2018 Sansarofficially marked the first anniversary of the public creator beta launch. Since then performance has improved, better scripting capabilities, more interaction, more fixes and there has been positive feedback from tech news sites on Sansar.
In late July 2018 the Sansar team added Custom Avatars, HTTP scripting API support, plug-and-play SimpleScripts for everyone to use on the platform. There have been improvements to the Edit Mode and much more. Apparently a permissions/licensing system will be coming soon for content creators which will attract even more investment for Sansar.
The Sansar website looks great today with recommended experiences to visit, daily events to enjoy, a great store to purchase products and easy access to the community/help areas.
Turning to user concurrency in Sansar over the past year there have been various high peaks however these numbers are no where as near the numbers like in Second Life. The numbers are more like what we see on various OpenSim grids. It’s still early days and more needs to be done.
Sansar User Concurrency Statistics 1 Aug 2018 — Source: Ryan Schultz
In the top graph for daily averages for concurrent users it never really goes above 20 users. For some reason there was a dip in June 2018 on the bottom graph for monthly average concurrent Sansar users.
Rather flat numbers during the past year but maybe when VR gets better in the years ahead when the equipment is less expensive and more comfortable to use then I’m sure more people will stay in Sansar for longer.
I think that within the next year or so Sansar user concurrency will rise even further hopefully.
Increase On The Number Of Experiences Users Can Create
On Saturday 28th July 2018 the Sansar team made a big announcement for Sansar on increasing the number of experiences users can create on the platform. This is very good news for all creators in Sansar.
The Sansar team have been thinking about this decision for a long time apparently and it’s good to see the Sansar team reaching a final decision on this.
Effective immediately, we are increasing how many experiences users can create:
Free users: Increased from 3 to 20 experiences
Creator: Increased from 5 to 25 experiences
Super-Creator: Increased from 10 to 30 experiences
Professional: Increased from 20 to 40 experiences
I’m sure this big change will help everyone going forward because this opens the door for even more creativity on the platform.
Good progress has been made so far in Sansar during it’s first year and hopefully it will be even more bigger during the year ahead.
Daniel Voyager 