Eye on the Blog: New Year's Contest, Xmas Present, and More

While the Newser has been busy reporting on Christmas-themed events across Second Life, Linden Labs has not been inactive. They've posted a few goings-on in their blog, most recently about a New Year's Eve photography contest.

Winter has arrived — and the spirit of the season is evident in every sense — from the snow on the ground in many parts, to the merriment and joy and observances across the world. We want to know how you celebrate the coming of the New Year in our New Year Snapshot Contest. If it’s a whole new look for your avatar, or an inworld party to celebrate — share your snapshots for a chance to win L$10,000,  L$5,000, L$3,000 or L$1,000. Visit the contest in our Official Forums for details and to enter.

There's also a Christmas present from the folks of Linden Lab, just go over to Portal Park 1 and find it.

If you’ve got a sweet tooth — come by one of the Portal Park locations to pick up a free holiday gift. Look for the red gift box and click it to get your copy — and enjoy the seasonally decorated Portal Park while you’re there.

The prize wasn't far from the Portal Park 1 (133/119/23) location provided, just beyond the arch labeled "Social Area." I (as my alt) got a copy of the present, and rezzing it at the office had a gingerbread house, "Happy Holidays from the Linden family!"

Earlier entries from not long ago included an update on "Experience Keys," which Linden Lab first announced they were working on in July, demonstrating it at "The Cornfield" game. This time, they were offering a "Release Candiate" viewer for the feature.

... a new Viewer Release Candidate makes it easy for you to manage all your experience permissions in one place. This new Viewer makes it easy to Block, Unblock, or Reset experiences. Additionally, an Events Tab logs the objects and scripts you encounter in an experience, so every action performed on your avatar will be saved or recorded. Have a problem with an experience? We’ve also integrated a new reporting feature to make it easy to flag bad experiences to our Support team for review. Search is also available in the new Viewer, so you can explore all of the growing number of available experiences that use this feature.

Earlier in the month, they offered a new feedback and suggestions page.

What’s the one thing Linden Lab could do that would have the biggest impact on further improving your Second Life experience? Many Second Life users have thoughts on this - from different approaches for the way things are done today, to brand new features that could dramatically improve their experiences, to seemingly small things that could have a big impact. Today, we’re launching an easier way to share your ideas with us, a new “Feedback & Suggestions” page on SecondLife.com. You can also find this page by going to Help and finding New Feature Suggestions in the drop down.

One can find the suggestions page here: https://support.secondlife.com/suggestions/ .

And if things have seemed wonkier than usual on the Grid, it likely was not your imagination. The Lab posted that there were certain "recent inventory issues" going on with accounts.

Bixyl Shuftan

Eye on the Blog: Experience Keys

Last week, Linden Lab announced on their official blog a new feature: "Experience Keys." This is a shortcut that allows a resident to grant permission for scripted objects of an encounter or experience to act on the avatar multiple times without asking for permission to continue at every single step.

Experience Keys are a new tool in Second Life that make it so you can opt-in to an entire experience made up of numerous scripted objects, rather than having to grant avatar permissions to every individual element of that experience. In other words, they allow creators to make experiences that are more immersive, because they’re not interrupted by permissions dialogues. Additionally, with Experience Keys, each of the scripts in the experience has access to a common private database that stores information across user sessions and simulator restarts; a powerful new capability for scripters. 



(Click here if the video fails to play)

Partially to show off what Experience Keys can do, the Lindens set up a game for residents to play: The Cornfield. To play it though, a resident needs the "Experience Keys Project Viewer." There are a few known issues with the viewer, though, such as the avatar looking "distorted" after changing appearances, and crashes with a certain video card.

... you can have some fun and get a sense for the ways Experience Keys can improve inworld content by checking out The Cornfield- a new (free) game, thematically inspired by a bit of Second Life history and created by the moles. Watch the trailer below, then grab theExperience Keys Project Viewer and go check it out for yourself 

One can get to The Cornfield Here: Portal Park1 (127/122/24)

One can read the blog post in full here: (Click Here).

Of "The Cornfield" game, Marianne McCann wrote a review one can check out (click here).