When Real-Life Strikes ...

 

Yours truly has been really busy in real-life, so some articles I was hoping would be finished will have to wait until next week. My apologies for the delay.

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

Newser Party Postponed

 

Due to real-life, the Newser anniversary party originally scheduled for today has been postponed until next Saturday. Sorry about the trouble. 

 

Delay Of Announcement of New Linden Home Theme

 

Last week, Linden Lab announced they were doing their last of three polls for the new Linden Home theme. The choices were "Millionare Homes," "Mid-Century Modern," "Alpine Style Theme," "Craftsman Style Homes," and "Tiki Water Theme." The winner was supposed to be announced on Monday. But it wasn't. As of the writing of this article, the theme has not yet been announced. 

 

It was also brought up in the forums that the date for the second Community Roundtable, which was supposed to be at the SL21B but delayed, hasn't been announced either. Nor have there been any new updates in the Lab's "Featured News" for over a month. 

Stay tuned for more information,

Bixyl Shuftan

Some Technical Difficulties

 

My connection to the Internet went down during the night, and only now has just been restored.

 

 Some articles may be delayed a little, but they will be done.

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

Premium and Premium Plus Stipends Delayed

 

One of the perks about Premium and Premium plus is the monthly stipends, or allowance, of Lindens from the Lab. But according to the Grid Status Report, there's been a slight delay.

 

  Investigating - We are aware of an issue where weekly stipend payments to Premium and Premium Plus members may have been delayed. We are currently investigating the issue. Please keep an eye on this blog for any updates.

 

Hopefully this will be resolved soon.

Trying To Figure Out New Tech

 

If I haven't been writing much lately, there's a reason. Yours truly has been making a tech upgrade. 

 

For years, I had just the old flip phones that came about in the 90s. Then when the company phased them out about a couple years ago, I finally got a smartphone, a simple one. But friends kept telling me I needed to upgrade. So I finally did. I went ahead and got a much better smartphone: a Samsung.

 

Trouble is, the joke about new tech being scary to people over forty, well, there's something to it. It's been something of a struggle trying to get the thing working right, which takes time. Time that cannot be used for writing, or covering events like the last days of the SLB.

But I'll get this figured out. In the meantime, in-depth stories, other than from other reporters and reader submissions, will have to wait.

 

Image credit: PC Mag 

Bixyl Shuftan

Fairelands Quest Delayed A Day

 
One of the features of the Fantasy Faire is the Farelands Quest. This year, the first part of the quest was scheduled to be ready to play on Monday April 25. But one of the designers behind the interactive story had fallen ill. So it was announced that the Quest would be delayed a day.

So sorry to have to tell you that we've had to push release of the Fairelands Quest back a day due to illness on the team. It's not serious but has been enough to slow us down -- we hope you understand, and we're continuing to work. I'll make an announcement here when I start setting out the vendors, so check notices in this group for the latest. ♥

The Faire's fans took the news in stride, though some figured there was always "that guy" who wouldn't take no for an answer. So a certain little limmerick urging patience was being passed around.

You keep asking about this thing called a quest
which really is fine, except the scripters are stressed.
So please be patient
or they'll be complacent
in putting a sword in your chest!

Stay tuned for more information.

Bixyl Shuftan
 

Busy Time

 
It's been a busy time in real life for the writers of the Newser. For yours truly, real-life has gotten busier then ever in the past few days. So not only am I prone to the occasional mistake, like the failsafe message that appeared earlier today that wasn't supposed to until if something happened that kept me from updating the computer for a month, for whatever reason. But some things I planned to write about soon will have to wait a little. But we'll keep updating. 

Bixyl Shuftan
 

"Premium Plus" Accounts Delayed

Last November, among an announcement on the upcoming option to change account names, Linden Lab also stated that there would soon be an option to upgrade their accounts to a level above Premium, called Premium Plus.

Changes are underway for Premium Membership. In 2020, you’ll see a new membership level, Premium Plus. This new option will join our classic Premium tier as an additional choice for Residents who want to get even more value from their Second Life.

According to an article written by Inara Pey, it seems the Linden Lab has delayed the rollout of Premium Plus. Grumpity Linden stated the two main reasons were wanting to focus more on the transition to the cloud servers, and with many residents hit hard financially by the Coronavirus crisis it was believed it wasn't a good time to roll out the feature.

We have made the decision to delay the deployment of Premium Plus based on two key factors:

1. We want to be focused on our Uplift project (move to the cloud) and to minimize distraction for our development, QA, and Ops teams. While we’ve laid a lot of groundwork, quite a bit more still remains to finish Premium Plus.
2. The pandemic has brought a lot of financial uncertainty to people all around the world and we know many of our Residents have been hit hard.

We are very happy that SL has provided an outlet for people where they can connect, escape, engage safely, and earn a living or supplement their income as well. But we also realise that introducing a higher-priced service level in this time would be really ham-handed.

It should be noted that a few days ago, Linden Lab stated earlier that there was a "Limited Availability" of new private sims due in part to their transitioning to cloud servers not complete yet. So that would be another reason to devote more time and resources to that effort. When the option of changing one's account surname was finally made available, one of the complaints was that due to the Coronavirus crisis, many wouldn't be able to afford it due to loss of income.

When asked when Premium Plus might be available, Grumpty answered that there were no guarantees, "but early 2021 is reasonable to expect."

Source: Modem World

Bixyl Shuftan

News and Commentary: No New Announcement On Last Names, Yet

On November 21, Linden Lab stated that they were "working furiously" to have the option for residents to get a last name or change it (if they had a Premium account) by January 31. Since then, the only announcement on the subject was their contest asking for suggestions for last names, and January 31 came and went with no option for last names.

So why no announcement over the past several days? One can only guess. Perhaps the Lindens feel they're on the verge of solving one or two technical issues and that finishing the big change is just around the corner. Or perhaps when they tried testing the change, they keep finding bugs and decided to take a little extra time to squash them before releasing the option.

There should be an announcement on the issue soon. In fact, it might be later today.

Bixyl Shuftan

Stormy Weather

Things were quite breezy in parts of the United States yesterday. And yours truly had his power knocked out for about eight hours. Because of this, some articles will be running late.

Sorry about the trouble.

Later Today

Did the Fairelands Quest with the help of a few friends before it closes down on Wednesday. But it meant staying up a bit. So today's articles will be delayed until I get some much needed rest.

Return of Last Names "Later in 2019" According to Ebbe Linden

Recently Hamlet Au interviewed Ebbe Altberg / Ebbe Linden. Linden Lab's CEO had a number of things to say (which I hope to write about more in depth later this week). On the issue of last names for accounts, which at a Town Hall meeting the Lindens stated would probably arrive sometime in Spring 2019, Altberg stated a different date.

There are some more back-end changes to SL which need to be made before Last Names can make a return (actually, it's really name changes that are the hard part), but we are working on it and hope to have it ready later in 2019.

So it seems once again, the date for last names has been pushed back, this time possibly to December.

Bixyl Shuftan

BREAKING NEWS!! Linden Labs Postpones Sansar Release Until 2019, Annouces Joint Development on "Ark Park" Vitrual World

Update: April Fools

In a surprise move yesterday, Linden Lab announced in a press release that it was postponing the release of the Sansar virtual world until "sometime in 2019." Partially, this is due to a Windows 10 update that rendered the Sansar viewer unplayable, and partially due to difficulties in making Sansar playable on older computers. "We thought these problems would be quickly solved," the statement read, "but our early optimism was disproved and dealing with these problems will take a while.

Linden Lab also announced it was cooperating with two gaming companies, Studio Wildcard and Snail Game, in developing a third virtual world: "Ark Park." Based on the survival game "Ark: Survival Evolved," the virtual world allows users to interact with the dinosaurs without attacking or being attacked.

(Click here if the video fails to load)

"Dinosaurs have always been popular in computer gaming," the statement from Linden Lab read, "And we are happy to be a part of making a virtual world around them in cooperation with Studio Wildcard and Snail Game."

To see the statement from Linden Lab in it's entirety, Click Here.

Video from Gamespot.

Second Life's Community Platform Is Open (Finally)

After about a month since Linden Lab announced they were moving their forum, blog, and knowledge base to a new server and a new Community Platform, and about a couple weeks since they estimated it would be ready, the Lab announced on Tuesday March 14 that the platform was up and running. Xiola Linden posted the following:

The new Community Platform is finally here! It has taken a bit longer than we anticipated, because we encountered some challenges during this transition that are unique for this community, which unfortunately required more time than we’d initially planned. We want to thank the community for your patience while we ironed out some of the larger issues to get the new platform ready for prime time. We also want to thank you in advance for your continued patience as we continue with some of the polishing work that will come over the next few weeks.


We have a new Community Home Page. From here you can see the latest things happening across the community platform, and click through to your favorite areas. This brings more visibility to areas like the Knowledge Base and Blogs, instead of dropping you directly into the forums. Speaking of the forums - one of the things that we were unfortunately unable to transfer to the new platform was background images on profile pics. If you were using a background image for your profile, you will need to upload a new profile pic. The good news is that uploading a profile image on the new platform is much simpler and more intuitive than before. Just select your profile from under your name, and you can upload an image from there. We will continue to make improvements, but wanted to get the community platform out as soon as possible, so that the Knowledge Base was back online.

Xiola stated there would be a number of other issues that they expected to fix in the coming weeks.

If you come across any bugs that are not listed above, we encourage you to let us know about them through our Jira system here. (NOTE: Please be sure to file with the System type “Website” and related Community sub-category.). While there is still work to be done, we are very excited to unveil the new Community Platform to you.

So it seems the platform is here, but still needs a little work. To see things for yourself, Click Here to check out the Community Platform.

Bixyl Shuftan

Official Second Life Community Platform Up, But Not Running Well

In mid-February, Linden Lab announced that it was moving it's Community Platform to a new server, and that while there would be no more new forum posts during the move, the old ones would still be readable. The process was expected to be complete by February 27. But it would not be for another week and a half in which the new community page was finally up. However not only were the official forums not updating, they along with the Linden blog were unavailable to view, as was the "Flickr Pic of the Day." In the "Announcements," there was a statement from Xiola Linden.

Currently, we have turned on the Knowledge Base. Blogs and Forums will come soon - but for now those areas are still under construction. We will update as those become available.

As of the writing of this article, the blogs and forums are still unavailable. Clicking on them just brings up an error page stating "our community is still under construction."

The issue has been discussed on one of the more popular alternative Second Life forums: SL Universe. Daniel Voyager guessed it would be another week before everything was ready. One poster commented, "It's annoying it's taking them so long but, when I recall the things that have gone wrong with previous botched attempts to transfer the forums from one format to another, I'm glad they're taking the time to do it properly." A number commented along the lines of "Here we go again."

Stay tuned for further details.

Bixyl Shuftan

Sansar Opening Delayed Until Later in 2017

In September, Linden Lab announced that Sansar would be fully open to the public in January 2017. But earlier this month, in an interview Ebbe Linden basically stated that their next virtual world wouldn't be ready until at least March. But in a recent interview with "Road To VR," Linden Lab had pushed back the date of the opening to sometime in "the first half of 2017." This means it could be as late as June when it is finally online.

Hat Tip:  Daniel Voyager, Modem World

Technical Difficulties

Due to technical difficulties, "Events This Week" will be delayed until later.