Premium Plus Now Available

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On early Thursday afternoon, Linden Lab made the Premium Plus option for accounts available. This was two days after Patch Linden gave details at the Second Life Birthday.

 We are so excited to be officially launching our Second Life Premium Plus offerings today! The Premium Plus membership level is designed for the most dedicated Second Life Residents with more weekly stipends, more groups, more mainland, and even more of all the things you love!  There’s only one thing there’s less of - fees. Premium Plus subscribers get free uploads for sounds, textures, and animations, free recurring events, lower group fees, and did we mention - $15 Name Changes?!

The all-new Premium Plus is available for $29.99 per month and $249 per year with a special limited time promotional price of $24.99 per month. Not ready for Premium Plus? You can still continue to enjoy our existing Premium offering, which is available for $11.99 per month and $99 per year.  
 

It's interesting to note that the Lab is listing a cash value next to the weekly stipend and free mainland, $11 USD and $13 USD respectively, so it can say one gets $24 USD worth of freebies for the $29.99 monthly price.

So far, there's been plenty of talk about Premium Plus, including a thread in the forums. On the whole, the response seems to be skepticism. Many stated they don't feel the extra bennefits are worth the price. Still, some did say they were interested, one saying, "I can run up 249 dollars worth of texture uploads a year pretty quickly if given enough time and space." "I ran the numbers for my account and I'd save about $6 a year." There were comments that one or two more things thrown in, such as free mesh uploads and name changes, might make then interested.

Some people will be signing up for Premium Plus. How many, well, we'll see.

To read the blog post, Click Here. 

Addition: Near the end of today's "Meet the Lindens," Grumpity announced they had over 700 Premium Plus accounts. So with this many in just a few hours, it seems they've had a successful start.

Bixyl Shuftan
 

New Linden Homes Now Available

 

A few days ago on Thursday March 3, the latest style of Linden Home, the modern-looking Newbrooke, was declared open for residents to get. Patch Linden announced the news in a thread the forums late in the day.

Today, we are pleased to release our latest Linden Home theme, Newbrooke!

 Our concept of a modern container home community is stylish, warm, and inviting, while being nestled in a contemporary setting of rolling hills peppered with small lakes, ponds, and public pools.

All of the Newbrooke regions are offered in both 1024sqm and 512sqm sized parcels.   In total, there are 8 stylish house models to choose from, and the smaller 512sqm parcel homes can also be placed on a 1024sqm parcel, giving you a larger outdoor area.

As always, there is a theme-specific content pack available from the house controller, enabling you to match the style and theme with any modifications you wish to do. (Please refer to the covenant rules).

Also for this theme we have a brand new community region, “Newbank,“ for residents to enjoy and hang out with their neighbors.

We hope everyone enjoys the latest additions to the Belliseria continent and community!

The Newbrooke sims, are in a group numbering forty-eight, connected to the Chalet Bellisseria area by a single sim (Josie Banks). Like some other Bellisserian sims, they often have amusing names such as Seldome Scene, Two Wrights, Tickled Pink, Sheep Date, and others. One can walk down the streets, or drive a car that can be dropped onto various vehicle rezz spots. Already, many have been claimed and the new owners decorating. But there are also many just walking around and exploring around. Of the roads, there are bridges, both over water and over other roads. For more on the Newbrooke homes themselves, check out our article on the eight styles (here).

And like the past couple groups of Linden Home sims, there is a community center. It is located in the sim of Newbank. The center is on an island in the middle of the sim conencted to land by three bridges. The style of the place did remind me a little of the new Welcome Island that went up last year. But the various food courts were a nice touch.

The community center is at https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Newbank/133/147/21/

Bixyl Shuftan
 

Linden Lab Announces Eight New Starter Avatars, Six "Bento Equiped"

Yesterday on the official Second Life Blog, Linden Lab announced that they were making available eight new starter avatars. These are male and female in four categories: "Renaissance, Mystic Heroes and Angels & Demons." Six of these avatars are different as they are described as "Bento-equipped."

... we’re excited to announce a set of 8 new starter avatars which are themed Renaissance, Mystic Heroes and Angels & Demons. In this release, for the first time ever, we’re offering Bento avatars! Yes you heard it right, all but the Mystic Heroes in this offering will be Bento-equipped. Some of the avatars are ride-alongs, which mean they include horses as a Bento attachment, while others boast animated wings!

For now, these avatars are available only in the official viewer, which presumably has updated already. Firestorm and some other viewers are likely to follow soon.

What do you the readers think of these new starter avatars? Are you impressed by the use of Bento in them?

Source: secondlife.com

Firestorm Releases Bento-Capable Viewer One Week After Linden Lab's

It was a little more than a week ago on December 5 in which Linden Lab announced that Project Bento was now part of the official viewer. For those who don't know, Project Bento has been in development by the Lab for more than a year. The most significant update to avatar design in many years, it allows for more detail in avatar design, such as facial expressions and hand movements, and would allow for more flexibility in nonhuman designs.

Linden Lab is proud to announce that Project Bento is now part of the default Viewer! Bento is probably the single most extensive update to the avatar skeleton ever, and as a result of countless hours of testing, updating, reconfiguring, testing… you get the picture, we are now live. Now everyone can enjoy the extra bones creators have taken advantage of to bring you true quadrupeds, winged avatars, fingers, facial expressions and more.

Xiola Linden stated that the Lab was working on "Best Practice" documents, including tutorials,  that would be available next year. For now residents could check out Bento's entry in the Knowledge Base.

With this much-anticipated update, Hamlet Au of New World Notes (and probably a few others) were predicting a number of Second Life's longtime users, whom as a group have an "overwhelming" preference for third-party viewers, would finally start embracing the Linden Viewer. But as it turned out, not many seemed to be downloading it. Apparently people were waiting for Team Firestorm, the developers of the most popular Second Life viewer to  come up with their own Bento-integrated viewer.

On Tuesday December 13, Team Firestorm announced their Bento-compatable viewer was now ready and available for people to download and use.

The demand for a Bento-capable Firestorm Viewer has been overwhelming, to say the least! With over 8,000 people in our preview group running it, is widely regarded as faster by testers and is expected to be a rock-solid update.... Even if you have no intention of using Bento-enabled content or animations, you will need this viewer in order to see it properly on others.

Team Team Firestorm recommended checking out Inara Pey's blog entry on the Bento release, whom would also write about Team Firestorm's Bento viewer.

With The Firestorm Bento-capable viewer out, this means that many more residents will soon be able to see and use avatars making use of the improved avatars. Which means more content creators will be certain to build such avatars. Considering the variety of avatars already on the market from the giant Colossus, to micros, to taurs such as Chakats, and many others, it should be interesting to see what designers come up with in the coming months.

Sources: Linden Lab, New World Notes, Team Firestorm  

Bixyl Shuftan