Some Of The New Second Life Policy Rules Explained

Some of you may have watched the film length video from the previous post concerning the new policy changes being made by secondlife. There's still seems to be a little confusion regarding what is being changed and what isn't.

What seems to be in linden labs (creator of second life) mind is they want to keep the users shared experience in SL the same if at all possible. The way they propose to do this is to not allow third party viewers (not the official SL program/viewer) to create new features users in other viewers can't see. For instance something like coloured tags above players heads or the placing of viewer names in the text above other users heads.

As of now that colour and viewer name tag feature is broken and should not work. The argument here is could this stop third party viewers innovating and creating new features. For instance, something like breast physics (wobbly boobs to you and me) was created originally by a third party viewer (TPV) team and was only viewable on those with compatible viewers, the official viewer originally not being one of them.

Now, because at the time of conception it wasn't available on the official viewer, if done now it would be classed as breaking the shared experience as the official viewer couldn't see it. Of course linden labs adopted a body physics feature at a later date an now there isn't a need for the original hack. But it was the hack and the work of third party viewers which encouraged the feature in the first place.

Linden Labs would like TPV to work with them and helping them improve the features of SL by submitting ideas and concepts, it just hasn't been fully worked out how that would be achieved.

The bottom line regarding shared experience is if you can't see it in the official viewer its braking shared experience and must be removed.

Real Online Status

Some Features in devices like this may be broken if scripted online status is removed for none script owners

viewers like phoenix and firestorm seemed to have circumvented the fact that people may have put as a privacy option that they wanted to remain offline to friends or members, but in these viewers it still showed if they were online when checking their profiles. Also LL propose to break the online status indicators found in devices. Which there are many found in officers of the GFC. The original proposal was that these devices would only show the online status of someone if the script running the command belonged to that person.

So in other words if i created an online status device and the script was owned by me, it would work, but if i create the same device but had it check the online status of someone else, it wouldn't work and since most online status devices aren't using scripts created by the person its checking, a lot of these devices would break. As of now, LL are reconsidering its proposal regarding online status, so for the moment, nothing has changed there.

In the future temp textures may fail, not because there's a desire to ban them but fixing a bunch of features may create the situation that temp textures will get broken. On this one we'll just have to wait and see.

All in all, most of you wont notice any significant change in how you use secondlife on your third party viewer other than tag colours and viewer names tags. The coming weeks we'll get more of an idea of what the changes really mean long term, but for now, there isn't a huge amount to worry about.