Greetings Residents!

2009 sped by and 2010 is right around the corner.  Hard to believe!  It has been a busy year at the Lab and all across Second Life and there is much to report.  I plan to make some time during the holidays to write a post to you reflecting back on 2009 and looking ahead to 2010.

In the meantime, I've been enjoying the holiday season inworld.  There is so much to see and do!

The wonders of Second Life are a credit to you, its Residents.

Thank You and Happy Holidays!

PS the IW build is HappyMood -- on of my favorites!

Many of you have now taken the opportunity to look around the Nascera continent where Linden Homes will be during the Beta period. Feedback seems to be really positive with some good points about the experience and how it could be improved. Thanks for all the comments!

Today the Beta officially opens for Linden Homes.

What does this mean?
A selection of existing Premium members, that have at least 512m of spare tier on their account, will be invited to take part in the Beta via email. We're going to cap the first wave to around 500 accounts, though, to ensure we get enough people testing the experience we will probably invite more than that. We will also disable the Beta signup if we encounter any significant problems over the next few days. So if you have been invited to try the Beta but find that you cannot get in, please be patient.

Testers will be asked to choose from the four themes, and to pick a house design from the chosen theme, along with naming the parcel. We will then assign them a Linden Home on the Nascera continent. After this they will be sent a confirmation email with a SLurl to their new Linden Home and we will drop a Landmark to them inworld. The whole process should be simple and friendly.

That's about it! We'll be surveying the Beta testers to find out how it went for them and what difficulties they had. There will also be a special support ticket type for them to report problems to us directly.

Tell me more about Nascera!
Our content team will talk more technically about the process of creating Nascera on the DPW blog shortly, but meanwhile some more details for those that are interested.

The terrain was originally created to be relatively mountainous, using a tool called World Machine which is a procedural terrain generator. We then take the heightmaps into Photoshop and do additional work there (such as parcelling) before pushing the raw files onto the grid as new regions. Continents typically tend to be between 700-900 regions in size, with some amount of Linden owned ocean and waterways as well.

It was important from the outset that this was able to scale, therefore manually placing each home would not be feasible. The team created a scripted rezzer that could detect the various parcel shapes (variations of 512m) and then placed the correct house type for the given theme of that region. Not only that but it can travel across the continent building out each region in turn. Immediately after placing the houses, it then places the trees and other scenery items.

For the 64 regions we have currently enabled on Nascera, the rezzer took 13 minutes to place all of the houses and trees. We then spent a couple of hours cleaning up a few areas, and a further two days for the Moles to add detailing and landscaping edits.

We soon found that the hilly terrain made automatic placement difficult. Though the houses have deep base sections, on even moderately sloped terrain we would often get houses with doors that were too high to reach without jumping. Not ideal! 

So, for the Beta we have made the terrain considerably flatter. We still think it looks fantastic, but we do intend to build more height into the continent so this is something for us to continue to work on.

The houses themselves were built by our growing in-house content team, with the super DPW Moles handling the later landscaping and detailing. We chose these four themes from a much longer list, because we felt it gave us plenty of variety for the Beta and the builds were quite simple to build. If things go well and we launch Linden Homes next year, we expect to be continually adding new Themes and house designs to keep the choices as interesting as possible. We will also give out the texture sets so that owners of Linden Homes can add internal walls if they wish to, and so that content providers can potentially add specific Linden Home ranges of furniture to their stores.

That just about wraps it up for this post. Comments again open below. We'll be blogging more as the Beta rolls on and we learn more about how it works in practice. Watch this space!

For answers to common questions, please visit the FAQ here.

For the Home Help Guide, please click here.

Greetings!

Winterfest events and activities kicked off this year with a wreath building contest and charitable event for Kiva.org (grab your wreaths today!) and Winterfest Shops, a place of wintry fun and commerce. We also announced the Winterfest Sweepstakes and highlighted seasonal content at XStreet. In November, we announced more traditional events were also underway - and put out a request for entries to the Second Life Destination Guide.

Today, we are ready to get this snowball rolling... Grab your hot cocoa and ice skates! Below is the calendar of events for Winterfest 2009 activities hosted by Linden Lab - and you are urged to post your own Winterfest events in comments! (No advertising or shopping events, please!)

Skating & Bonfire Under the Stars:  Dec. 21-23rd
A three day perpetually midnight Skating and Bonfire event at the Winterfest Shops regions, with music during select hours.

Music dates/times:

Monday Dec. 21st 6:00am-9:00amPST with ChiuNiu Ceres

Tuesday Dec. 22nd 1:00pm-4:00pmPST with Selo Jacobus

Wednesday Dec. 23rd 8:00pm-11:00pmPST with Radio Radio - Madame Maracas

Locations: Dasher, Prancer, Donner, Blitzen

Winterfest Snowball Fights:  Dec. 28-31st
A Second Life tradition pitting Residents vs. Lindens in snowball fights spanning three days. Linden participation hours are highlighted.

Linden Participation dates/times:

Monday Dec. 28th 12:00pm-5:00pmPST

Tuesday Dec. 29th 7:00am-12:00pmPST

Wednesday Dec. 30th 5:00pm-11:00pmPST

Locations: Zermatt, Luna, New Port, Zindra (ADULT), Coelacanth (Teen Second Life)

Winterfest Destination Guide: Now Through February
A specially labeled Showcase/Destination Guide category highlighting Resident locations and activities relating to Winter fun and holiday culture.

Resident Locations can be found here!!!

Don't forget to add your events in the comments and have a wonderful Winterfest holiday!!

Thank you all for the great comments and feedback on my previous blog post regarding Linden Homes.  We're now close to being able to allow some existing Premium members to enter the Beta period so if you are a current Premium subscriber and have 512m of tier currently unused, do watch your inbox!  For those lucky enough to be offered a chance to sign up for a Linden Home, please note that we will be capping the number of people we let in.  If things go well, and feedback is good, we may then look at expanding the number of Beta folks we allow in.

In the meantime, we would like to announce that from today the Linden Home area, a new continent called Nascera, will be open to all residents so that you can take a look.  Please bear in mind that it is a Beta, and therefore some things will change and improve as we move forward.  We'll be blogging soon about the actual build process we have used and what we have learned from that - it's been quite a ride so far!  

A feedback thread is available for this post.  We'd love to get your first impressions of the houses themselves, and of the experience we're offering.  Though we may not reply to each post, your feedback is very important so please do take the time to let us know what you think.

Here are a few regions you can try teleporting to..

• Elderglen (the main fantasy themed infohub)
  
• Fern (to see the fantasy themed houses)
  
• Batry Park (to see meadowbrook, the california modern area)
  
• Buckeye (to see tahoe, the A frame log cabin theme)
  
• Kagero (to see the Japanese themed regions)