While the grid is closed till a reliable solution can be found for a network connection, there are still small things happening to the grid.
The most noticeable are the addition of 3 new regions east of Firat to make a more natural end of the Murat River flowing into the Firat Bay.
The Bakxos Greek taverna moved onto a height overlooking the new bay and the road was extended from the bridge to below it.
The Murat telecoms building also got an update with a full second floor making it possible for an avatar to walk inside both storeys.
Future plans
As the dust settles the grid will gradually get more regions to the East to make the landscape flow more natural into the sea.
andwest will get a new store building next to the gas station and maybe even a small little street with a couple houses up the hill
The plan is to take the so-called “avination merge” opensim version when it becomes available, but I suspect Postgres support will be lacking, so this needs to be corrected. This might be the time to start preparing for the Postgres 9.5 update due out of beta in January 2016, and rewrite the general table handler to take advantage of the “upsert” functionality in 9.5 – which should bring the code closer to the MySQL version.
The Swift Viewer
My ambition is also to start hacking at a more Mac specific version of the viewer, which will bring the code base further away from the Linux / Windows base, but this is absolutely necessary to keep the viewer running on the most current and future versions of OS X. It would also allow for significantly simplifying the code by using native OS X frameworks, and is an opportunity to introduce Swift into the code base to replace both the Objective-C code that is outdated, but also to replace other portions of the code.
While I would like to see the renderer rewritten in Metal, such an undertaking is beyond my competence and would have to be funded and programmed by professional developers. It would, however, make a solid investment on the way to an iOS version of the viewer.
New Products
I am uncertain as to what extent I will bring new products to the marketplaces given the uncertainty of SecondLife’s future now that Linden Lab’s Sansar project is moving to beta soon. It does to a certain extent feel like flogging a dead horse. While the Kitely Market is nice, it is also tiny in terms of volume. Maybe long dark fall nights will bring new inspiration – so maybe!