Kantbe Serious: Have You Gotten WETS lately?

submitted by Kantbe Thursday

Through a tip from an unidentified and unreliable source, SurfWatch is pleased to announce in this exclusive story that after many months of hard work and even harder negotiations, the joint efforts of SLSA, ABBSL, ASA, MUST, IOOF, and radio station KLTZ, have convinced Linden Labs to reverse their policy of not providing any land grant sims and a new collection of 13 Full and Homestead sims dedicated to surfing in SL have been established.  Originally, since this was a united effort to transform surfing in Second Life, they called the new organization Second Life United to Transform Surfing.  However, after reflecting upon this for a couple of seconds, they decided to change the name to World Enterprise to Transform Surfing, or WETS.

The 13 sims are arranged so that there are 5 Homestead sims with 5 adjoining full sims so that there will be plenty of locations for surfing, competitions and spectators.  Three Full sims will be available for development of new wave and surfboard technologies.  Wave and board scripting developers are encouraged to contact WETS representatives if interested in making arrangements for the use of these development sims.

WETS Headquarters

Since the Lindens understand how important sim performance is to surfing in Second Life, all of these sims will be running on beta versions of the Class 10 servers.  The only potential drawback, according to Gearbox Linden, is there are relatively frequent spontaneous restarts.  He was quick to point out, however, that the rumors of lost inventory items for those on the sims at the time of a restart have been greatly exaggerated and the sudden disconnection from the asset servers typically will result in no more than 30-40% inventory loss no more than 80% of the time.  While Linden Labs cannot restore those lost items, they can provide land marks and URL's to some of the most popular stores inworld and on MarketPlace for replacing those items.

The development sims will also include the use of the alpha version of the Havok 2015 engine.  This is a totally new rewrite of the current Havok engine and won't be burdened by the minor tweaks made since the change to Havok 4.  According to some reports, the changes are substantial and will be another jump forward like the upgrade to Havok 4.  As was experienced then, there is the potential that all waves and surfboards will have to be replaced, but that remains to be seen.  Havok 2015 has also been redesigned specifically for the overwhelmingly popular mesh support.  Not only will newly designed waves and boards be able to interact at a smaller object level, any mesh clothing and hair can also interact with the waves.  Now, surfing in that gown or baggy jeans can drag you off the board and under water just as in real life.  This will no doubt stimulate the market for mesh beachwear using less bulky and faster drying material.

As an extra bonus, WETS has negotiated an arrangement that makes it possible for any public surfing sim owner to apply for an upgrade to the Class 10 servers with the Havok 2015 engine for a nominal one time fee.  Due to the beta and alpha nature of the server and the alpha collision API Linden Lab cannot offer any support for any issues that may arise, nor can they help troubleshoot whether an issue is a normal Second Life issue or one caused by the beta server or alpha software.  But such an opportunity may be hard to pass up.  If you're a sim owner and are interested, please contact a WETS representative.

SurfWatch believes this could be a significant change to surfing in Second Life and exciting times are ahead.  Let's all get out there and get WETS!!!

[OK, the SW source is April Fools - :-) ]

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