CCS 1.0.5 - The Happening

Holy christ these people are lazy. By these people I mean me and Melanie...except that we're not and while its taken a long time to get done, CCS 1.0.5 is finally going to be in your hot little hands. And good gods is this website getting ugly, I really want to rip it out and replace it with a wordpress system...perhaps I will next year. We'll see.

Of course most people will point out that we've been talking about CCS 1.0.5 since 2012 and they'd be largely correct...but a lot of changes in Second Life and in Real Life have happened since the boom years of SL, and this was a very complex update even if we take those changes into account.

Most people will probably look at CCS 1.0.5 and be like..it works just like CCS has always worked, why did that take nearly three years to achieve?

Well for starters:

• Script memory usage between CCS 1.0.4 and CCS 1.0.5 has been cut by 60%
  
  
• CCS 1.0.5 uses a new encryption schema which does not allow unauthorized devices to speak to the meter.
  
  
• CCS 1.0.5 has more stable internal communications than CCS 1.0.4, making it more less functionally disrupted by high volume region traffic.
  
  
• New HUD - the new HUD is designed for 1680x1050 and above resolution monitors, it also works best if you disable the favorites/navigation bar on your SL viewer. If the HUD is too large for your 4:3 CRT monitor, please feel free to visit Wal-Mart or Costco or Scan.co.uk and join the rest of us in the 21st Century. Or just use the old HUD, which will still function.
  
  
• CAPTCHA is 100% gone...beware of the all seeing eye of the CCS server though.
  

Overall the major focus on this update has been stability and security. So while it seems like a lot of nothing was done, its best that you understand that the entire system was more or less rewritten from the ground up, with very little financial support. So while its not CCS2, its CCS, just a whole lot better and more secure.

Upcoming plans from here include several things.

• First thing is the annual holiday free respec, that will drop on the night of the 24th around midnight EST.
  
  
• After the Holiday holocaust has gotten past, I will be sitting down and doing a full system balance pass which will address many racial and class concerns, I expect to be doing this some time between Xmas and New Years depending on my availability.
  
  
• API 3.0 has been done for quite some time but we are currently overhauling the API module to work with the new encryption system, it will be given to the currently licensed developers as soon as the encryption of the system is done. Until that time API 2.5 enhanced weapons will remain active. And after we issue the new API to the developers, they will have 60 days from the date of issue to convert their weapon lines to API 3.0 before API 2.5 is shut down completely.
  
  
  So overall, I'd just like to say, thank you for your patience, CCS is a full time job, that unfortunately tends to pay like volunteer work these days, so...we do what we can when we can do it. Its just the way things have gone with SL since 2010 or so, its been a slow financial decline for the grid itself and its affected all systems associated with it. CCS was never ridiculously lucrative as it was, but it used to at least pay for me to spend 100% of my time focused on that alone. Today in 2014...and coming up in 2015...not so much, hopefully the grid will pick back up, but til it does, we all have to do what we can to make sure we live indoors and eat once a day...right?
  
  Anyways I'll be watching for any major flaws with the release, and we'll attempt to deal with any major issues with quick corrective updates rather than force people to wait for long periods....hopefully this will not be necessary at all, which is why we spent so much time doing beta's and test runs before pushing to live.