User:Torley Linden
Who am I?
Friendly greetings! I'm Torley, you may've heard I love watermelons. It's true.
I started my Second Life as a Resident (affectionately abbreviated as "Resi") in 2004 before working for Linden Lab, and grew very passionate about making our world a better place for you to live. I'm mellow but prone to enthusiasm.
If you feel you're constantly observing and acting on wonders most other people miss, I can relate.
What I do
I'm a "Product Manager & more" on the Community Team.
- I develop communications — Blog, Issue Tracker, Wiki, etc.
- I'm in Studio Blacklight, helping devs to identify and repro critical pain points.
- I'm our community-facing representative for Project: WindLight (killer skies & kickass environments).
- I also nourish content creativity — Texture Tools, Video Tutorials, etc.
- I'm involved with the inworld Resident eXperience, including our user interface, and exploring the Grid.
- You can call me an avid photographer of Second Life's beauty, and spontaneous performance artist.
- Additionally, I specialize in connecting seemingly unrelated pieces together and observing eclecticism that gets missed!
I also post regularly on the Official Linden Blog.
For more info about me, see Torley Lives, my personal blog.
These are some of my free textures:
How to contact me
I prefer simple, old-fashioned email. torley at lindenlab dot com is my address. I can't promise to respond because I get a lot of correspondence, but I try to read everything I get. Requests to check out places, eclectic antics, and such are usually saved for personal relaxation on weekends.
IMs and notecards get missed/discarded because I'm busy working (as shared in my profile's Web tab). I often have to login for a meeting, repro a bug, and do some Grid reconnaissance, then logout. Pardon me if you see my avatar but I'm not interacting — it just means I'm focusing on immediate tasks.
Offline IMs to me get capped. Frequently. I don't have IM-to-email turned on. Again, a well-thought-out email is better.
If you want to chat with me inworld, Office Hours are your answer. I love having visitors. Please accept my advance apologies I will likely not be able to attend events I'm invited to. Maybe someday when my Second Life's work is done. ;)
Got a bug or new feature you want to email me about? Make sure it's in our Issue Tracker with actionable details first, so I can serve you better. I have an excessive amount of odds 'n' ends to keep track of, am unable to reply to queries without a tracking #, and a solid reproduction saves time for us.
Anyone is free to contact me! However, please note I can't give account-specific assistance or forward help requests; the right place for these is our Support Portal. My work queue is overflowing and to add to that would mean to slow down the many, many responsibilities I've already committed to. Questions about my direct responsibilities get higher priority, especially if only I can answer them. And there are times when frequently-asked questions get turned into resources... see below.
Thanxies graciously for understanding. :)
Office hours
I also attend other Lindens' office hours on occasion, and help Benjamin, Bridie, and Iridium with their bug triages.
Transcripts
Project updates
I've added this experimental section because I get many, many questions about the same things. Dates are included with questions to provide temporal clarity. Please feel free to leave followup on my discussion page.
[2007-08-25] WindLight: Internal testing continues
Info can be caught, like a cold, only healthy. So what to do if you find the info on this page useful? SHARE IT WITH A FRIEND!
Sometimes, I leave blog comments filling in gaps, but those tend to get lost, so why not focus on this page? I can do both.
Anyhoo, I continue to both formally test WindLight and informally use it everyday. Internal bug-churning continues; I recently announced, within Linden Lab, an internal First Look as it were, to precede the public FL. My concerns right now? Partially to do with aesthetics (subjective, I know... tricky tricky!) because I'm finding a number of scenes look too white or washed out, e.g. noon with local lighting. HARD to understand if I don't show pictures or if you're not actually using it, but...
We have fallback mode ("shaders off"), which doesn't have clouds, but still looks better than the current sky, and is supported even if your computer doesn't have a fancy graphics card. And it doesn't exhibit the really bright overcasting of the WindLight Shaders, so I toggle on/off for relative comparison. We'll keep adapting it, Pastrami Linden has been tweaking the default day cycle because he cares so passionately about making it photorealistic. Yes, photorealistic. The ripple water has gone through several iterations too: you may've heard reflections got added as an option (understandably, negates performance on slower computers), but the most recent one looks SEXIER than ever. (I can remember when we got the first ripple water added, it and it looked like "liquid bling".)
So, it's the weekend now. I'm casually sauntering inworld and doing everyday stuff. I'm also warmly concerned about overall performance, we have some bugs to work out with that because we earlier, and continue to find issues that counteract the gains done with the aforementioned optimizations. Everyone on the team wants us to be plus, positive with that, so not only do you have prettier skies, but a better experience (that's the word!) too. Wider testing tends to reveal more, so I'm looking forward to your help come public First Look re-release.
LOTS LOTS LOTS of changes have been made since last public FL: WindLight so please don't base final judgment on that. A number of crashes were fixed. (We hate those!) I know shiny was dull in early releases, well now, it shines. Even better, it uses less CPU power ("single-pass shiny"). A lot of known WindLight issues were already fixed internally, and in our release notes, we'll document all the other changes that happened behind-the-scenes so you get a more comprehensive understanding of the work that went into WindLight.
You can keep observing this page for updates. Login to the wiki from the upper-right-hand corner and then click the "Watch" tab, or just bookmark it in your web browser.
If this section gets too long, I'll move it onto its own page. Thanks for keeping on going with me. +^_^+
[2007-08-20] When is First Look: WindLight coming out again?
Hopefully in a few weeks. I earlier hoped it would come out by the end of August, but it doesn't look like we'll hit that. The WindLight Team has been very busy fixing bugs (including those I've reported), and today, we just launched an internal testing round for Lindens (because previously, it was mainly just the WindLight Team using it). I apologize for the delay because I know how anxious a lot of you are, particularly from comments I've been getting on my snapshots.
Also for emphasis, you should know (if you don't already) that WindLight isn't just about "pretty skies" — performance improvements, rendering optimizations, and code cleanup to improve the viewer are an important part of it too. It's a false dichotomy that we spar between bug fixes vs. new features, and I am dogged (and obsessed) about improved performance & stability (aka P&S) for Second Life.
Issue Tracker bugs I've reported
^ Check it out if you wanna see what I've been up to, and/or if you don't know what a filed bug should look like. As a Linden, I'd like to help set a good example and help you be more comfy. :)
Other things of note
- Please be aware chat and IMs you send me MAY NOT BE PRIVATE — my screen is sometimes recorded and broadcast on the Internet when I'm teaching classes, doing demos, testing, etc.
- I don't add to my Friends list because I find it too time-consuming to manage contacts.
- Generally, it takes me about 1-2 weeks to get to received inventory items. I like to sit down, sort them out, and enjoy.
- My screen is often crammed with windows because I'm working on various things inworld. This means I prolly won't see your chat in the open. I apologize if this is so. If I'm available to talk, I'll be very chatty!
- I usually don't blog about stuff (neither professionally nor personally) on request. I already have a long list of topics I'd like to get to "someday" and am inundated in ideas, so thanks in advance for your suggestion, but please understand I most likely won't be able to fulfill your request — unless by the wonder of synchronicity, it happens to already be on my list!
Superfantastic resources I enjoy
Stuff I found
- Developers Resource Matrix - It's kinda hard to find on our website, but it's got lots of helpful links I refer to regularly. If you're a content creator or looking to Do-It-Yourself, bookmark it and keep it close.
- PacificRim Exchange's Learning Page - I've seen a lot of resource link lists, and this one is teh trump. Categorization is lovely, and it includes a lot of helpful highlights. Thanx to Claudia Linden for lettin' me know.
Stuff I founded
Feel free to contribute to these if you know good stuff that should be on 'em!
- Video Tutorials - When words and still pictures aren't enough... the wiki's 3rd-most-viewed page!
- Texture Tools - I love textures! Who doesn't?
- Clothing Tutorials - Making clothing is a cornerstone of SL content creation.
- Snapshots & Postcards - The fine art of inworld photography.
- Office Hours - For those times when you wanna meet a Linden. And discuss stuff.
- Debug Help - Need to learn how to find your SecondLife.log or get your Fast Timers results?
- Debug Settings - Hidden features that can be of great benefit to your Second Life.
Misc.
Things that need to be fleshed-out and sorted later.