Many of you were probably shocked when receiving today's notices, sent from an alt of mine, no less, that Damnation is closing.

The reasons for that are purely financial, they don't have a bearing on my role in CCS and as a developer for CCS.

During the past three months, I lost both pillars of my RL income. Trying to make ends meet proved futile, with Damnation and North Gate costing $295 and $125 respectively, plus VAT, since I'm in Europe.

So, with much regret, I had to let the island go at extremely short notice. As of right now my Melanie Milland account is suspended for nonpayment, but Suz and I have taken CCS meter development offline years ago, so that is no hindrance for development.

I am, however, not turning my back on CCS and SL. Not owning sims eases a lot of the tremendous financial pressure that has forced me to devote all my time to scraping up money to pay my bills. Relieving that pressure will actually give me more time to concentrate on what I want, rather than what I have to do.

I plan to add IFF (Identify Friend Foe) code to the Meter for testing, hopefully by this weekend. Also, I can invest a little more time into tracking down the skill spam issue to make a new general release meter a reality quite soon.

Please rest assured, I'm not running off on CCS, I just can't continue to spend over $4800 per year on overpriced sims in SL. I'm likely to rent a small spot for a lab and continue working on CCS there.

I'm sorry to have to drop Damnation, it has been my clan home, home to many over the years and it has seen truly epic roleplay in the years of it's existence. An album of pictures of Damnation exists, please do contribute images you may have to help us remember it's good times.

Just a heads up. We've identified a few problems with the roll out of CCS 1.0.5, one of those problems appears that due to API 2.5 still being the API standard, a few individuals who I won't directly name have taken it upon themselves to attempt to disrupt the release by abusing the dynchan.

Now...I should bring up that the only reason this can be done is because the API is still in the process of being swapped over to the new system.

I could have very easily shut down API 2.5 and told people to like it or lump it. But I wanted to be considerate of our players and the money they have spent on weapons over the years, so I set up the 2.5 to 3.0 release scenario to be a slow shift, also with the intention to give our 3rd party developers a 60 day period to update their weapons to the 3.0 system before shutting down 2.5 entirely.

One thing certain individuals can still do is mess with meters via the API 2.5 dynchan...mostly just meter resets, level up notices and the like, nothing horrific...its also possible for these people to go into high volume combat regions and spam the dynchan and cause region performance and CCS performance to tank as well.

Now, this isn't me dodging the responsibility that the meter will need to have further testing and potential patches if we identify problems with how our system is working. But the recent problems reported to me are all mostly attributed not to actual problems with the meters, but a few...rather unfortunate individuals that have made it their business, while in SL, to attempt to disrupt CCS at any level possible. And I could go into a long winded explanation as to why they do it, but I won't bother, because in the end it really won't matter what I say, people will believe whatever they want to believe. But I can assure you that their issues with CCS are mostly based in self interest and the fact that they were denied access to the API and/or banned from Second Life for selling modified viewer executables designed to allow individual users to exploit CCS.

Anyways, simple facts are the only reason this is happening at all, is because the API 2.5 door is still open, we do have the 3.0 API done, its being encrypted and as soon as we can get the bulk of the weapon base shifted over to it (keep in mind some older developers may not update their weapons at all and we do not have any control over that..they just may no longer be in SL at all), we will shut down API 2.5 and this becomes a non-issue from there.

So overall most of the problems currently being seen with the 1.0.5 meter can be attributed to a small handful of people making a minor effort to attempt to make 1.0.5 look like "it doesn't work" and or "isn't secure"...when the only reason they can do that is because I've tried to be considerate to our players in regards to the money they've spent on weapons. I could very well have shut the API down entirely til the 3.0 API was implemented and told you all to fight with rocks and sticks...but I didn't feel that was very considerate as approaches go.

So...no good deed goes unpunished right? Hopefully this gives people a frame of reference on some current issues as they've been reported with the 1.0.5 meter. Its not the meter, its just a bunch of assholes abusing a door we had to leave temporarily open to try to show everyone how smart they are.

Advice to region owners, should you notice any CCS oddities or bad performance, check your region list for names you don't really recognize, I'd be interested in the names you find to check them against the data I'm getting server side.

Anyways, sorry for the bumpy road here, and...sorry that people, are, sometimes, assholes. But we're working as fast as we can to make it a moot issue. CCS 1.0.5 was one part of the solution, the other part is finally getting API 3.0 out to replace 2.5....and from there, it won't really matter how clever someone is.

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.