Customizable Weather & Environments:
We have added the ability to change the sky dome and weather pattern in your space in There.  These options are available to the Zone Owner on the Zone Configuration page for all zones permanent and portable.  Select the desired Environment and Weather from the pull down menus and click the 'Update' button.  The available settings are:

Environment Override:
Default - Restores 'normal sky for that location'
New Dawn - Early Morning sky
High Noon - Bright Blue Sunny sky
Romantic Sunset - Pinky Sunset sky
Moonlit Night - Starry Night sky

Weather Override:
Default - Restores 'normal weather for that location'
None - Removes all weather (even if normal for that location)
Rain - Gentle Rain with Foggy sky
Snow - Gentle Snow with Foggy sky
Thunderstorm - Heavy rain with dark grey sky with Thunder claps and Lightning flashes

We received several suggestions during the betas for additional environments and weathers.  These have all been recorded and will be evaluated for future releases.

If you prefer not to see any of the weather patterns, you can toggle weather off using the Customize menu There -> Customize -> World -> Weather On.

Known issues:
-The Rain and Snow are designed to stop when they hit the collision of a house's roof. We discovered that some of the There houses have leaky roofs where there are gaps in the collision map.
-If  you are in a zone with a foggy environment/weather selected, if you zoom out to Super or World Zoom, the entire world will appear foggy.  This is due to the fact that your view is based on your avatar location (which is foggy).

- The Environment settings will not work in PAZes purchased before 5/11 (last Friday) on islands with non-standard sky domes. (ex: Frosty, Motu Motu, Ootay) We are searching for a solution that will allow us to resolve this issue in pazes purchased before that date.

Zone IM
A Zone IM window can now be turned on or off for your zone.  The zone owner can check 'Show Megaphone in Zone' on the Zone Configuration page and click the 'Update' button to turn the Zone IM window on/off in all houses, funzones, frontier zones, Hoods and lots. 

Extend Rental
We have made a change to the code which allows you to extend your zone rental an extra 30 day period.  This works for houses, funzones, frontier zones, hoods and lots.

To extend your rent:
Open your zone information page.
Click the 'Extend Rental' button
Click the 'Rent It' button
Click 'I Agree' button
Your rental expiration date has been updated to +30 days.

Known issues:
If your rent is due 30 days or more in the future you will not be able to extend your rental.

Events:
New Schedule an Event Flow:
We have made the schedule event page a 1 page form, and have added flexibility for event hosts.  A link to the new Event Scheduling 'Or try our NEW event scheduling system!' is below the Add New Event button on all zone pages.

What's new?
Select the date, time of event, duration and prep period using pull down menus.
You can schedule an event up to 30 days past the rental due date for your zone! (Yay!!!!)
The start time, duration, and prep time are in 1 minute increments, so you no longer need to wait for the next 1/2 hour, or fiddle with the url to start an event right away!
The Event Type and Category lists have been reduced based on member activities.  (Plus recommendations from the betas.)
The broken option of selecting Teams by Club has been removed.
Selecting 'Club Members are Co-hosts' now lists all clubs you are a member of, not just the ones that you lead.

Events on Rental Cancellation:
The issue was brought to us that events remain associated with a zone, even if the zone is unrented. This feature will only remove events when the zone is unrented. If you transfer a zone to another person the events will remain as scheduled. If you use the relinquish rental url to remove the rental, all existing events will be removed from the zone. (Zones need to be rented for events to be scheduled.)

Known issues:
Events that are in progress when the zone is unrented will continue as scheduled.

Find a Zone for Event:
Go to menu Activities -> Schedule Event
Select a Zone Type and Time of day that you would like to schedule the event then click 'Search for a Funzone'
Zones that are available at that time, and that you have permission to host will have a Blue Select button

To Clarify the Scheduling Process:
We've added a Reminder at the top of the Confirm Event Details page that you need to click the 'Schedule Event' button to finalize the event schedule.
We have also added the Zone Title to the Confirm Event Details page so that you can make certain that the zone location hasn't changed unexpectedly.

Known issues:
We have been unable to reproduce the bug where your event location changes at the last moment under test circumstances. We will continue to look for the cause of this, but hope that the above changes will help catch the problem before scheduling your event.

The Event Types and Categories
After receiving reports and requests over time to have the Event Types and Categories better reflect what members were enjoying in There, we reviewed what those lists contained.  As a result, the Event Type and Category lists have been adjusted based on member activities, feedback and recommendations from the betas.


Miscellaneous Changes:
System Message Sounds can now be turned off using the menu There -> Customize -> Messages -> "Turn off System Message sound"

Events Browse page formatting has been modified to display events with longer descriptions in a nicer layout.

Bug Fixes:
We have fixed the issue that allowed the orange music bar from VLB to be displayed on There Clients. 

Recent Releases:
Stylemaker 5.1  - We've added the kits to the Stylemaker download and added more features to the tool to make testing your textures better before submitting. Read here for more information.

Billing Server Upgrade - We have made a number of changes to ensure that your transactions are more secure. This includes changing billing providers, as well as adding Address Verification (AVS) and Card Validation (CVV2) for greater cardholder security.

This release is brought to you  by:
Everyone at Makena Technologies has a hand in producing and supporting There.  We would like to take this opportunity to extend special recognition to the folks that coded the features and those that provided design input.

Billing Update - Skippy, KatKat, PocketCalculator, Jessica, Helper_Suzanne, the finance guy.... (Really just about everyone did something for this.)
Events - myIMV, KatKat, _Emma, Mackie
Stylemaker 5.1 - TheChaz and Sonblock
Water - Samsyn, TheChaz and Vash
Weather - Samsyn, TheChaz and Dihtri
Webpages and XSL mojo - EngeeDave and xbudex (these guys touch all the web pages)
Zone IM - Samsyn
Zone Extend Rental and Relinquish Rental - KatKat
Release Coordinator - PixelVixen

Wait! What about the Developer Lab Zones?  Aren't they in this Release?
After the last beta test we determined that the Lab Zones were still too unstable to be released into production. To make sure that we release this as a polished product, PixelVixen will continue working on these, resolving the issues, and we will test them again on the beta cluster to flush out any additional issues.