Update January 3rd, 2012:Together for Sway raised L$1,551,825 in just two weeks.
Sway Dench has been a resident of Second Life for over five years, and is possibly most famous for her Cookie Bears.
Sway Dench
Sway was recently diagnosed with a tumour in her brain. While benign and non-life threatening, the tumour nevertheless needs to be removed, and Sway has been scheduled for surgery in some 6-8 weeks time, after which she is liable to be convalescing for up to six months.
As Sway’s SL business is her major source of income, and is liable to be impacted by both the surgery and the period of convalescence, a group of friends and content creators have rallied to her support and organised Together for Sway, which runs from now until the end of December 2012.
Together for Sway
Together for Sway features a special vendor area, complete with donation boxes, offering a range of goods an items for sale with all proceeds going directly to assisting Sway Dench. Entertainments will also be provided during the time Together for Sway is running, and details on these are liable to appear on the Together for Sway blog.
In addition, on Friday 21st December, commencing at 17:00 SLT, Rebel Yell Concerts will be hosting a Nickelback concert for Sway, where donations can also be given.
The Seanchai Library will be presenting another round of stories and readings in Voice this coming week, as they continue with tales of a distinctly seasonal flavour, while the first full week of The Dickens Project continues.
As always, all times SLT, and unless otherwise stated, events will be held on the Seanchai Library’s home on Imagination Island.
Monday December 17th, 19:00: The Cat Who Came for Christmas
Join Kayden Oconnell for selection from Cleveland Armory’s endearing book.
It is fitting that the founder and head of the Fund for Animals personally rescues and takes in strays, and one incident proved to have a profound effect on him. On a snowy Christmas Eve, Amory helped capture a scrawny cat and took it to his apartment. How does a new cat-keeper train a creature accustomed to fending for itself in Manhattan’s alleys? Slowly, with patience and respect.
Tuesday December 18th, 19:00: A Sprinkling of Christmas Classic
Brought to us piping hot and ready to enjoy by Derry McMahon and Bear Silvershade, who are joined by Aoife Lorefield.
Wednesday December 19th, 19:00: A Christmas Story a Year
Well all know Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843. What many may not know is that he went on to write a further four Christmas tales: The Chimes in 1844, The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845, The Battle of Life in 1846 and The Haunted in 1848. Join Caledonia Skytower as the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’ birth draws to a close, as she presents us with A Christmas Story a Year.
Thursday December 20, 19:00 Dave Cooks the Turkey (and more)
Dave owns the world’s smallest record store, where the motto is “We may not be big but we’re small.” Dave is frequently neurotic and prone to small accidents and mishaps – but he’s not the only one in his family, or his neighbourhood.
Bear Silvershade concludes Dave Cooks the Turkey and he and Derry bring us more from the pen of Stuart McLean for his CBC Radio show, The Vinyl Cafe.
Sunday December 22nd, 13:00: A Raglan Shire Christmas Carol
Join Derry McMahon and Bear Silvershade at Raglan Shire as they present a special adaptation of Dickens’ classic tale of penny-pinching redemption and ghosts past, presents and future especially for Tinies (Biggies welcome as well).
All donations toward the real world charity Witness.
The Dickens Project Continues
The Dickens Project: The story starts on Monday 17th December at noon SLT with Marley’s Ghost, and continues through the week
All this week, The Dickens Project continues with a special nightly presentation of A Christmas Carol to mark the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Dickens. Each presentation is held in voice at Info Island, the home of the Community Virtual Library.
Monday December 17th –Stave One ~ Marley’s Ghost
12:00 noon – Ixmal Supermarine
16:00 – Corwyn Allen
Tuesday, December 18th – Stave Two ~ The First of Three Spirits
12:00 noon – Dubhna Rhiadra
17:00 – Brokali
Wednesday, December 19th – Stave Three ~ The Second of Three Spirits
12:00 noon – Ixmal Supermarine
17:00 – Kayden Oconnell
Thursday, December 20th – Stave Four ~The Last of The Spirits
This summary is published every Monday and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Viewer Round-up Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware) and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy
By its nature, this summary will always be in arrears
The Viewer Round-up Page is updated as soon as I’m aware of any releases / changes to viewers & clients, and should be referred to for more up-to-date information as the week progresses
The Viewer Round-up Page also includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog.
Updates for the week ending: 16 December, 2012
SL Viewer updates:
Beta version rolled to 3.4.3.268139 on December 14 – release notes
Development rolled to 3.4.4.268156 on December 14
The Sunshine Project viewer (avatar baking) arrived with the release of 3.4.4.268071 on December 14th (wiki page) – note this viewer is not recommended for daily SL use
Dolphin rolled to 3.4.6.26773 on December 11 – core updates: snapshot tiling fix (MAINT-628); fixes and improvements for the image quality with SSAO enabled, and for ambient fog over water (distance haze) with shadows enabled; Some Windlight preset files renamed to avoid issues; Teleport to ground level enabled via keyboard (CTRL-SHIEFT-END) – release notes
Niran’s Viewer rolled to 2.0.5.2346 on December 11 – core updates, snapshot tiling fix (MAINT-628); fixes and improvements for the image quality with SSAO enabled, and for ambient fog over water (distance haze) with shadows enabled; new “space reflections” feature – release notes
Restrained Love rolled to 2.8.3.5 on December 16 – core updates: fix for those encountering build problems using 2.8.3.4, plus latest beta updates from LL, including snapshot tiling fix (MAINT-628)
Cool VL updates – three versions for the time being, all updated on December 16:
Stable version rolled to 1.26.6.1
Legacy version Legacy (v2.6 renderer) rolled to 1.26.4.44
The RC channel deployments went head as scheduled, and included the promised fix for offline IMs from scripted objects failing to reach people’s e-mail (BUG-1002). A further issue (BUG-1027) with group owners receiving garbled messages on ejecting group members was reported over the weekend of the 9/10th December, and this also received a fix which formed a part of the deployments.
As reported in part 1, Magnum received code to double the server-side memory allocation from 60KB to 120KB. Animations within SL have two core limits: loop time (30 seconds) and memory allocation (60KB). Apparently, some complex animations which ran within the 30-second time frame have been hitting the memory allocation limit. This initial change should help to ease that issue when encountered. A future change on the viewer-side of things should eventually increase the animation run-time as well, allowing for animations longer than 30 seconds to be uploaded and used.
Server Deployments Week 51
Given Magnum has all the same changes as both BlueSteel and Le Tigre, plus the additional stability improvements and memory leak fixes, it now looks likely that this code will be promoted to the Main Channel on week 51 (week commencing Monday 17th December). No news was provided during the Server Beta meeting on any proposed RC releases during week 51.
Again, as a reminder, there will be no server code releases during weeks 52 (commencing Monday 24th December) and week 1, 2013 (commencing Monday 31st December). There will also be no further Server Beta meetings until Thursday January 3rd, 2013.
Viewer Updates
Linden Lab continue to work on the beta and development viewers in order to clear the backlog of releases resulting from the memory leak / crash issues. Currently, they are “almost” at the end of catching-up on the release schedule. Some of the focus at present is on the Mac side of things, with Oz Linden reporting that there should be “A bunch of changes for the Mac build and the Mac implementation coming into viewer development” over the next few days.
The beta viewer has seen a further 3.4.3 code release (3.4.3.268139 on December 14th). This should mark the last of the 3.4.3 code releases for the beta viewer prior to that code moving to the release viewer, possibly in week 51. After this, the beta viewer will move to the 3.4.4 code base, which will include the changes for the Mac side of things as well. This should then see the viewer branches all more-or-less back to a normal pace of development and update, with fresh releases on the order of every three weeks or so, including more HTTP service updates and improvements.
Tcmalloc has been set off to one side in order to clear the backlog, but “has not been forgotten”. Currently it is still enabled in the beta release, but appears to be disabled in upcoming viewer development versions.
Avatar Baking
The biggest news of the week came with the announcement that for Avatar Baking, the countdown has commenced. This is going to take the next few months to implement, and requires both changes on the server-side of things and significant changes to the viewer. An update had actually been promised at the Content Creation User Group on Monday 17th December, but given the large impact the changes have on viewers, Nyx Linden rightly announced the news relating to the project at the TPV Developer meeting on Friday 14th December.
Nyx linden discusses server-side baking at the TPV Developer meeting, Friday 14th December
Threaded Region Crossings
The work on multi-threaded region crossings is still with the LL QA team. In the meantime, further regions have been added to the simulator version (server code DRTSIM-184) running the new code. Four of the latter are GC Test 9, GC Test 10, GC Test 15 and GC Test 16, which form a block of four regions which may assist with testing the capability (remember these SLurls are all to Aditi!). Caleb Linden has been testing the capability and reports that he has encountered some issues himself, with crashes during “automated horde testing” and with repeated crossing with heavy scripts. He’s interested in hearing constructive feedback from anyone willing to carry out informal tests on the code.
Update 17th December: The video of the meeting is available on You Tube (and embedded below). Links have also been added to the official announcement and a transscript of Jessica’s presentation given at the start of the meeting.
Jessica Lyon and members of the Phoenix Firestorm Team hosted an in-world / streamed meeting on Saturday 15th December, 2012 to discuss the future of Phoenix.
As expected, the core of the news was the Phoenix has essentially come to its end of line. As from December 31st, all official support provided by the Phoenix / Firestorm team will cease.
There are many reasons as to why this step is finally being taken, but they all have their roots in the fact that in late 2010, the decision was taken that to ensure future ease-of-development and enhancement of the viewer, it would be more in the Phoenix Team’s interest to develop a viewer which could more easily keep pace with LL’s development curve, rather than attempting to continually backport new code and features into a viewer that would be based on what would become an increasingly outdated code base. Thus, Firestorm was born. Whether one agrees with this decision or not is actually moot. It was a decision the Phoenix Team were entitled to make.
Jessica Lyon (stock image)
The major reason as to why the team has opted to formally announce the end of line for Phoenix now is because Linden Lab have notified TPVs of the forthcoming roll-out of server-side avatar baking in 2013.
As I’ve explained in a recent blog post, server-side avatar baking is a significant change in the way Second Life operates and which should see an end to the major issue of avatar bake fail. However, it brings with it not only changes to the server-side of Second Life, but very major changes to the viewer itself.
Such is the complexity of these viewer changes that Linden Lab has sought to provide TPVs with an eight week window in which to implement and test them. Given the overall status of Phoenix, it simply is not possible for the Phoenix Firestorm team to implement the changes in Firestorm and backport and integrate them into Phoenix (together with all the other changes required to get Phoenix back on a par with LL’s viewer development) in that time frame. The reason why it is vital for all TPVs incorporate the new code is because without it, avatars will fail to render correctly – so if Phoenix does not have the code, it simply “won’t work” when the new service is deployed.
Avatar baking 2013 and Phoenix in brief: These images show the impact of the new avatar baking service on a viewer which is not updated to the new code. (l) as I appear on a viewer without the code, and someone on another viewer (regardless of the code it is using) looks to me – a “grey ghost”. On the right, someone running the new code, and how I look to them – a never-rezzing cloud.
Please use the page numbers below to continue reading this article
Unhinged, subtitled A Festival for Eku’s Head a special, month-long series of events aimed at raising money to assist SL resident Eku Zhong, draws to a close today.
Over the last several years, Eku has suffered with MS and then thyroid cancer prior to being stricken with bone cancer. Throughout this she has undergone extensive treatment from radiation therapy through to both bone marrow transplants and bone replacements, all of which have taken their toll, and left Eku with a fragile skull. The area where her zygotic arch meets the temporal bone is severely compromised, leaving her with a risk that her zygotic arch could lift off the temporal arch and push the temporal bone into her brain. Actions as simple as chewing hard food or yawning the wrong way could cause this.
To prevent this, Eku needed to have a further surgery to fit her with a prosthesis to replace the damaged bone. Unhinged was put together by Eku’s friends, lead by Nephilaine Protagonist, in order to help her meet the cost of the surgery and the prosthesis.
Over the course of the last month, Unhinged has been taking place on two regions, with a large, open-area vendor area on Port Seraphine, with content creators who are supporting the event displaying their wares – some of which have been exclusively for Unhinged. The vendor area is simple, low-lag and highly effective for an event of this sort. It leads up to the party / stage area, which is just “over the border” in the region of WaterWorks and is very much in keeping with the overall theme for the event, as it features a large skull in which DJs are artists perform.
During the course of the month, which has seen donations both in-world and via an Indiegogo fundraiser page, enough had been raised which could be added to the money Eku herself has put together for her to undergo the surgery. As a result, Eku is once more at home, recovering. She is also hoping to attend the remaining Unhinged events through the day as and when she can.
As a result, a series of special events are being put together – and while the schedule is somewhat fluid, everyone is invited to join in and welcome Eku home.
Jessica Lyon and members of the Phoenix Firestorm Team hosted an in-world / streamed meeting on Saturday 15th December, 2012 to discuss the future of Phoenix.
Unhinged, subtitled A Festival for Eku’s Head a special, month-long series of events aimed at raising money to assist SL resident Eku Zhong, draws to a close today.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 