This weekend sees the official kick-off for Relay for Life of SL with a special celebratory event taking place on Saturday March 9th, starting at 10:00 SLT.
The theme for 2013 is “100 years of hope”, and marks the centenary of the American Cancer Society. As such, this year is being seen as an opportunity to more closely align RFL’s digital world efforts (which now also include InWorldz as well as Second Life) with the ACS.
The kick-off celebration will take place on four dedicated Kick-off regions adjoining the American Cancer Society region, which feature a central stage and the Cafe du Kick-off, set within a park and surrounded by a parade-like walk and gaily coloured houses.
RFL of SL Kick-off stage area
The event will comprise the official opening of the RFL of SL 2013 season, complete with a number of special guest speakers. entertainment will be provided throughout the day following the opening ceremony, with DJs on-hand to spin the tunes at the central stage area throughout the afternoon, and a special dance troupe performance during the course of the festivities.
There are around 113 teams registered for this year’s season, with over 2,000 avatars listed on the team rosters – however, there is still time for people to put together a team of their own and join in the fundraising activities; teams can still be registered via the RFL of SL website.
The RFL of SL kick-off regions
All RFL of SL teams are warmly invited by the event organisers to attend the kick-off and mix with one another. SLurls for the event are:
All of the deployments planned for week 10 went ahead as scheduled. While further issues related to region crossings have been reported, these are not thought to be related to any of the new code deployments for this week (see below for more).
The one issue that has been noted with the deployments is for VWR-786, which formed a part of the Magnum deployment.
This was supposed to ensure that if a friend does not have ‘See my online status’ permission, they will now see “User is not online ..” message following IM or inventory offer. However, the result has also been that if you IM a non-friend, the server always returns the “User is not online” message. The short-term solution for this is to remove the change from week 11’s releases in the interest of getting the other fixes (BUG-1612 and SVC-8019) across the grid.
The Lab is particularly keen to see SVC-8019 deployed to the entire grid, as this should fix issues of regions not handshaking correctly with one another following a rolling restart. The cause of this is believed to be due to regions looking at stale cached copies of a neighbouring regions’ status. With the update, regions grab more up-to-date copies of the status of their neighbours.
Server-side Baking: Further Pile-on / Load Test
Nyx Linden has announced that there will be a further SSB pile-on / load test on Thursday March 14th, following-on, as with the last test, from the Server Beta meeting on Aditi. The test is liable to be in much the same format as the first test, of which Nyx notes, “It gave us a lot of information and we’ve been working on a number of fixes, both to Aditi inventory, as well as viewer and back-end changes. Given this, the reason for the next test, in Nyx’s words, is because, “We’d like to see how much progress we’re making.”
The first SSB pile-on / load test (image courtesy of Latif Khalifa
Those wishing to participate will be required to be using the latest version of the Sunshine project viewer (3.4.5.271419), and are advised to attend the Server Beta meeting on Aditi ahead of time (the meeting commences at 15:00 SLT on Thursdays). Addressing those who participated in the first test, Nyx added, “If you had trouble at the last pile-on with outfit switching, feel free to test out the new build in advance – you should be able to comment on the JIRA tasks you filed, or email me directly with any issues.”
Materials Processing
Following-on from his replies to my question at the open-source dev meeting on Monday March 4th, Oz Linden talked some more on the status of the materials processing project at the Wednesday meeting on March 6th, “There’s one build floater bug and one crash that need fixing,” he said in kicking-off the discussion on materials, “I might even be willing to let it out without the crash fix (though it’s pretty bad).”
However, before everyone starts shouting, “Yes, yes!” :), even the release of a crashy version of the project viewer requires the “other” problem to be fixed. This appears to be related to a texture list getting corrupted, and which can manifest in a number of ways, including:
The normal map picker reverts to displaying the diffuse (texture) map after a normal map has been selected and the picker closed, with the normal map failing to render on the object / face it has been applied to
If deferred rendering is turned off, anything using materials appears black
If bump mapping is disabled, objects using materials appear to randomly adopt nearby textures (including skin textures) which can change as the camera is rotated / moved.
Normal map application issue: a normal map is selected and applied to an object face (l); however, on re-opening the build floater, the map appears to have reverted to the diffuse map (r), and the object face does not render as expected
World of Beauty is the home region for Tableau Vivant, supplying skins, clothing, animations, mesh items and more, with goods spread across two stores, one at ground level, and the other some 2000m in the air.
The region is also the home of something of a “secret” and somewhat dark build by the Tableau Vivant team which though small, is nevertheless spectacular – particularly when viewed using deferred rendering.
Tableau Vivant’s sky build at World of Beauty (click to enlarge)
Is this a world struck by a natural catastrophe, or the aftermath of a man-made apocalypse? That’s for you to decide. For me, and for reasons I can’t adequately explain, looking around the build kept bringing excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets to mind, starting with the opening of Burnt Norton.
Tableau Vivant’s sky build at World of Beauty (click to enlarge)
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.
Tableau Vivant”s sky build at World of Beauty (click to enlarge)
It’s perhaps unfair on both Eliot and the build to take both somewhat out-of-context in this way, but I was unable to shake myself from much of Four Quartets in camming around the ruined streets and shattered buildings. Although given the generall tone of the piece, perhaps a part of the third stanza from Burnt Norton has something of an understandable resonance.
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
Tableau Vivant”s sky build at World of Beauty (click to enlarge)
Nor should it be taken to mean that the build is in any way depressing. Yes it is dark; the feeling of emptiness is palpable and the desolation obvious. But then, as Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin reminded us as he stood on the surface of the Moon, there can be a certain magnificence within a scene of desolation.
Go see for yourselves!
Tableau Vivant”s sky build at World of Beauty (click to enlarge)
These questions were actually the focus of some thought on my part back in 2011, when – having been prompted by a tweet from Crap Mariner, I mused on advertising SL: the machinima effect, and it seems worthwhile both revisiting those thoughts and updating them with a few further ideas and thoughts.
The video that prompted my original post on the subject may not be focused on Second Life, but it is ample proof of how machinima can be used to promote a product. What’s more it is fun.
Back in 2011, it prompted Crap to tweet: Linden Lab needs to make some ads like this for Second Life – something which caused me to reply: Or #LL should work with the machinima folk for suitable ads: say a competition; top 3 promoted on YT, SL.com, etc., which inturn prompted my original post on this idea,
Today, as Ciaran points out, and as I’ve covered for the last few years in this blog (albeit haphazardly), the University of Western Australia holds an annual MachinimUWA Challenge, which this year sees a prize pool of L$1.1 million for machinima makers submitting entries on the theme of “Reflections”.
MachinimUWA VI: showing the potential for machinima as a promotional tool
What makes MachinimUWA particularly relevant to this discussion is that not only does it showcase machinima as an art form, it actually promotes the University of Western Australia. The promotion may actually be very low-key, and a somewhat secondary consideration in terms of storytelling for those entering the competition, but it is there. This year, for example, entrants are required to film in “At least one of the 3 major spaces of Reflection at UWA … (The Reflection Pond, The Sunken Gardens, The Somerville Auditorium).” With the rules going on to note that entrants “may choose to film in any other area of the campus … or … include all 3 locations.” Thus, the UWA’s in-world facilities form the nucleus of the competition in terms of providing the backdrop for whatever stories entrants opt to tell.
On Tuesday March 5th, the Second Life Server (SLS) channel received the server maintenance project that was deployed to all three RC channels in week 9. This update only contains a fix to a single crash mode.
On Wednesday March 6th, the three Release Candidate channel should receive the following code deployments:
BlueSteel and LeTigre: a new server maintenance project, which fixes a fairly common crash mode, together with Baker Linden’s large (as in file size) object rezzing project aimed at improving simulator performance (see below)
Magnum: a new server maintenance project, which includes a mix of bug fixes and stability improvements. Specific fixes mentioned in the release notes are:
BUG-1612: region Owners and estate managers finding they are unable to teleport back to their region after disabling direct teleports to the region
SVC-8019: region visibility delays following region restarts. This may help with the problem of diagonally adjacent regions failing to render
VWR-786: if a friend does not have ‘See my online status’ permission, they will now see “User is not online ..” message following IM or inventory offer.
Large Object Rezzing Project
Baker Linden has been looking to improve how objects with large file sizes are handled by the simulator software when being rezzed. He describes the work thus, “What I’ve been working on is hopefully significantly decreasing lag spikes when rezzing large, complex objects [such as those with lots of scripts]. Large does not necessarily imply size, but size of the files being read. When an object is rezzing, we have to parse the object / mesh files and create our in-world objects with that data.”
Until now, reading and parsing of any files related to objects which require rezzing has been on the main thread. When several such objects requiring rezzing at the same time, the simulator stalls. Baker has been moving the reading / parsing operation to a background thread in the expectation that this will prevent the simulator being choked.
The key point about this work is that it is specifically aimed at preventing the simulator processes from choking and a region stalling when there are a number of large object files being read / parsed, not at actually “speeding up” the physical rezzing process. As such, it is unlikely that objects will appear any faster in people’s in-world view as a result of this work. However, what it does mean is that the simulator code will be better able to handle rezzing multiple “large file” objects without the attendant region lagging which can occur as a result of the simulator being unable to process messages from viewers and other simulators, etc.
Materials Processing
In my last update on this work, I reported that the Lab believed they had one more issue to resolve with the materials processing project, after which the way should be clear for a project viewer to be made publicly available. At the time, it wasn’t clear exactly what the problem might be. However, on Monday March 4th, I was able to ask Oz about the problem, and it appears that it is with the project viewer itself.
“We’ve got a viewer, but it’s so crashy, and the crashes are mostly in material property editing, that I don’t want to distribute it yet…. I’m concerned that doing so would result in a lot of broken content lying around,” Oz informed me.
Materials processing: viewer issues delaying project viewer release (image courtesy of Geenz Spad) – click to enlarge
I asked Oz if the crash problems were related to physically applying maps to objects and / or object faces. He confirmed that this is indeed the case – and that the latest (non-public) version of the project viewer can crash if even the parameters for maps applied to an object / object face are modified. However, he went on to say, “Hopefully we’ll get the worst of the crashes dealt with soon, and then we can start giving it to a wider audience. We’ve already solved a bunch of them, but it’s not quite ready for even open alpha testing.”
So, for those who commented on the lack of any update following my last SL project update from week 9, I’m afraid the situation still appears to be one of, “Hurry up and wait.”
A little while ago, Nalates Urriah pulled together a set of statistics from diverse sources (all of which are duly credited) which help to paint a decent picture of where SL stands away from all the hype over falling region numbers, etc.
When taken together, the stats – which cover daily sign-ups, concurrency (daily / monthly), region numbers and even forum usage, all for periods of at least a year – present an interesting picture of Second Life which Nalates interprets in her own inimitable way. While they show that Second Life has in many respects been on a steady downward slide (particularly in terms of overall usage), the situation is far from unrecoverable. Indeed, some of the figures are, at least for a moment, trending upwards again – although without more detailed data and a wider breakdown, it is impossible to draw any conclusions as to what this might signify in the short-term and thus how it might be projected in the medium-, or long-term.
There are significant gaps in the data (through no fault of those who gathered / present it – the information simply isn’t available). For example, while sign-ups can be shown to have been at least constant (or have increased slightly) through the 2-year period, there is no practical context to the figures in terms of users actually being retained. A further problem with the figures is that there is no indicator as to the percent / proportion of these sign-ups actually being alternate accounts, rather than actual new users (although LL does apparently have a mechanism in place for distinguishing between the two).
Daily sign-ups, as reported by Tateru Nino and extrapolated and presented by Nalates Urriah, with monthly concurrency for 2012 inset – click
Certainly, Rod Humble did state at in his first (and last) SLCC address in August 2011 the rise of user sign-ups did coincide with an upswing in identifiable uniques (i.e. genuine new users, rather than alternate accounts), which he clearly defined as people signing-up, downloading the viewer and logging in to SL.
The user concurrency chart is somewhat more meaningful, in that it charts concurrency for a more extended period from December 2009 through to the present day. As such, any trend shown is liable to be somewhat more reliable, although there are still problems in interpreting the data as a whole. For example, it does show a consistent downward trend in concurrency since the late “boom” period when SL was at the height of its own Hype Cycle “peak of over-inflated expectations”; but precisely what this means is still somewhat open to interpretation.
Daily concurrency, Dec 09 through Jan 2013, from Tateru Nino, as extrapolated by Nalates Urriah
Less Doesn’t Automatically Mean Fewer
A decline in concurrency doesn’t automatically mean a substantial drop in overall user numbers (although it is hard to completely divorce the two). There have been a number of factors which have contributed to some aspects of the decline outside of falling user numbers. Linden Lab caused something of a decline when they clamped-down on the use of bots. More recently, factors such as changing demographics and changing user habits appear to have also contributed to falls in concurrency.
These latter points were indicated again indicated by Rod Humble in his SLCC 2011 address, when he drew attention to the fact that the overall demographic of SL users was shifting, age-wise, more toward people in the mid-to-late 20s, and that they were collectively logging-on to SL for shorter periods. He also indicated that LL had charted a noticeable increase in the way SL users were interacting without actually going in-world – through the mechanism of profile feeds, for example.
This weekend sees the official kick-off for Relay for Life of SL with a special celebratory event taking place on Saturday March 9th, starting at 10:00 SLT.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 