Gemma Cleanslate of the BURN2 team has issued a reminder that there are still plots available for purchase at the upcoming BURN2 2013 event in October.
Available plot, sizes and prices for the week are as follows:
512 sq m (117 prims): L$3000
1024 sq m (234 prims): L$6000
2048 sq m (468 prims): L$12000
4096 sq m (936 prims): L$24000
If you are interested in participating in this year’s BURN2, which runs from October 19th through to the 27th inclusive, and would like a plot, you can purchase one via the vendor system located in-world at the Burning Man Deep Hole region.
Please note that Juried Camp applications have closed, and successful applicants will be announced on September 1st via the BURN2 website.
You can purchase a BURN2 plot directly from the in-world vendor, which also gives the number of available plots of each size
The theme for this year’s event is Cargo Cult, in keeping with the theme of Burning Man itself.
InWorldz have issued details of their kick-off rally to mark the start of their 2013 Relay for Life of InWorldz season in aid of the American Cancer Society.
The press release, circulated to virtual world bloggers, reads in part:
InWorldz community members are uniting at a rally to officially launch their Second Relay For Life season of Many Worldz For A Cure. Hundreds of participants again are will ringing in the new season with a rally that educates everyone on how their involvement benefits the American Cancer Society’s goal to save lives and create more birthdays. Money raised will fight cancer by helping people stay well and get well, by finding cures, and by fighting back.
Come join us, as we meet the American Cancer Society organizing committee and a live performance by Russell Eponym. Come rally with us to begin a campaign we will not lose.
The kick-off event will take place on the InWorldz Paradise by Design region (please note that is an InWorldz IWurl) on Saturday August 24th, 2013, commencing at 09:00 InWorldz Time. The current schedule comprises presentations from the organising committee and then the aforementioned live performance:
09:00 – Hairy Thor – Chair
09:10 – Neill McCullough – Teams
09:15 – Bain Finch Co Chair
09:30 – Key Note Presentation
09:45 – Russell Eponym – live performer
Sponsorship
According to the RFL of IW website, sponsorships for the season are currently open, and comprise three levels, starting at $50.00 USD and rising to $150.00, each with unique benefits to sponsors, including website promotion, event mentions, logo promotions, and more. For full details of each level of sponsorship, the levels still available, and how to become a sponsor, please refer to the RFL of IW sponsorship page.
Media / press enquiries to RFLofIW.PR@Gmail.com (media contact: Wildstar Beaumont)
About Relay for Life
Relay For Life (RFL) is an inspirational overnight fundraising event that honours cancer survivors and celebrates life. Each Relay is a community-led, non-athletic event where teams fundraise and then join together in the Relay event. There, teams take it in turns to walk round a track for up to 24 hours to signify that ‘cancer never sleeps’.
RFL started in the United States in 1985 when one man circled around a track for 24 hours raising $27,000. Now, over four million people from twenty countries world-wide participate annually in Relay for Life events. RFL of IW is officially sanctioned by the American Cancer Society and a recognised RFL event.
Sunday August 25th will see the third annual Bard on the Virtual Beach festival take place on Nowhereville Beach in Second Life.
Bard on the Virtual Beach, brought to SL by Storyfests SL and Stories Unlimited, is a celebration of the works of William Shakespeare in an informal beachfront setting – a kind of sun, sand and sonnets, you might say.
On hand for the event, which kicks-off at noon SLT on August 25th, will be some of the finest voices in Second Life, all there (with their avatars!) to bring you some of the finest moments from the works of the world’s greatest playwright, complete with a couple of special interpretations!
The schedule, as it currently stands, is given below. Please do be aware that the order of events is subject to change, particularly should real life intrude, so please keep an eye on the Storyfest SL website for updates and for the final time slots.
Scenes from Romeo and Juliet:with Basilique Performing Arts (on stream with music and dance)
Scenes from The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act II, Scene 1) and King John (Act II, Scene 1): with Ada Radius and Avajean Westland
Sonnet Break!: with Freda Frostbite
“The Duke of Bridgewater presents his interpretation of Hamlet’s Soliloquy” from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn: with BigRed Coyote
Hamlet (Act III, Scene 3): with Caledonia Skytower and Em Jannings
The Merchant of Venice (Act I, Scene 2): with Ada Radius and Avajean Westland
The Merchant of Venice(Act I, Scene 3): with Yunus Nyn of TALIA and friend (In Spanish, English translation provided)
Titus Andronicus(Act III, Scene 1): with Kayden Oconnell
Sonnet Break!: with TBA
As You Like It(Act 3, Scene 2): with Bhelanna Blaze and Roderic Unplugged
Macbeth(Act I, Scene 7): with Gyro Muggins
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act II, Scene 1): with Ada Radius and Avajean Westland
Scenes from Much Ado About Nothing “How Two Wayward Wits Fall in Love”: with Caledonia Skytower and Kayden Oconnell
Selection from The Tempest (TBA): with Crap Mariner.
Bard on the Virtual Beach 2013 – August 25th
Bard on the Virtual Beach takes place in an informal setting, with minimal sets and props, in a partial reproduction of the Globe Theatre. The audience is invited to sit on the benches or on the sand and enjoy the passage of an afternoon in good company. The festival is free to all, but gratuities will be accepted on behalf of the event’s beneficiary, War Child North America.
War Child strives to empower children and young people to flourish within their communities and overcome the challenges of living with, and recovering from, conflict. To achieve this, War Child works collaboratively with those communities to increase access to education, overcome the obstacles of poverty and create a protective environment for the rights of children and youth. The ultimate goal of War Child is that someday we will live in a world where no child knows war.
Wired UK carries an article announcing the launch of a new service from the creators of Oculus Rift.
Oculus Share, launched in a beta mode on August 20th 2013, is described as “a platform to enable users to discover games and experiences which use the technology” and is initially aimed at those with the Oculus Rift development kit. However, plans will see the service transition into a fully fledged marketplace for for heaset-ready games, applications and experiences; a move which will likely coincide with the official launch of Oculus Rift as a consumer product some time in 2014.
Oculus Share beta (Image courtesy of Oculus Rift)
A blog post issued by Oculus Rift provides a description of the intended use of the service in this first iteration:
Oculus Share (or simply, Share) is the first of many steps we’re taking to build the best virtual reality platform. With Share, you can host Oculus-ready games and experiences that you’ve created, browse and download content from other developers, rate experiences on quality and VR comfort level, provide feedback to devs on what you enjoyed (and what you didn’t), and tip fellow developers for their work in cash, should you feel so inclined.
Experimentation, iteration, and actual playtesting are at the heart of pushing virtual reality forward. One of the main goals in building Share was to help developers on all these fronts by creating a centralized community portal for Oculus content. And while it’s simply a sharing service today, over the coming months we’ll work toward making Share an incredible marketplace for Oculus-ready games, experiences, and applications.
The service offers six categories under which items can be uploaded / shared: Full Game, Demo, Experience, Alpha, Beta and Mod, with a further sub-class of genre for items: Action / Adventure, Casual, Exploration, Puzzle, Simulation, Sports, and Strategy. As might be expected with the initial launch, content is currently light, but will doubtless grow as word spreads. For now the Demo category is the most heavily populated section, featuring a number of Oculus Rift’s own commissioned demonstrations, such as the Tuscany World from Fenix Fire.
Applications, mods and games are each featured on a page of their own, some with screen caps, others with a video (or both), together with a description, system requirements and set-up instructions – think Steam or Desura for the Rift, and you get the idea.
Within the current set of uploads there are intriguing hints at how additional technologies might be used with the headset. In the Trial of the Rift Drifter, for example, head gestures can be used for communications, while in another demo, the potential for eye movement to be used for in-game object control is outlined.
The content categories are currently focused on games, which is not surprising, given that is perhaps where the most interest with the technology lies. However, it would be nice to see a couple of non-game categories added to the service to cater for the likes of virtual environments (such as SL, OpenSim and others looking into the technology) and for real-world applications (medical, engineering, research, training, etc., simulations – although it might be argued that the Simulation genre is the catch-all for these; not ideal, but it is there).
Oculus Rift are currently vetting all submissions to Share in order to prevent the upload of offensive or malicious content. As a result, they do warn that items submitted to the service might take a while to appear, and ask for patience from those making submissions. As a beta service, Share is also liable to some teething problems as well – Wired UK reports it was down for maintenance just a few hours after launch – so again, patience may well be the order for the day for those wanting to make use of Share, as things are bedded-in and improved.
The potential for the platform is clear. By launching a service of their own, rather than relying on portals such as Desura and Steam, etc., Oculus Rift are presenting a “one stop shop” through which Rift developers and users can both promote and discover products specific to the headset without either necessarily having to use or peruse multiple web stores. As such, it will be interesting to see how Share grows in the months leading up to the commercial launch of the headset – and beyond.
As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for news, updates and feedback.
Second Life Server (SLS Main) Channel – Tuesday August 20th
The Main channel had Server-side Appearance (SSA) enabled, as per this blog post from the Lab. As I’ve previously noted, users will need to run a maintained viewer which incorporates the SSA code in order for other avatars to render correctly in their view. See the release notes for additional information to the above links.
There were no other updates in this deployment.
Release Candidate Channels – Wednesday August 21st
Magnum should receive a new maintenance package which “only includes a few internal bug fixes which shouldn’t show any visible changes to the residents”. In describing this at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday August 13th, Simon Linden said, “There’s one performance fix that you might see in the viewer … you shouldn’t get those situations where you see lots of ‘duplicate caps. messages” – this package was deployed to LeTigre in week 33
Bluesteel and LeTigre will both be on an update to the package deployed to BlueSteel in week 33, which includes:
A fix for the “grey box attachment issue” (non-public BUG-3547, details below)
A (further?) update to for “llListen in linked objects is listening at root instead of linked object local position *after re-rezzing the linkset*”, which was also listed in the BlueSteel release notes for week 32 (non-public JIRA BUG-3291)
The code to block avatars entering a region / objects being rezzed in a region during the last 60-seconds before a restart. In addition, restart warning pop-ups will include the region name. This was again in the release notes for week 32, so would appear to be a further update to that code
Fixes for further simulator crash modes.
Further, all three RC channels will have Server-side Appearance enabled at the conclusion of the Wednesday August 21st deployments.
SL Viewer Updates
Release Viewer Updated
Tuesday August 20th saw a new update to the de facto release viewer, when the former Maintenance Viewer RC 3.6.3.279564, dated August 12th, was promoted. The full list of updates for this release can be found in the release notes. However, of most interest to many will be the fact that it includes the particle selection capability.
As previously reported in these updates, this capability (MAINT-2268) allows a user to right-click on a particle emitter and mute it, blocking the particle emissions from their viewer. This is liable to be very welcome to those using regions which are frequently the target of particle griefing, as it means that the emitter itself no longer needs to be located and blocked. In addition, the new code has a FPS limit on particles, and will stop generating new particles when frame rates drop to 4 FPS or lower.
Other SL Viewer Updates
The promotion of the Maintenance Viewer RC to release status leaves four remaining release candidate viewers at this time: CHUI, the MAC-focused Cocoa RC viewer, the Google Breakpad RC for better crash / stats reporting and the Snowstorm RC, which contains updates contributed to LL by third-party developers. As is now the practice, these will each be rebuilt using the “new” de facto release viewer code, and so will have updates appearing over the coming days.
Oculus Rift
Oculus Rift – UI work progressing at the Lab
Work is progressing with integrating Oculus Rift with Second Life. While I’m not overly interested in the Rift myself, one are that does interest me is that of the UI and how it is going to be integrated with the headset – as I’ve commented in the past, while others see it as a potential issue, I don’t necessarily agree, although I’ve felt that a balance would have to be struck in order to avoid the UI completely overwhelming / spoiling the first-person view.
Speaking at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday August 20th, Simon Linden indicated that this is on the Lab’s collective mind as well – and that a potentially clever solution is being tried-out to ensure the UI menus, etc., are usable without interfering with the user’s view of things:
I know recently they were working on how to have the SL UI appear … having menus hanging out in your vision is an interesting design, but you’re not in a “window” anymore … In the Rift it’s projected on a surface around you … so you look up to see the menus and they float there in mid-air … I think they’re experimenting with the shape of that surface too … if it’s flat, the text can look funny as it’s slanting away from you.
This, I have to say, does sound intriguing, and I’d be curious to see it in action; if nothing else, it gets me thinking somewhat of Bruce Branit’s World Builder – although admittedly, the protagonist in that piece is physically “inside” his virtual realm…
If nothing else, that gives me an excuse to post the new HD version of World Builder Bruce posted to his YouTube channel earlier this month (yes, I know it’s not the first time I’ve posted it, but I do love the movie).
Update August 21st: Nicky Perrian from Kokua has added a comment about a Windows issue with uninstalling, due to a change in the installer.
Kokua released version 3.6.2.29072 on August 16th, becoming the first TPV to start operating LL’s viewer update capability since the Lab formally announced it was making the capability available to TPVs if they want to make use of it (Catznip has actually has an auto update capability since release R7, but I’m not clear on whether that uses any of the LL code, or is something the Catznip team built for themselves). Along with this change comes a number of smaller updates.
Download and Installation
The latest Kokua installer (Windows) weighs-in at 36.8 Mb. As expected, the installer runs without a hitch. As I’m still getting around to re-installing viewers on an “as needed” basis on the new PC, I didn’t have to perform a clean install (not that one is recommended in the release notes).
Auto Update
Oz Linden announced that the Lab would be making their viewer release mechanism available to TPVs via an e-mail earlier in the month and also at the TPV developer meeting on Friday August 9th, when he indicated that the Lab were already working with some viewer development teams to help them implement it, Kokua clearly being one of them.
With Kokua, the update options are presented exactly as they are in the official viewer – complete with the check box to update to release candidates. Whether this means Kokua will be completely following suit with the overall release process implemented by the Lab, I’ve no idea.
Obviously, while the code is from LL, viewer updates obtained via it are still coming from Kokua – it doesn’t mean people sill suddenly start getting SL viewer updates!
The change does mean that from now on, updates will be obtained from Kokua’s SourceForge repository as the code does not work with BitBucket. However, the team are at present continuing to post updates to both BitBucket and SourceForge.
Additional Updates
This release brings the viewer up to parity with the Linden Lab 3.6.2 code base, which means it has the more recent materials processing code updates, although not necessarily the very latest to surface in the SL Materials Project viewer, and well as other recent updates within the official viewer. Other notable updates comprise:
A return to standard SL viewer Debug for the login menu. This allows the selection of Debug level before logging in
“Stop animating me” short cut has been assigned to Shift-S
There are several Linux build changes to allow compiling on current compilers (builds on gcc-4.7 and gcc-4.8 have webkit runtime issues)
Maximum number of groups has been corrected for OpenSim
Freeze/Unfreeze and Eject/Ban context menu options have been added to the people / radar floater, as per Feature Request #1254
The Reach Out slider on the people floater mini-map is renamed Radar Range, has been repositioned above the mini-map and now has a maximum range of 4095 metres
The Map button in the tool bar is renamed World Map
Clicking on the bandwidth or packet loss graph will bring up the Statistics floater
The middle mouse button can now be used as a paste function and / or to scroll the world map.
This is another small but very tidy update for Kokua, and the release notes are available on the Kokua blog. While I only had a very brief time to try it out over the weekend, I didn’t notice any issues of import / impact (other than the issue of mesh clothing on other avatars failing to render, which I frequently encounter on Firestorm and the official SL viewer, so is not a Kokua issue).
Gemma Cleanslate of the BURN2 team has issued a reminder that there are still plots available for purchase at the upcoming BURN2 2013 event in October.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 