Day: January 15, 2014

Looking through an artist’s eyes and discovering flying in SL

Posted on by Inara Pey

The Linden Endowments for the Arts is hosting a series of 16 “interim” art projects through until the end of January 2013. I’ve already covered the Flash Mob event on LEA26 and LEA 27, and both The Wonderful World of Particles and Paper Observatory, which are displayed at LEA13 and LEA21 respectively, as well as the installations created by Frankx Lefavre and Thea Dee. In this item, I drop in to the regions provided to Fuschia Nightfire and Natascha Randt.

Fuschia Nightfire, “Fuschia’s Collection” – LEA22

Fuschia Nightfire - LEA22
Fuschia Nightfire – LEA22

“Since I first joined SL I have collected art from other SL artists, but never had a space to show these works,” Fuschia Nightfire says of her installation at LEA22, “So I decided to use my LEA sim to do this.”

The result is a chance to see SL art through the eyes of one of the platform’s foremost artists as Fuschia offers-up a display of some of her favourite piece of art she’s collected over the years, as well as pieces she’s collaborated upon with others. On display are sculptures, 2D art, paintings, static pieces, interactive pieces all from the likes of Rose Borchovski, Baron Grayson, Soror Nishi,  Light Waves and more.

Fuschia Nightfire - LEA22
Fuschia’s Collection – LEA22

The design of the region is simple and elegant: to one side of the region sits a gallery featuring paintings, drawings and a number of 3D pieces, which stands alongside a couple of other buildings which are there to be explored. Paths from here wind out over the water to a large sculpture on one side and a floral garden on the other, on which is set-out further items for the visitor to admire. More art can be found out on the water itself, most close to the footpaths – but do keep an eye out for the scattering of Light Waves’ brilliant Greenies.

Fuschia Nightfire - LEA22
Fuschia’s Collection – LEA22

To ensure the eye isn’t too distracted by things going on around the region, Fuschia has erected a set of walls surrounding the installation which an image of the sky, forming the perfect backdrop to the exhibit and allowing the photographer to cleanly capture items on display.

Fuschia Nightfire - LEA22
Fuschia’s Collection – LEA22

This is a great way for those unfamiliar with the scope of SL art to dip a toe in the water without getting heavily into anything and gain a little familiarity with works by some well-known names.

Recommended.

Continue reading “Looking through an artist’s eyes and discovering flying in SL” →

Relay for Life of SL 2014: Call for committee interest

Posted on by Inara Pey

RFL-logoThe Relay for Life of SL organisers are getting ready for the 2014 season in Second Life, and in doing so, have put out a call to people interested in helping with committee work.

The committee work is divided into four key areas, and assistance is being sought to help with the work carried out by all four. These are:

  • Outreach, including: mission education, bringing-in sponsors and business  partnerships, supporting international relations (providing internal aspects for key RFL of SL activities such as the Kick-off Celebration, Halfway There fair and Relay Weekend and translating written material); bringing people from within and beyond SL to the Relay
  • PR and Media Relations, including writing and / or distributing press releases, photography, video and audio recording, scheduling interviews with media partners, updating the RFL of SL blog; undertaking social media outreach
  • Events and Design, including planning and executing RFL season special events such as the Kick-off Celebration, Halfway There fair, Multi Team Event and Wrap Up Party; providing support for RFL of SL special mega events as well as the Relay Weekend
  • Internal Support, including providing support to all Relay Teams (processing information on teams, providing mentoring and coaching to teams, moderating group chat, providing inspiration and advice to teams, etc); reaching out to caregivers and survivors; managing the various tools used by RFL of SL (databases, fundraising tools, etc.

Full details on the responsibilities for each division, together with the key skills being sought for each, can be found in the notes accompanying the application form.

If you would like to apply to help with any of the committee work, please complete the committee interest application form, making sure all required fields and filled-out.

Last year, RFL of SL almost broke through the $400,000 barrier. Why not help make 2014 even more of a record-breaking year?

Related Links

High Fidelity put out call for alpha testers

Posted on by Inara Pey

HF-logoI’ve been keeping a sort-of eye on news concerning Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity from something of a distance, occasionally checking the website and seeing what is going on. However, as a lot of it goes somewhat over my head, I tend not to report on it, preferring to wait as see to what actually starts to emerge in the future.

Nevertheless, Ciaran Laval poked me earlier in the moth that some interesting news might be coming out of the company, and so I’ve been watching various feeds to see what does. As a result, I caught Hamlet Au bringing the news, courtesy of “Epona666”, that High Fidelity have put out a call for alpha testers.

High fidelity: seeking alpha testers
High fidelity: seeking alpha testers – click to follow

Hamlet refers to the company as looking for “creative builders” for the Alpha testing. However, the sign-up form is scant on specifics, and leans more towards the hardware and operating systems applicants have at their disposal, rather than on specific skill sets of any description. There also doesn’t appear to be ant blog post associated with the announcement, so it is a little hard to discover further information relating to the call.

The application form: hardware and OS-focused
The application form: hardware and OS-focused

This request is somewhat easier than the company’s last, as reported by Ciaran Laval at the time. In December, the company invited those wishing to work for / with them on code aspects of the platform to build the High Fidelity user interface from source code and then log-in to the system to get the company’s attention, and then attempt to tackle one of the current tasks the company has listed on Worklist.

The company's last call for assistance took the form of a challenge to those interested
The company’s last call for assistance took the form of a challenge to those interested

For those interested in signing-up for this alpha testing can do so by following the link from the High Fidelity home page, or by following this link (or click the banner ad towards the top of this article) to the application form itself.

Hamlet also points to a new subReddit where High Fidelity can be discussed by those interested in the project.

Related Links

SL project updates week 3 (1) Server and viewer + misc items

Posted on by Inara Pey
Simulator User Group meeting (stock)
Simulator User Group meeting (stock)

Server Deployments: week 3, 2014

There are no server deployments this week on either Tuesday 14th (Main channel) or Wednesday 15th January (RC channels). The latter was anticipated to be the case, after Maestro Linden indicated there were no maintenance or other projects in the RC pipeline during the Server Beta meeting of Thursday January 9th.

While it had been thought that issues relating to STORM-1831 were not sufficient to prevent the RC package deployed in week 2 from being promoted to the Main channel, the decision has been taken to allow the package to run a further week on the RCs.

Week 4 Deployments

It now seems as if the plan is to deploy the RC maintenance project to the Main grid in week 4 (week commencing Monday January 20th), and to issue a new server maintenance project on the Wednesday of that week, although details on this have yet to be finalised.

SL Viewer

The Project Interesting viewer with the viewer-side interest list changes (notably the changes to how region information is cached and re-used by the viewer) gained a further update on Tuesday January 14th, with the release of release candidate 3.6.14.285213, which includes a number of additional bug fixes – see the release notes and download page.

STORM-1831: LSL Syntax Highlighting

This contribution by Ima Mechanic will allow LSL syntax highlighting in the viewer’s LSL editor to be updated and defined using a file obtained directly from the simulator the viewer is connected to, with the intention to eliminate issues of the viewer using outdated versions of the file. The server-side updates for this work are currently deployed to all three RC regions. However, as of the end of week 2, additional work was required on the syntax file itself.

In addition, there are a number of issues which are currently being addressed with the viewer-side code. These are listed on the JIRA for the project – STORM-1831, and require resolution prior to the code being issued  in a release candidate viewer. Most of these are currently being worked on, and are not seen as major show-stoppers, but will delay the code’s appearance in the short-term.

Other Items

Values for brush constants in calls to llModifyLand

One issue which has (again) been raised through STORM-1831 is that the values for brush constants in calls to llModifyLand, used for scripted terraforming operations, are out by 1 each (they are set to 1, 2, 3 and should be 0, 1, 2). This means that, for example, a call using LAND_SMALL_BRUSH will edit an area of 4×4 metres, not 2×2. The wiki documentation for the function notes the error as well. As a result of discussing this issue in the Open-source Developer’s meeting on Monday January 13th, a STORM JIRA was raised to (again) highlight this issue (STORM-2006).

However, as the issue itself is actually related to either STORM-1831 per se and because it will actually require server-side changes, the issue is liable to be moved to a BUG status and triaged from there.

Snapshot uploads to the SL Feeds

“It has to do with authentication under the hood when getting the credentials and then using them to fetch the snapshot config info,” Simon Linden said at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday January 14th. The problem is still being worked upon for those still affected by it (I am), but there is currently no ETA as to a complete fix for the matter.

With thanks to Mona Eberhardt for the meeting notes.