A blog post from Kat Alderson on the Second Life Home and Garden Expo website brings word that this year’s event, the 7th to be held in Second life, has been rescheduled.
Originally set to take place on May 13th through 27th inclusive, the event will now take place in September, with the Press Days set for the 14th and 15th September, and opening its doors to the public at large on September 16th through 28th inclusive.
The change has come about due to a mix of unforeseeable circumstances, misunderstandings in what is proving to be a packed events season, as Kat explains in the post:
In October 2013, we announced that the 2014 Home Expo would take place May 13-27. Since then, other events announced their schedules, and the spring and summer are packed with high volume events which support Relay For Life of Second Life, as well as other non-profit organizations, charitable institutions, and private interests.
The Home and Garden Expo is the SL event where users can see homes, gardens and furnishing from creators across SL, enjoy talks and presentations by designers, enjoy entertainment throughout the week and – most importantly, help raise funds for RFL of SL. The 2014 event will now take place between September 16th and 28th, with press days on the 14th and 16th September
While the new dates for the event fall outside of the main RFL of SL fundraising season, the 2014 Home and Garden Expo will still be an RFL of SL event, and 100% of all fees, sponsorships and donations will go directly to the RFL of SL 2014 fundraising coffers.
One element of the Expo will, however, still occur in May 2014. This is the Fiction for a Cure activities (readings, auctions, and raffle), which will take place May 16-26 on the American Cancer Society island.
Because Monday January 20th is a holiday in the USA, Maestro Linden has posted details of the deployments which will take place in week 4. Despite the US holiday, the deployments will still take place on Tuesday and Wednesday as usual.
As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for the latest news and updates.
Main Channel: Tuesday January 21st, 2014
The Main channel should received the server maintenance project which has been on the RC channels for the last couple of weeks. As notes in previously SL projects updates in this blog, this comprises:
The forced delay in llLoadURL has been reduced to 0.1 seconds
Preliminary support for custom default permissions on newly created objects – currently awaiting viewer-side support via STORM-68, which has yet to be released
Preliminary support for the viewer fetching the LSL syntax rules from the simulator, for up-to-date syntax highlighting in the script editor – currently awaiting viewer-side support via STORM-1831, which has yet to be released.
Release Candidate Channels, Wednesday January 22nd, 2014
All three RC channels should receive the same server maintenance project, which contains a single fix for a crash mode.
SL Viewer Updates
The following section contains notes taken during the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday January 17th, a video of which is included below. My thanks, as ever, to North for the latter.
Fitted Mesh
As reported here, the Fitted Mesh viewer reached release candidate status on Thursday January 16th, with the release of version 3.7.0.285178, which also includes a number of bug fixes and STORM contributions from third-party developers.
Issues Affecting ATI/AMD Users
There are reports of additional issues arising within the Fitted Mesh viewer which are not apparent in other version of the SL viewer. These issues appear to impact those using ATI/AMD graphics cards and have Advanced Lighting Model disabled.
In the first issue, non-rigged mesh is invisible when viewed on the Fitted Mesh viewer (see FITMESH-20), which was reported for the new release candidate version of the viewer. In the second (FITMESH-6), worn mesh which is not rigged to the collision bones is seen to stretch away towards the 0,0,0 point of the region the avatar is standing in (which is oddly similar to how viewers without the Fitted Mesh updates render garments rigged to the collision bones in an avatar).
Rigged mesh which is not using the collison bones as seen with the Fitted Mesh viewer when running on systems with ATI / AMD graphics and Advanced lighting Model disabled (image courtesy of Willow Wilder)
Again, these problems only appear to impact those using ATI/AMD graphics cards and who are running with ALM disabled. Initially, the problem had been thought by the Lab to be a driver issue, but testing reveals the problem to occur across a range of ATI/AMD drivers, including the most recent Catalyst updates.
New Sliders and Asset
Redpoly Inventor has also raised a feature request (see FITMESH-19) for what he calls a “Mesh Clothing Adjuster” which can be used to scale specific parts of the collision skeleton in order to achieve better fitting for the likes of knee boots, tank top straps or any clothing that doesn’t look good with alphas. He also includes code with the JIRA which people can add to their viewer in order to create slider to the shape menu which controls the clavicle volumes.
Those who read this blog know I try to report on the various LL projects which are on the go, both server-side and viewer side and – in some cases – both.
Monty Linden: spearheading the HTTP work
One of the latter is the HTTP project work, which has been in progress over the last couple of years and spearheaded by Monty Linden, who has been slowly but surely making dramatic changes to SL’s sometimes creaky communications mechanisms. This work started with texture fetching, way back in 2012, and has steadily progressed from there, with changes being made both server-side and within the viewer.
Much of this work has gone unsung among the greater populace of SL as a whole, which is a shame, as Monty is perhaps one of the great heroes of SL and the Lab for taking-on this work and developing a project and roadmap which not only massively improves viewer / server communications and their overall robustness, but which is also having beneficial impact elsewhere (such as Monty rebuilding third-party libraries critical to the viewer and putting in place mechanisms to ensure they are properly maintained going forward) and also preparing the ground for HTTP pipelining.
An early phase of Monty’s HTTP work from 2013
Most recently, Monty’s work has involved overhauling the way in which mesh is handled between the viewer and the server (both uploads and – in particular – downloads), something which has been an issue since mesh was first introduced, due to the manner in which it effective “shotguns” the network, and also because – to a degree – people don’t fully understand the impact certain debug settings have on viewer / server communications.
The fruits of this labour have already been released server-side, and now the viewer changes are reaching a point where they will soon be filtering into viewers of all flavours, the code having now moved from a project viewer to a release candidate viewer.
(This viewer should also address the DNS problems many users have experienced and eliminate the need to use the Google DNS workaround for those who have been affected.)
The initial HTTP work raised the request rate ceiling within the viewer for texture and mesh data from A up to the blue line of C. Future work will hopefully raise it still further
The blog post is a careful and clear explanation of the work which has gone on to date, covering all aspects of the project, the positives and some of the negatives, while touching on some of the complexities of viewer / server communications which are outside of the Lab’s direct control, but which these changes may well still help alleviate to some degree. The piece also looks to the future and what also might be folded-in to the work, allowing for management decisions, staffing, and other priorities as well. While the look ahead is somewhat speculative at this point in time, it does point towards some intriguing options, such as updates to HTTP services such as inventory operations…
All-in-all, the post is a worthwhile read for anyone with any interest whatsoever in the work the Lab is putting into trying to improve Second Life and improve the experience for all of us who use it.
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 a number of them – see the related links at the end of this piece – and here I turn my attention to the installations by Asmita Duranjaya and Maikelkey Resident and by Martini Discovolante and Marion Questi.
Tales of the future is a joint piece by Asmita Duranjaya and Maikelkey Resident which presents “5 immersive environments of 5 ambient études”, together with a live performance space.
Asmita has been immersed in art since her childhood, seeing it s a way to express her emotions and communicate in a non-verbal way. She works in a range of genres, including still-life, portraiture and surrealism, as well as producing applied art such as book covers, event posters, etc. More recently she has become increasingly involved in the medium of digital art using a tablet and pen. Within SL, her work has been presented at a number of venues, and she has her own exhibition space at Space 4 Art, where she exhibits both her own work and the work of other SL artists. At LEA25, she has produced the immersive environments.
Maikelkey is actually the digital persona of German science-fiction author, writer, translator and composer Michael K. Iwoleit. As well as being a published author in his own right, he is the co-founder of the German science-fiction magazine Nova and the international SF magazine InterNova. He has translated works by Iain M. Banks, Cory Doctorow, Sean Williams, Chris Moriarty and David Wingrove, among others. At LEA25, he is responsible for the 5 ambient études.
Traditionally, an étude is a short instrumental musical composition of considerable complexity designed to help perfect a particular musical skill. It’s a technique that will certainly be well-known to those who have been formally taught the piano, although it is by no means restricted to that particular instrument. Here, the use of the term is somewhat broader, the pieces on offer seeking to present a specific atmosphere or mood.
All five of the ambient environments are located in the sky and reached via anywhere door-style teleports located around the edge of the ground-level performance area. Each has a short description of the piece over the door, which will carry you to the environment when clicked. Once there, and with the exception of one of the environments, you’ll be asked to activate the required étude by following a web link. There are interactive elements to some of the environments, so keep an eye out for poseballs and hovertext when visiting them.
The use of web links is perhaps a little less than perfect, at least to me, as they form an intrusion into four the immersive aspects of the build, as the visitor either has to swap between viewer and browser to start the associated étude, or (if using the viewer’s built-in browser), have a floater open which then blocks a fair portion of the in-world view. Both of these points left me wondering why each of the ambient environments couldn’t have been presented within its own parcel, with the étude streamed into it for a more seamless immersive feel.
The performance area itself sits within a “depression” in the centre of a rocky landscape bathed in a suitably blue sci-fi like light and covered by a blue dome. Anti-grav chairs together with poseballs provide room for the audience to hover (or float) before a small stage area. The latter will be used for live performances by – I assume – Maikelkey Resident. The first of these, at 14:00 on Saturday January 19th, will be a reading. The second, at 14:00 on Sunday January 19th, will be a musical presentation.
Spijkers Aviation & Marine EC-135 over Blake Sea Half Hitch
While visiting RiTai recently, I took time out to fly a helicopter modelled on the Eurocopter EC-135. I’ve never really fussed that much with helicopters in SL (one has been sitting in my inventory forever but it is so old, a Havoc update way beck in … 2009? 2010? broke it and as I’d already stopped using it, I never really bothered with the updated version). As such, I was a little curious to see if my attitude had changed.
Well, flying the machine, even on the one region, proved to be a lot of fun; so much so that I got, well, hooked. Since then, and as time has allowed, I’ve been shuffling around SL looking at various makes and models of helicopter with a view to getting one, and repeatedly found myself drawn back to the EC-135 design as being particularly attractive. My poking around led me to Spijkers Aviation & Marine where, after much mmming and ahhing (and not a few flights in the demo aircraft there) I picked up Tig’s civilian version of the EC-135.
Spijkers Aviation & Marine EC-135 – passing the Fastnet light
I’ve barely put it down since.
Weighing-in with a land impact of 27, the helicopter is well made and looks good. Seating the pilot and up to five passengers, it offers plenty of opportunities for flying with friends – but that’s just the icing on the cake.
For a start, the pack itself contains not one, but three variants of the helicopter: flyable, static (unscripted), and “desktop” (which is small and beautifully formed), each of which is offered in three basic colours: red, white and blue. As the full-size versions are MOD, also included in the pack are additional texture sets allowing the purchaser to mix and match the three finishes to produce a very individual aircraft – and if that is not enough, Tigs and Amy offer to produce custom textures upon enquiry.
As well as the various models of the helicopter and the texture options, the pack includes two sets of instructions and two HUDS – “full” or “light” depending on your preference. Neither is absolutely required for flying, and each has a number of buttons not applicable to the civilian version of the EC-135.
The texture packs made customising one of the default versions a breeze. As I have a thing for red and white (witness Lady of Calas and Lady of Calas 2), I wanted my new toy to be ranged in the same colours, and it took me less than 3 minutes to have a two-tone EC-135 ready to fly. And flying this little helicopter is fun.
Spijkers Aviation & Marine EC-135 – original red (r) and my 3-minute “custom” finish (l)
Page Up and Page Down act as the collective, the arrow keys function as the cyclic for forward / reverse and turning / banking. Other commands are accessed via typing (“s” to start / stop the engine, “l” for lights, “ld” for opening / closing the left door, etc.), or via the HUDs, if used, if used. Handling-wise, the EC-135 is very responsive, and once one has got the hang of using the controls, staying airborne and enjoying oneself is a breeze.
One of the reasons I opted for this model compared to others are the range of additional options. FlySafe, for example turns the aircraft and passengers phantom – handy if you’re flying over mainland only to find someone has parked their skyhome on your flight path and evasive flying might not be that easy due to other buildings, etc., also hanging in the sky.
More importantly (from my viewpoint, at least) is the fact that – like many of Tig’s aircraft – the EC-135 can be configured so that a co-pilot can take the controls (a copy of either HUD can even be given to them). Having been a passenger on flights myself more than a few times, I know how boring sitting and letting someone else pilot you around can get be. so being able to turn over control to a friend and let them experience flying the helicopter for a while, strikes me as a neat idea and helps share the flying experience.
Spijkers Aviation & Marine EC-135 – the controls are ideal for my avatar’s height
I also like the optional floats that come with this model. While these can only be activated / deactivated when the engine is off, they’re a handy addition for someone like me, who lives on the edge of Blake Sea and is surrounded by water 🙂 .
There a lot more I could say about this helicopter, but I’m not going to – just take it from me, if you’re looking for a helo for yourself and you’ve not tried Spijkers Aviation & Marine, then I thoroughly recommend you hop over to their in-world headquarters and give their demonstrators a go. I doubt you’ll be at all disappointed.
Spijkers Aviation & Marine EC-135 – making an inspection pass near the Second Norway airport tower
The second broadcast from the attic studios of The Drax Files Radio hour kicks-off with an introduction by Strawberry Singh, before launching into a wide-ranging segment which covers news from SL and beyond, further feedback on the inaugural broadcast, including more on the Oculus Rift, some discussion on SL’s status as a niche product and the more, and a tribute to Osprey Therian.
Osprey Therian
Vivian Kendall – Osprey Therian in Second Life, who passed away in RL in 2013, but her legacy lives on in SL
It is with the tribute to Osprey that I’m choosing to start this piece, as it is the core of this episode – and rightly so.
Osprey Therian (Vivian Kendall in RL), artist, long-term SL resident and both a friend and inspiration to many, passed away in December 2013, much to the sadness of all who knew her. Her legacy is not just physical through her work in SL and RL, but also emotional, because she did touch so many and in many different ways.
Through a number of interviews and discussions, Draxtor reflects on the lives – real and virtual – of someone who, while she would doubtless be embarrassed at being called such – was very much an iconic figure where Second Life is concerned, and in so many different ways.
Through the words of Marianne McCann, Jim Purbrick (formerly Babbage Linden) and Salazar Jack (Justin Esparza in RL), Drax presents an engaging, uplifting portrait of Osprey and her approach to life, virtual reality, health and more. It is a piece which touches upon many different areas of the real and virtual, all of which Osprey herself no doubt would applaud and, were she able to, add her voice to the comments and the broader discussions which could so easily arise from the subjects touched upon. As a tribute, this is a beautifully handled segment, and full kudos to Drax as both interviewer and producer, for the overall scope of the piece.
Is SL nothing without Controversy?
Controversy is hard to avoid in Second Life, and not long after the initial episode of TDFRH was broadcast, the show was tangentially caught in some controversy over the interview with Ash Qin on the subject of the NSA and eavesdropping, etc., on virtual worlds (and the Internet as a whole), which prompted a response from Ash himself. This prompted Drax to point out that the show is “not the BBC”, and the intent is not to undertake investigative journalism, but to provide general news and commentary on the metaverse as a whole. Which is a fair point.
However – and while I certainly don’t expect either Drax nor Jo to have their finger on the pulse of absolutely everything that has happened in SL, past or present, a show such as TDFRH can only be enhanced by demonstrating aware of past history, where it is relevant. This is not to say I find the critique levelled at the inclusion of the interview with Ash Qin to be valid in and of itself, but I do applaud both Drax’s and Jo’s response to the criticism and their openness and willingness to seek support from people in ensuring critical bases are covered.
Did the FBI try to get LL to “block” OTR IMs server-side?
As an extension of this, episode 2 makes mention of OTR and its use (most notably within the v1-style Phoenix viewer) and how, apparently, there was pressure within the Lab to have the capability for OTR-encrypted person-to-person messaging “blocked” on the server-side, with the intimation that the overall pressure for this was coming from a government agency (the FBI being specifically mentioned).
The story comes via a former Linden Lab employee and makes interesting – indeed, curious – reading; particularly given that the OTR system itself, as members of the Phoenix (now Firestorm) team have stated, was apparently deeply flawed in terms of how well “protected” IM conversations really were / are.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 