Angel Manor: the subject of a beautiful new video by its creator, Kaya Angel
Kaya Angel is one of Second Life’s most respected builders, and his Angel Manor estate is rightly admired across the grid both as a build in its own right and as a venue for art, fund raising events and a more. I
As a designer / builder, Kaya naturally turned to emerging capabilities to further enhance his commercial and commissioned work, and to enhance Angel Manor itself – so much so, that I keep reminding myself I’m overdue for a visit in order to write an update to my March 2013 piece on the manor, as so much has changed since then.
In celebration of the manor, and to demonstrate just how immersive Second Life can look and feel, Kaya has produced a new 6-minute video entitled Second Life: A different perception, which has been drawing widespread praise from all who have seen it and is without a doubt, simply superb.
Marvellously edited, matched to an excellent soundtrack, this is a film which can hardly fail to evoke a feeling of wonder, joy and pride in the heart of anyone who has invested time and energy into Second Life. If ever there was a banner by which we can proclaim to the world just what is possible within SL for the creative mind, then this film is it.
Relay Rockers have announced details on some of the events they will will organising and hosting as a part of the 2015 Relay for Life of SL season.
First up is the 4th annual Celebrate Remember Fight Back (CRFB) Top DJ Competition, challenging on-line DJs to raise the most donations for the American Cancer Society during a series of 1 and 2 hour sets.
Since it’s inception in 2012, nearly 50 DJs from across Second Life have participated in the competition, raising over L$6,000,000 to support the Relay For Life of Second Life.
On-line registrations for the 2015 competition, which will run from late March through May, will open during the first week of February 2015, and will be available for up to 16 competitors.
In addition, the Rockers will again be inviting SL music venues to be partners in support of the competition, hosting preliminary rounds in the premises. Also, and in response to suggestions, the Rockers will be providing for the use Dual Team Kiosks during the preliminary rounds for competitors who are registered members of another Relay For Life team. Further information on the competition can be obtained from Ariel Stormcrow via e-mail to: ariel@relayrockers.t1radio.com)
In their announcement, the Rockers further confirmed their continuing partnership with their premier sponsor dAlliez Estates to once again provide Relay d’Alliez as a venue for teams to host fund-raising events during the 2015 RFL of SL season.
Teams will be able to reserve the region, either in parcels or its entirety, from the RFL of SL kick-off week right through until the Relay Weekend in July 2015. Information on how to place a reservation will be announced in early February through the Relay For Life Volunteers group and on T1Radio. In the meantime, requests for information about Relay dAlliez should be forwarded via e-mail to: relaydalliez@relayrockers.t1radio.com.
Finally, in a year which see the Rockers enter their 11th consecutive season of RFL of SL support, the press release announced their intention to continue with their signature event, Bid Me Bald. This time it will be team co-founders Trader Whiplash and Nuala Maracas sitting as the initial ‘Victimteers’, and the barbershop kiosks will be open on March 11th and 18th respectively, which shearing to take place one week from those dates.
The Barbershop Kiosks will be set up on March 11th and 18th, respectively with their shearing to occur one week hence. The Rockers also plan to hold RelayStock ‘15 as a multi team event and invite all teams to begin planning to attend.
Questions and general enquires about the Relay Rockers may be emailed to:
Coming soon: Avatar Hover Height provides a means of adjusting your avatar’s graphical height above the ground / floor / objects, as seen by yourself and others -see below for details
Server Deployments – Week 4
Due to Monday, January 19th being Martin Luther King day in the USA and holiday for many, the scheduled deployments for the week have been put back by one day.
There will be no Main (SLS) channel deployment for the week, as the server maintenance package deployed to the RC channels in week 3 has resulted in the snapshots-to-email functionality in the snapshot floater failing (see BUG-8223).
On Thursday, January 22nd, and as a result of this issue, the LeTigre and Magnum RC channels will receive a further server maintenance package which includes a fix for BUG-8223.
BlueSteel will also receive the same update, but with additional support for the new avatar height adjustment capability, as noted below.
Avatar Hover Height
Prior to the arrival of server-side appearance (SSA), many TPVs included a capability commonly referred to as “z-axis height adjustment”. Simply put, this allowed the height of an avatar to be adjusted up or down, relative to the ground or to an object they were sitting on, which allowed for a wide range of adjustments to be made (such as when sitting or kneeling on the ground, to prevent the appearance of hovering over it or to more finely tune the avatar’s pose on the ground, or to re-adjust an avatar’s height relative to the ground when using things like dancing posballs, etc, and so on).
This capability was lost when SSA was deployed, and as a result SUN-38 was raised, requesting a means by which greater freedom for avatar height adjustment could be given to users. While the Lab did respond to this request through the introduction of the “Hover” slider in the Edit Appearance floater, it only met a very narrow subset of use cases for adjusting an avatar’s height, and even then would only work with Modify shapes.
In June 2014, a formal proposal was put to the Lab more fully explaining why a height offset capability is required, and offering suggestions on how it might be achieved. As a result of this, Vir Linden has been working to provide such a capability, which is now officially called Avatar Hover Height (AHH), preliminary details of which, together with notes on testing it, can be found on the wiki.
This is now available for testing on Aditi using the new AHH project viewer. In addition, and as noted above, the server-side support will undergo initial deployment to the BlueSteel RC of the main grid on Thursday, January 22nd.
Within the viewer, AHH adds a new option called – wait for it – Avatar Hover Height to the right-click Avatar context menu in the viewer. Clicking on this displays the Set Avatar Height slider / spinner which can be used to adjust an avatar’s height by up to +/- 2 metres from the nominal default height.
Note that this is purely a graphical change – there is no associated change the avatar’s height in terms of platform physics. The slider allows for quite rapid adjustments to be made, while the spinner supports finer manual adjustments of up to 3 decimal places.
The slider allows your avatar’s graphical height to be adjusted by +/- 2 metres from its nominal default
Once adjustments have been finalised, they are sent to the simulator, and then back to all viewers connected to the simulator, allowing your adjusted height to be consistently seen by everyone around you (or that will be the case once the capability is fully deployed; during the roll-out, there will be a couple of caveats, as discussed further down in this article).
The slider works regardless of whether you’re using a No Modify shape, and allows adjusts to seated poses as well as standing poses, and works with poseballs (thus allowing couples dances to be correctly adjusted to prevent one or other partner either floating over the dance floor or being buried up to their ankles in it).
Avatar Hover Height will allow you to fine-tune your apparent seated position relative to an object or to the ground when dancing with a partner, allow you to kneel / lie / sit on the ground correctly, and so on – thus meeting the majority of use cases the Hover slider in Edit Appearance fails to address.
As noted above, the capability can be tested on Aditi right now. You’ll need the project viewer (when available), or you can download the latest version of the viewer from the link given above. You’ll also need to be be on regions which have the necessary server-side support for Avatar Hover Height. These are any region on the DRTSIM-274 channel, and nominally Hover1 and Hover2. Please read the notes on testing (again linked-to above).
Note on Initial Deployment
As AHH requires both viewer and server-side support, a couple of things do need to be noted while it is being tested / deployed:
Until such time as server-side support for AHH is fully deployed, any adjustment you make to you avatar’s height using it will only be effective while you are on regions with the necessary server-side support. If you move to a region without the support, your avatar with revert to its nominal default height above the ground / objects, and the AHH options will be greyed-out in your viewer. However, any setting you have made using AHH will be automatically re-applied when you re-enter a region with server-side AHH support
Until such time as the viewer-side code is incorporated into all viewers, any adjustments you make to your avatar’s height using AHH will only be visible to you and other people using viewers with the AHH code. anyone on a region supporting AHH who is using a viewer without the necessary AHH code will continue to see your avatar at its nominal default height.
Do keep in mind that until the AHH code is fully deployed across the grid, it will only work on regions with the server-side support. Similarly, adjustments made using it will only be visible to others using viewers with AHH support; those using viewers that do not support AHH will continue to see your avatar at its nominal default height, as shown in the image on the right, taken with Firestorm which shows my CTA standing on the ground, rather than hovering over it, as seen in the AHH viewer.
From the rapid testing I’m managed to do with AHH, it appears to work for the majority of cases where some fine tuning of avatar height is required, and offers a suitable level of granularity in adjustment through the spinner (although a suspect most people will perhaps finder the slider adequate for their needs. It will therefore be interesting to see how detailed testing progresses.
Assuming no major issues are found, it would seem likely this update will be one targeted for fairly rapid deployment, at least on the server-side, although the viewer code may take longer to filter through and to be picked-up by TPVs, depending upon what else is in the pipeline.
Now open at the art region of MetaLES, is Moya’s Memory, featuring some of the work of French artist Patrick Moya, aka Moya Janus in Second Life.
For those unfamiliar with either name, Patrick Moya is a part of the Nice contemporary art movement, centred on the École de Nice, and he has had a long association with integrating / leveraging technology with and for his art. Within SL his is perhaps best known for Moya Land, his four-region estate dedicated to his work and to “brand Moya”.
The installation at MetaLES is a celebration of Moya’s work, featuring several of his iconic pieces, including a plethora of his cartoon alter-ego. Central to the piece is a large logic circuit, complete with resistors, transistors, DIMM modules and so on, within an around which can be found elements of his art – his aforementioned cartoon alter-ego (as well as his superhero identity) and characters from a number of his pieces and drawings while bespectacled orbs carry the likeness of his face and his name can be encountered again and again.
Given its title, this is an installation that appears to work on several levels. First, and perhaps most obviously, it might be seen as something of a personal retrospective by the artist. Secondly, the use of the circuit board stands an an echo of the manner in which moya embraces the use of technology in his art. Thirdly, the circuit board is itself suggestive of memory – and by extension, the mind – further suggesting that the growth of free artistic expression can oft arise from the ordered (dare I say logical) workings of the human mind.
There’s also, perhaps a small comment on the how the identity of the artist is invested in his or her work; the motifs seen throughout this pieces – particularly the frequent use of his name and the self images or the frequent appearance of Dolly the Sheep, be they taken from the physical world or embodied in the use of Moya’s alter-egos – are far less any form of ego-driven statement, and more a commentary on how the artist is himself perhaps defined by his work.
The motif of mind and art being bound through memory and brain is also repeated elsewhere through the installation, such as in the inclusion of a model of Moya’s physical house, or the model of his cartoon alter-ego, from the head of which bursts forth a fountain of the artist’s drawings.
Moya is a prolific artist, whose work covers multiple mediums and formats; as such, there is perhaps another aspect to any interpretation of this installation: that it is itself a small reflection – an aide memoire, as it were – to the vast catalogue of his work, physical and virtual. The latter aspects can, following a visit to MetaLES be enjoyed through a hop over to Moya Land. In the meantime, Moya’s Memory will be open through until at least the end of February, I believe – so enjoy!
When I was a lot younger than I am now, my family took a holiday in Florida, ostensibly to see a space shuttle launch. While there, we did all the touristy things as well , including the inevitable Walt Disney “thing”. As a teenager, I found it all wonderfully kitsch, bar one small episode. That lay with getting stuck on a malfunctioning ride for something like 20 minutes, denied the ability to get off as staff strove to get it going, all the time being subjected to It’s A Small World (After All) over and over and over again. Even today, the opening bars of that song still get me twitching and reaching for sharp-pointed instruments with which I might conceivably harm someone.
I bring this up, because an idle paging through the Destination Guide brought me to an advert for Discovery Mark II, which is billed as “the world of tomorrow. Featuring rides, shows and more”, and my thoughts immediately turned to those far-off days, with the result that curiosity got the better of me, and I hopped over for a look.
Occupying a little over 1/4 of a full region, Discovery Mark II (I’ve no idea what happened to the original, other than I obviously missed it), is what I can only describe as a lovingly put together homage to Walt Disney’s parks and rides. Five attractions are on offer: PeopleMover, an elevated monorail system that carries you on a tour of the park, together with reproductions of Disney’s Astro Orbiter, Space Mountain, The Timekeeper, and the Electric Umbrella Café.
It has to be said that there is a wonderful attention to detail here; the broad boulevards, manicured gardens and bright colours are mindful of their Disney counterparts, while the look and feel of the foyer / queuing areas of Timekeeper and Space Mountain are carefully reproduced. The whole place has been very well done, and even the use of poseballs for seating in the Space Mountain ride add a certain level of whimsical retro kitsch to the park.
However, I also have to admit to having a slight niggle with the build which rather spoiled my visit. The Timekeeper attraction includes video camera footage filmed inside the physical world ride, and I’m pretty sure that attractions like it have warnings prohibiting such recording (although I admit to never having seen this particular attraction). Thus, walking into it in-world immediately raised very direct questions on matters of IP infringement and copyright.
Which is a shame, because otherwise I did enjoy my visit; it brought back memories of a family holiday twenty plus years in the past, and did so without me having to listen to It’s A Small World (After All) or deal with the resultant twitching!
Updates for the week ending: Sunday January 18th, 2015
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 Current Viewer Releases 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. This page 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
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
Official LL Viewers
Current Release version: 3.7.24.297623 updated on January 11 – (formerly the HTTP pipelining RC viewer) download page, release notes
Experience Keys RC viewer updated to version 3.8.0.298001 on January 15 – provides support for viewing and managing Experiences and for contributing content for Experiences (download and release notes)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 