Softie Gallery, a part of the Black Label Exhibitions corner opened its doors on Saturday, November 5th with an ensemble exhibition featuring artists from across Second Life – including two who have not previously shown their own in-world in public before.
Organised by Storie’s Helendale (GlitterPrincess Destiny), Kristine Blackadder and AnnaFrancesca Helendale (AnnaFrancesca Kira), building on an idea by Storie’s, the three storey gallery space features work by Aldiladeisogni, Astralia, Bryn Oh, Catt Scorpio (cattivella), Cica Ghost, Ciottolina Zue, Eleseren Brianna, John Brianna (Johnannes 1977 Resident), Enrico Yamden, Judy Barton (mitla) LeMelonRouge Lil (Lilarya), Magda Schmidtzau, Mistero Hifeng, Poala Mills, Seersha Heart, Terrygold, Vangogh Rembranch and Stories herself. Joining them, and showing their art in-world in public for the first time, are Blip Mumfuzz and MM Mysterr).
“I am excited because this gallery was empty so long a time,” Storie’s told me ahead of the opening as she gave me a preview of the exhibition. “I was honoured when so many artists said they would exhibit here, so now the gallery can live and breathe again!”
The gallery space is presented in black, offering a strong contrast to the 3D and 2D art on display. The latter leans strongly towards avatar studies in a range of complimentary styles: colour, monochrone, photo and painting; together with sculptures, real life art, one or two landscapes, to more abstract-like pieces, and real world, all of which, combined with the 3D from four artists I greatly admire, makes for a fascinating mix of styles and presentation.
I understand the gallery is a permanent exhibit space for the artists, although they are going to be encouraged to rotate the art they place on display there. Art installations focused on specific artists and / or ideas will continue to take place up in the air above the region. As such, I look forward to seeing how the various displays evolve over time.
The majority of the notes in this update are taken from the abbreviated TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, November 4th. The video of that meeting is embedded at the end of this update. My thanks as always to North for recording and providing it.
Server Deployments
As always, please refer to the deployment thread for the latest news and updates.
On Tuesday, November 1st, the Main (SLS) channel received the same server maintenance package as deployed to the three RC channels in week #43. This comprises: a fix for the bug introduced in week #42 – see BUG-40735 “Paying an object with [slgaming] in the object name (most skill game machines) fails on the RC 16.10.14.320687”; two fixes for issues with the new llSit function for Experiences, and additional internal updates.
There was no RC channel deployment on Wednesday, November 2nd. However all three channels were restarted.
Both the Main channel deployment and the RC channel restarts saw land capacity / prim allowances for Mainland regions increase.A full Mainland region now has a land capacity / prim allowance of 22,500 as standard. Note that private estate regions will follow in due course.
The Project Bento RC viewer updated to version 5.0.0.321250 on Wednesday, November 2nd. offering the following fixes (the reports on the JIRA are non-public, so links aren’t included here to save confusion):
SL-395 – joint scale locks failing to upload in some cases.
MAINT-6853 – viewer crash when checking preview skin weights in mesh upload.
SL-504 – intermittent crash when adding attachment to an avatar (probably during shutdown).
This viewer is expected to go through at least one more iteration to address further bugs.
The Lab hopes that either the Bento RC or the current Maintenance RC (version 4.1.2.321183 at the time of writing) will be promoted to the de facto release viewer prior to US Thanksgiving, with the other being promoted shortly thereafter.
A further Maintenance RC is in development, and is likely to appear once the current RC has been promoted.
64-bit Viewer Progress
The Lab has completed building all of the required libraries for the 64-bit viewer, and are now actually building the first 64-bit project viewers, which it is hoped will see the light of day before the end of the year.
The library updates also mean that the Lab will be able to do large-scale updates to the viewer build environment with significantly greater ease in the future. One of the first of these updates liable to come in the first quarter of 2017, to switch to Xcode 8 (Mac) and Visual Studio 2015 (Windows).
Bento
Medhue Simoni’s Bento elephant is now available – requires a Bento viewer to use / render correctly
There was no Bento User Group meeting on November 4th, so there is nothing major to report on that front – except those who have been fascinated and charmed by Medhue Simoni’s magnificent Bento elephant can now obtain it via the Marketplace. There’s also an extensive video on it – and it even flies! How cute is that?
Note, obviously, that you will need a Bento capable viewer to use it, and others will require Bento capable viewers to render it correctly.
During the meeting Sansar is discussed, and Oz Linden indicates that the log-in data the Lab receives suggests than a large number of Second Life users are using systems which are unlikely to be able to run Sansar particularly well, further boosting the Lab’s confidence that Second Life has a longer-term future.
This shouldn’t be taken to mean that Sansar will necessarily have a massively high set of system requirements – although obviously, anyone wishing to use the current generation of HMDs will need to have a system meeting the specifications required by such hardware.
Rather, it would again suggest than many Second Life users continue to access Second Life using systems which might be described as past their prime when compared to even the “modest” hardware standards set by modern home computers.
The familiar bellow had me on my feet and in the Editor’s office before it had finished reverberating across the office.
“Chief?” I enquired from the doorway of his inner sanctum. He tossed a folder across his desk at me. I crossed the room to look at the cover, then at him, puzzled. “The new prim allowances? I’ve covered them, Chief…”
“Yeah? Well it seems some are concerned about the supply, given those changes. I want 500 words on my desk about prim production before the end of the day!”
I opened the folder and saw a ticket for one to Heterocera and details of a charter helicopter which would get me to the ANWR Channel. I looked up at the Editor, “You want me to visit the Prim Rig?” The look I got in reply told me all I needed to know. Pausing only to grab my camera and notepad from my desk, I headed for the elevator…
“After circling the Prim Rig to afford me a good view, the pilot brought us in to a safe landing”
ANWR – named in respect of the to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – forms part of the body of water connecting the continents of Heterocera (Cercopia region) and Sansara (Cyclops and Purple regions) to the south. It is the home of the Prim Rig, a massive drilling rig sitting in the midst of the water which – as legend has it – is where all the prims in Second Life come from.
“You’ll need this,” the rig Foreman said, handing me a yellow hard hat as I stepped off the helipad. “We run a safe operation here!”
The idea for the rig is actually a part of an initiative to add some “back story” to Second Life through the character of Magellan Linden. However, it has gained a life of its own as the place where “primoleum” is drilled, pressed into the prims we need, and then funnelled to dry land via a pipeline.
I opted to take a trip out to the rig and blog about it when Patch brought it to mind in discussing the new region prim allocations, joking that he had been out to the rig to ensure production had been increased to meet the demand brought about by the new allocations.
Easily reached via water – and hard to miss when boating / sailing – the rig can also be reached via hot air balloon, SLGI tour trains (which fly out to the rig when they come to the end of their ground lines) or the regular sailings of the resupply vessels to / from the rig. Those wishing to fly to it via helicopter can do so from any of the airfields near the coasts of the two continents (as I did from the , travelling from the Calleta City Airport, Cecropia, where the prim pipeline comes ashore. When flying to the rig, do be aware that the helipad can be used by other vehicles as well and that auto return is set to 10 minutes, with no rezzing on the rig.
“We toured the rig, the Foreman showing me how raw Primoleum is brought up from deep under the sea bed, the raw cubes quickly smoothed or rounded into cylinders before passing on for pipeline delivery. It’s all a highly automated affair…”
It’s a very industrial place, as you might expect; the tall central drilling derrick rises into the sky like a latter-day spire, the square bulk of the rig surrounding it, waste stacks angling outwards over the water, burning off unwanted gases safely away from the massive structure. Cranes, containers and the Helipad occupy the upper deck, but it’s the deck below that offers the main attraction; that’s where the prims first appear, ready for onward transfer for use by residents!
There’s a lot of history bound up with the ANWR drilling rig – the fable of the prim, the legend of Magellan Linden, his discovery of Heterocera – all of it so much a staple part of Second Life’s history and back story mythology. All of which makes it a “must see” stopover for any SL explorer serious about discovering the grid 🙂 . Should you choose to do so, you might also want to check-out the Valda Experimental Wave Energy Hub to the south and west of the rig; but for me, that’s the subject of a future blog post – maybe!
“As we lifted off from the helipad, I took a last snap of the Prim Rig through the helicopter’s open door, knowing that as long as it was standing, prim needs in Second Life would always be met…”
On Friday, November 4th, Grumpity Linden posted news via the Tools and Technology blog, on the recent updates to the Lab’s web services which support Second Life, and improvements / updates recently made to the Second Life Marketplace.
It was the updates to the SL Marketplace which made up the bulk of the summary, which has been listed chronologically rather than via service. However, as people might prefer reading thing by subject matter, I’ve split the list of updates / improvements between the Marketplace and the Lab’s other web services.
The SL Marketplace updates and improvements, implemented in September and October 2016, comprise:
Fixes:
A fix for sorting reviews by rating.
A fix for duplicate charging of PLE subscriptions.
Fixes for some remaining hangers-on from the VMM migration (unassociated items drop down + “Your store has been migrated” notifications.
A fix to Boolean search giving overly broad results (BUG-37730)
A fix to the Marketplace for an issue where a Firefox update was ignoring browser-specific style sheet settings on Marketplace.
Disabling of fuzzy matches in search on the Marketplace so that search results will be more precise (+ a switch added to allow the Lab to enable or disable fuzzy matches in search).
Archived listings are no longer indexed.
If a store is renamed, all of its products are now re-indexed.
Blocked users can no longer send gifts through the Marketplace.
In term of the remain web services, Grumpity notes that the Lab has recently:
Provided a number of unspecified bug fixes for the support portal
Provided a fix for the “Create Your Own Map” link, which used to generate an invalid SLurl
Updated the new user sign-up flow to give more consistency in password requirements
Finally, and launched just ahead of the November 2016 premium subscription offer, is a Premium Membership landing page aimed at potential incoming new users as a part of the Lab’s rotating series of landing pages, and which currently features the premium subscription offer.
A part of the new Second Life Premium Membership landing page, highlighting the current Premium subscription offer, and launched on October 31st, 2016
Note: An earlier version of this article appeared in error whilst still being drafted on-line, as a result of a mistake on my part and to my own embarrassment. Once again, my apologies to Linden Lab and readers of this blog for my carelessness.
It is something Second Life users have long wanted / wished for / desired / demanded: an increase to the basic land impact (or prim count, if you still prefer) available for regions.
And now the wish is being granted – although word came out a lot sooner than the Lab had anticipated (thanks in part to my aforementioned mistake).
However, on Thursday, November 3rd, the Lab officially announced that they are increasing the Land Impact allowance for Second Life regions. The new allowances are:
Full Regions:
Mainland: 22,500
Private estates:
20,000 at the same tier price OR
30,000 for an additional US $30 a month (+a one-off US $30 conversion fee to add / remove the extra 10K allowance)
Homesteads: 5,000 (Mainland and private)
OpenSpace: 1,000 (Mainland and private)
All of the changes filter down to the parcel level, according to parcel size.
Mainland full regions now have a 22,500 Land Capacity / prim allowance as standard. Those with prim bonuses will be based on the new LI / prim allowance
The changes to Mainland regions were made during the regular weekly deployments on Tuesday November 1st, and Wednesday, November 2nd, with official confirmation being given in part in a blog post from the Lab which indicated the increase to Mainland full regions alongside the most recent Premium subscription offer (note: that blog post from the Lab has now been updated).
So why has this change come about?
“We’ve finally reached the point where we have the equilibrium between technology and software performance on our side,” Patch Linden, Senior Director of Product Operations at Linden Lab informed me, as we sat down to discuss this and other aspects of Second Life. “The hardware we use to run the simulators is in a really good place right now, and will continue to be. Of course, as time goes on, things will continue to get better in that department. And the simulators are running so efficiently now, with all of the back-end work that we’ve done with them over the past several years that we can now do things like this.”
Patch Linden
“We started with Mainland being it’s obviously ‘ours’ to directly influence,” Patch said. “We could deploy, and watch, and listen to the metrics to see what they tell us. Then providing everything behaves, we’ll go out to the rest of the grid and all private regions shortly thereafter. It is such a fundamental change to the simulator that we want to make sure we do it right, and we don’t cause unnecessary harm in the process. So the more controlled we could do it, the better we felt.”
It was this need to watch and wait following the initial deployment which had caused the Lab to decided to hold back on a public announcement until Thursday, November 3rd. However, users noticed the change almost as soon as mainland regions came back on-line following the Tuesday rolling restart, prompting forum posts and support enquiries as to whether there had error. As a result, Patch issued a short forum post reassuring people there wasn’t an error, although the decision was made to hold off on any official announcements until November 3rd, due to the arrangements already in place – including a live Designing Worlds session featuring Patch, who would reveal more and take questions.
So given the Mainland changes are now deployed, a key question I had for Patch was: when would Private regions see their update. “We should have them up and running within the next couple of months,” he replied. In essence, the precise roll-out to private islands will depend upon the metrics gathered following the Mainland roll-out.
And the reasons for the differences in the full region allowances between Mainland and private estates?
“There are 2 reasons,” Patch explained. “The first is that Mainland regions have long been a slightly less costly, but also less feature rich product than private islands. But recently we rolled out the private region buy-down offer, which somewhat levelled the pricing between the products. So, we wanted to give a little something back to Mainland, and choose to give full regions there a slightly higher prim limit increase than private estates.
“The second reason is that private estate full regions have an additional advantage over all the other region types,” Patch continued. “This allows us to offer the additional 10,000 LI allowance to private estate full regions, for a total of 30,000. There is some additional maintenance work that comes with this, hence the US $30 a month fee (per region), together with a one-off US $30 conversion fee to add or remove that option; but the offer will be available for any price level full region, whether it be an older grandfathered region, a newer bought-down region, or a regular priced full region, immediately the increase in land impact / prim allowance is rolled-out to private estates.
“So you might say, it’s a little give, a little take, and a bit of balance between the advantages of the differing products :).”
Linden Home holders should now find they have 175 LI as their own to play with – as will users with 512 sq metre parcel on the Mainland, with other parcel sizes adjusting accordingly. The same will be true of private islands, once the update is fully deployed.
In the meantime, the change to the Mainland was warmly received by most, with many land holders and content creators pointing to the home and garden / landscaping markets potentially gaining a significant shot in the arm as a result. This is significant, as a hope at the Lab is that rather than everyone simply adding more objects to their land, the extra capacity will encourage more content creators to make use of optimised levels of details on their mesh creations, rather than using very high LOD values across all viewing distances, thus helping to lighten some of the current load on older systems.
As we closed the conversation, I asked how Patch, as a long-term Lab employee and as a former resident, felt about the change.
“This is something I’ve wanted to do for several years now,” he replied. “And we’re pleased to be able to do something as fundamental as this to change the product in a good way.”
With thanks to Patch Linden, Pete Linden and Linden Lab.
Update, November 3rd: the changes in prim allowances in full are now available in this post.
On Thursday, November 3rd, the Lab blogged about their latest Premium subscription offer for Second Life, and in doing so gave confirmation of the Mainland LI / prim allowances people had been noticing following the weekly deployments on Monday, November 1st and Tuesday November 2nd – and gave a tease for more news to come:
Premium members are entitled to a Linden Home and can own parcels on the Mainland. Now, we’re raising the limit on the number of prims you can use in those spaces. This means you will have more prims and creative flexibility to decorate and customize your own space. Land impact (object) capacity on Mainland Regions will go from 15,000 to 22,500 – that’s a lot more building capacity!
In addition to this, we will further carry the prim limit increases to the private estate regions shortly. Keep your eye on our blogs for more information!
An episode of Designing Worlds comes out later this afternoon which talks more in-depth about this new perk. We’ll update this blog once it’s available.
(My emphasis on the last part of the statement). All things being equal, I’ll also have more to come around 14:00 SLT see the link at the top of this article.
The blog post from the Lab confirms that Mainland full regions now have a standard Land Capacity / prim allowance of 22,500.
The rest of the post concerns itself with the Premium subscription offer, which started on Wednesday, November 3rd, 2016 at 08:00 SLT and will expire on November 10th, 2016 at 08:00 SLT. It offers the usual 50% discount – which for this offer is applied to the first month of the monthly subscription plan, as the small print explains:
TERMS & CONDITIONS This offer begins on November 3, 2016 at 8AM Pacific Time (PT) and expires on November 10, 2016 at 8AM PT. To qualify for this promotion, you must 1) have an existing Second Life (“SL”) basic account or create a new account, and 2) select monthly (every one month) billing for your SL account. The fifty percent (50%) discount will be applied to your first month’s bill and future months will be billed at the standard Premium Membership price (currently US$9.50 per month). For new accounts or accounts not previously upgraded to Premium Membership, after initial login through the Second Life viewer following upgrade to Premium Membership and: 1) following your first full week, the L$300 weekly stipend will be deposited to your account every Tuesday for the duration of your Premium Membership; and 2) after your account has been active for forty-five (45) consecutive days, the L$ sign-up bonus will be deposited to your account.
As well as the discount, Premium members are also offered a new gift in the form of a laser-shooting Alpha Robot Avatar.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 