SL15B: fifteen years and counting!

Posted on by Inara Pey
The SL15B Cake Stage

The first part of the celebrations for Second Life’s 15th anniversary opened on Sunday, June 17th, when the SL15B Community Celebration regions opened to the public.

Events within the 24 regions will run from Sunday, June 17th through until Sunday, June 24th, with the Big Day, marking the original opening of Second Life to the public at large, far back in June 2003, taking place on Saturday, June 23rd. After the main celebrations, the regions will remain open for visitors from Monday, June 25th through Sunday, July 1st, although there will be no formal events during this period.

The SL15B (animated) Serpent Stage

As befitting a 15th anniversary, the theme for this year’s community celebration is crystal, so expect to see a good few builds within the regions reflecting this – and possible watches and timepieces as well, given these are often gifts associated with 15th anniversaries.

Throughout the week of festivities, there will be much going on: music, dancing and performances at the various stages found within the regions; talks and presentations within the auditorium – including the now-familiar Meet the Lindens events, of which more anon, and some of the exhibits built be SL residents and found within the regions may also play host to events of their own.

The SL15B Welcome Area 1 and Welcome Area 2

The festivities bring together the use mix of resident-build exhibitions and SLB infrastructure builds – with the latter this year being provided by Mikati Slade – Cake Stage; Walton F. Wainwright (Faust Steamer) -Serpent Stage; Anthony (ADudeNamed Anthony) – Auditorium; Ancient Mole – Crystal Rotunda Stage and Welcome Area: and City Builder (Lim Pikajuna) – Stage North.

As well as these, there are special features, such as the Tapestry of Time, tracing Second Life’s History from 2003 to the present; people can also pay a visit to the original Cornfield – the Sin Bin of early Second Life, and tour Bear Island, which makes a return to SLB celebrations for all lovers of Linden Bears. Plus the ever-popular SLB Big Hunt and the pod tours and very much a part of the festivities.

The SL15B Auditorium has landed

Meet The Lindens

This year, Meet the Lindens will talk place between Monday and Friday, at 14:00 SLT at the SL15B Auditorium. The participating Lindens this year include:

  • Xiola Linden – Monday, June 18th.
  • Patch Linden and Kiera Linden – Tuesday, June 19th.
  • Ebbe Linden – Wednesday, June 20th.
  • Grumpity Linden and Oz Linden – Thursday, June 21st.
  • Brett Linden  – Friday June 21st.
Patch, Grumpity, Brett and Xiola – all taking part in this year’s Meet the Lindens at SL15B. Credit: Linden Lab

Where To Find Information

The best place to find information on all that is going on at SL15B is the SL15B Community Celebration website. Daily schedules will be posted there, together with news and updates. IN addition, you can view the daily schedules for the major stages and the auditorium via the following links:

Visit the Tapestry of Time to learn about SL’s history

Getting There – SLurls

Published by Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.

3 thoughts on “SL15B: fifteen years and counting!”

  1. Reblogged this on Thar She Blows! and commented:
    All things regarding SL15B slipped right by my ass and I only noticed today that the celebrations hae already begun. Inara Pey and her best-informed blog to the rescue. So I’m lazily just reblogging a post with all the important info, timetables and slurls. Enjoy.
    Oh,, and as always: When you go to any SL15B event please be so nice and make photos and collect infos n shit and send all the stuff to your friendly editrix for publishing.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. I went there last night, the 17th. The party had barely begun and not all that many people were there. The builds are outstanding; creative and well done. Sadly, so was the LAG (movement, function, and loading). While this was not unexpected, the sheer amount of lag was surprising – and the number of sims used for this party are probably the greatest number of sims used for a celebration, ever.
    So – Happy Birthlag, Second Life! You could have made this fifteenth celebration memorable – but you didn’t.
    I’d advise visitors to go there during the hours when the fewest number of people are there and be ready for lag – a lot of it – like a fps of 11 to 14 in a nearly empty sim. Lag or not, the builds are stupendous and worth the inconvenience.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Given that most of the”lag” people experience is actually at their end of things – within their own computer – and not really to do with simulator performance, there are some things which can be done to ease the load.

      • Reduce draw distance – good for party attendance; perhaps not so good when trying to view exhibits, so play around with it.
      • Reduce the number of non-imposter avatars your viewer will fully render, and keep friends close. Avatars are about the most costly things to render, so dropping the more distant ones to imposter status lightens the load.
      • Lower your Maximum Complexity setting and used the always render friends option. Sure, having jelly dolls dancing / walking around may not be pretty, but it means your system isn’t working so hard to render them all – and you can still see your friends OK.
      • If you’re exploring on your own and want to focus on the builds and not the people – trying de-rendering avatars altogether via the Advanced menu > Render Types > and unchecking the Avatar option.
        I will caveat this by saying unfortunately, this does also prevent your own avatar from rendering, so is really best only for camming around
    2. Turn down options like particle effects. These are rendered entirely in the viewer and if a location is using a lot of them, toning down the number being rendered might help – I actually rarely set particles higher than 1024 on my system
    3. A no-brainer, but worth saying: if you run the viewer with shadows on, disable them when visiting SL15B and only toggle if taking photos.
    4. While it shouldn’t really impact anything other than low-end GPUs, if you have Advanced Lighting Model enabled, try just toggling it off and seeing if things like your frame rate improve.

      5. And of course we can all help others as well, by not necessarily dressing to the nines and loading up with every attachment we just *might* need or running with enough bling to impersonate a lighthouse. By being just a little conservative and thinking of the effect this or that item might have on the performance of other people’s computers, we can all perhaps contribute to making things just a little be easier for everyone visiting SL15B.

      Liked by 1 person

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