Day: December 24, 2018

Each year through this blog I attempt to track news about, and changes to, Second Life, as driven by by Linden Lab. On the technical side, this is do through my weekly SL project summaries, which summarise the various in-world meetings the Lab holds each week / month, and the rest is done through various means, such as attending public meetings and Q&A sessions, tracking the official SL blog etc.

Given this has been in some ways a busy and ambitious year for LL and Second Life, I thought it might be interesting to look back over the major changes and technical projects that have come to pass, and some of those still on the horizon.

Land

2018 saw some significant moves on the virtual land front.

• On Wednesday, March 14th, LL announced an immediate reduction in Mainland tier costs of 10%.
• At the same time, they also announced the amount of “free” tier granted to Premium members would increase from 512 sq metres to 1024 sq metres.
• On July 2nd, 2018, private region fees dropped by up to 15%.

At the time of the Mainland restructure, and while welcoming it, I was a little dubious on how it would be received, simply because obtaining Mainland parcels could be something of a hassle. Well, it turned out the Lab had also thought of that, trimming back on the overhead involved in obtaining abandoned land and making it a simple ticket request.

Result: what has reported to be, and continues to be, a positive response to the change – although just how big is a little hard to judge at this point in time. The last date for which we have figures via Tyche Shepherd’s Grid Survey (January 11th, 2017), abandoned land accounted for around 21% of the Mainland. As (I believe) Tyche updates this figure annually, it’ll be interesting to see how things have changed come early 2019.

First announced in an official blog post on June 20th, The private tier pricing adjustments met with a mixed response, with some in the land rental business claiming they were being somehow being “gouged” on the basis that grandfathered regions were being excluded from the new pricing structure.

As I noted when the price adjustment came into effect, such claims were somewhat nonsensical. For one thing, grandfathered regions remain either US $54 per month (Full regions) or US $14 per month (Homestead)cheaper than the new rates. Further, while there was an up-front fee for converting regions to grandfathered status in the 2016 “buy down” offer, more than enough time had elapsed for those costs to be recouped in tier savings. For another, those best placed to capitalise on any surge in interest in holding / renting land as a result of the restructuring would actually be land rental businesses.

As it stands, and again using Tyche Shepherd’s grid survey, the restructuring may resulted in a very small increase in region numbers during 2018. However, I’ll have more on that when Tyche publishes her end-of-year report.

Fee Changes

Alongside the private region fee changes, the Lab also announced an increase in the cost of Linden Dollar purchases by US 0.50 per transaction. While in keeping with the goal of trying to shift the balance of the Lab’s revenue generation away from virtual land, the increase did cause a degree of upset, being the third such in around 15 months (the last being November 2017, when the cost per transaction rose by US 0.39).

This change particularly hit those who prefer to buy small quantities of L$ at a time. While it was pointed out that the impact could be somewhat mitigated through the purchase of larger L$ amounts over fewer periods – providing people’s available disposable income allowed them to make larger, if more infrequent L$ purchases. As it is, how the fee change may have impacted people’s buying / spending habits is a little hard to quantify.

Technical Updates

It may sound odd, but of the four major user-visible technical changes planned for 2018, three were actually established in 2017, with only one actually being delivered before the end of the year.

Animesh

The delivered project was of course Animesh – the ability to use the avatar skeleton to animate rigged mesh objects in a similar manner to animation an avatar (through scripted animations running the skeleton). I’m not going to dive deeply into Animesh, given it has been covered extensively in my Content Creation User Group summaries, and I also gave an overview when it was officially released in November, complete with resource links. Currently, the majority of Animesh creations that are surfacing appear to be basic NPC characters and pets / animals.

Bakes On Mesh

Bakes On Mesh (BoM) is a project extending the current avatar Appearance / Bake Services to allow wearable textures (skins, tattoos, clothing) to be applied directly to worn mesh faces in a manner similar to how they were for system avatars.  It was first announced in May 2017.

Vir Linden’s original announcement of Bakes on Mesh in May 2017

BoM touches multiple Second Life services: viewer, simulator, appearance and bake, as such it is a complicated piece of work.

The first part of the process was to update the Bake Service to support 1024×1024 textures, in order to allow wearables to match the quality of textures applied to mesh faces by applier systems. After that, the service needed to be able to recognise how to handle wearables when applying them to mesh faces. The simulator also required updates to recognise things like BoM messages, and obviously the viewer and its UI also required updates.

Cathy Foil introduces Bakes on Mesh (April 2018)

As it stands, the vast majority of the work has been completed. A project viewer has been issued, and the support services updated while the simulator code is grid-wide. However, there are still some issues to be ironed-out viewer-side; currently, the viewer lead, Anchor Linden, is leading work to resolve a positioning issue with small mesh avatars, so BoM is, for the present “on hold”.

It should be noted that the Lab do not see BoM as being designed to replace mesh applier systems, but rather as an alternative. However, it is also seen as potentially a means to reduce the overall complexity of mesh avatar bodies and heads, which may have an impact on applier systems / how they function in future. Also:

• This work does not include normal or specular map support, as these are not part of the existing Bake Service, nor are they recognised as system wearables.
• It also will not provide a means of applying wearables via script + UUID.
• Either of these options might be considered in some future BoM extension.

Continue reading “A look at key Second Life updates in 2018” →