Day: February 8, 2020

Seeking ownership or sponsorship: the Phoenix Art Collaboration

Posted on by Inara Pey
Phoenix Arts Collaboration

I recently wrote about the The Phoenix Artists Collaboration (PAC), a group formed to support artists from across Second Life by providing large-scale exhibition spaces capable of supporting multiple artists free-of-charge (for up to 100 land capacity).

The group was founded by Robert73Miller and Luke (Marshmal), with artist Anibrm Jung curating the gallery. Set within a Full private region utilising the additional 10K land capacity allowance (so 30K total capacity), PAC offers a range of gallery and events venues, with some 42 artists currently availing themselves of the gallery’s core exhibition space, as I noted in The Phoenix Artists Collaboration in Second Life.

Unfortunately, PACs future is now uncertain. While Luke and Robert have funded the region through until the end of March 2020, due to personal reasons, Robert has had to withdraw his involvement in the project as a funder, and this has cast doubt on the group’s ability to meet the cost of region tier from April onwards.

Phoenix Arts Collaboration

However, rather than simply give up on the endeavour, Luke and Ani are hoping they can find assistance in continuing PAC’s work beyond March through the wider support of those within the Second Life community who might be willing to get involved in both the group and the running of the region. Specifically, they are very keen to hear from:

  • Individuals or a group willing to:
    • Either take total ownership of the gallery and region, and meet the L$16,999 per week tier (and with Ani continuing in her role as gallery curator)
    • Or join with Luke and Ani in managing the group and gallery, and meet an agreed share of the region tier.
  • Individuals or groups willing to sponsor the region and gallery for a fixed weekly amount, in return for advertising space within the region, and with all promotional material issued by the group for exhibitions and events.

Those interested in doing any of the above are asked to contact either Luke or Anibrm in-world, and at their earliest convenience to discuss ideas and opportunities.

SLurl Details

2020 TPVD meetings week #6 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Greenhouse, December 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on February 7th, 2020. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks to Pantera for recording and providing it. As always:

  • Time stamps are given with links that will open the video at the appropriate point.
  • Core points of the meeting are listed below. Other subjects of lesser import may have been discussed, please refer to the video.

This was a relatively short meeting, information-wise, with much of the actual meeting time given over to general text chat.

SL Viewer News

[0:27-2:21]

  • The Yorsh Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.3.7.535996 on February 7th.
  • The Love Me Render RC viewer updated to version 6.3.6.535087 on February 6th.

The remainder of the current SL viewer pipelines are as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.3.6.535003, formerly the Xanté Maintenance RC, dated January 22nd, promoted January 27th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd, 2019.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • The three potential candidates for the next release promotion are quoted as being the Yorsh Maintenance RC, the Love Me Render RC and (even though it is still a project viewer at the moment) the Legacy Profiles viewer.
  • The Camera Presets RC viewer is experiencing a higher than average crash rate, with investigations on why still ongoing.
  • [19:47-20:30] As noted in my week #6 CCUG summary, EEP is now in burn-down mode – which means more bugs are being fixed than are being reported. It is anticipated that the formal deployment is now weeks, rather than months, away.
  • [28:06-28:41] The cache replacement viewer project is once more making progress, but there is no date as to when a public version of the viewer is likely to surface.

In Brief

  • [2:46-11:30] The new Premium Plus subscription level requires viewer-side changes. These predominantly relate to logging-in, where a user’s account level (Basic, Premium and – in the future – Premium Plus) is obtained from the back-end via a received block of LLSD code containing benefits tags and values.
    • This code is now in a public repository, and will be seeing some changes to various values specified within it prior to Premium Plus being launched.
    • The server-side code supporting the new LLSD code block will be made available on some Aditi servers soon, so TPVs can ensure the code doesn’t interfere with their ability to connect to the SL servers with their current viewer versions, and to start testing the viewer-side code in non-public versions of their viewers in preparation for the launch of Premium Plus.
    • At some point the server-side code will be deployed to the main grid, where it should not impact current viewer versions.
    • As side notes to this:
      • Once Premium Plus has been launched, the new code will refuse to connect if the required data is missing, but the system will let a viewer that ignores it to connect.
      • However, under the current roadmap, Premium Plus will not be going live until some time after Name Changes has been released (as per statements made at the monthly Web User Group meetings).
  • [14:42-14:50] Work on migrating viewer repos from Mercurial to Github is progressing.
  • [21:38-26:08] The SL system requirements page no longer references Windows 7 as this is no longer a supported operating system version. However, a broader update to the requirements page is being considered, as the current information is considered “woefully to aged.”
    • As part of this discussion, it was reiterated that when EEP does go live, it removes the option for turning off basic shaders, which will prevent systems than cannot support basic shader operates from accessing Second Life. The fixed function OpenGL code that supports the disabling will then be removed as a part of a future viewer code clean-up pass.
  • [15:19-17:20 (incl. text chat)] Both Singularity and Alchemy have been working towards making formal releases Soon™. Singularity has an up-to-date beta available to users, and Alchemy is close to making an updated beta available as well.