Month: October 2021

Burn2 2021: The Great Unknown in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Burn2 2021

Burn2 2021 opens its gates at 17:00 SLT on Friday, October 8th, 2021 and will run through until Sunday, October 17th, 2021. Possibly as a result of the 2020 event proving so popular amongst Burning Man veterans – that event went virtual due to the pandemic – this year’s Burn2 Octoburn is taking place over a total of 12 regions, double the usual number. Thus, there are more camps, more builds and more things to see and do.

The theme for this year’s event is The Great Unknown, once again matching the core theme of Burning Man, and the organisers of that event describe the theme in these terms:

This year’s Burning Man theme is an invitation to emerge from our collective isolation, to explore the unfamiliar contours of a changed world, and to reimagine ourselves, our community, and our culture in ways that might not have been possible before this period of plague and pause. After a long year adrift in the Multiverse, beset by angst and uncertainty, it’s time to climb up out of our escape pods and look outside to see where we’ve landed. On top of a mountain, like Noah? At the bottom of a rabbit hole, like Alice? Or are we on a vast and endless plain, ringed by ancient mountains, the sort of unfathomable territory that once caused mapmakers to throw up their hands and write “here be dragons” at the margins of the known world? 

And so it is that the eleven regions spread before and to either side of “base camp” at Burning Man Deep Hole have been given names designed to encourage camp and plot builders to go beyond the limits of everyday expression and into the cosmos of the imagination and those landscapes of the mind labelled Here Be Dragons and realms unmarked by borders or the constraints of the mundane.

Burn2 2021: Stoner Park

The Great Unknown will formally start with a “soft” opening featuring the Lamplighters, who will lead a procession through the event regions. Activities will then kick-off at 18:00 with music across the three event stages of Main, Bob, and Centre Camp. Details of all activities and entertainment can be found in the Burn 2 Event Calendar. Note that some of the individual plots may also be hosting their own events and entertainment.

As is traditional, the burning of The Man and the Temple will occur at 12:00 noon SLT on Saturday, October 16th, and Sunday October 17th, 2021 respectively.

When visiting, people can explore the regions in multiple ways: on foot, via balloon, and the familiar Department of Mutant Vehicles cars, whilst for the environmentally minded, horse are also available for riding. Also, the greeters at the main landing point have backpackers – clicking these backpacks will provide you with an inventory folder packed with info about the event, including landmarks to key points of interest.

Burn2 2021: The Temple

About Burn2

Burn2 is an extension of the Burning Man festival and community into the world of Second Life. It is an officially sanctioned Burning Man regional event, and the only virtual world event out of more than 100 real world Regional groups and the only regional event allowed to burn the man.

The Burn2 Team operates events year around, culminating in an annual major festival of community, art and fire in the fall – a virtual echo of Burning Man itself.

Related Links

2021 CCUG meeting week #40 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Ilha Do Sol, June 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 7th, 2021. These meetings are generally chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar and the venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

A *very* short meeting, as Vir was unavailable, so the Graphics team could only update on their work.

SL Viewer

No updates to the current official viewer thus far through the week, despite hopes the Apple Notarisation viewer would be promoted to de facto release status. This leaves the current pipelines as:

  • Release viewer: version version 6.4.22.561752, formerly the CEF Update RC viewer, issued July 24 and promoted August 10.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Apple Notarisation Fix RC viewer, version 6.4.23.564172, issued September 24 – this should remove the warning messages which are currently popping up.
    • Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.4.23.564063, on September 21.
    • Simplified Cache RC viewer, version 6.4.23.562623, dated September 17, issued September 20
  • Project viewers:
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.4.23.563579, issued September 3.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

Graphics Work

  • The Graphics team currently remain primarily focused on drilling down into the data being gathered by the Tracy debugger / system analyser, which is available internally to the Lab.
  • This has already revealed a number of high latency artefacts within the main loop rendering code.
  • The focus of the most recent work has been to either eliminate these or move them to secondary threads so they do not impact the primary rendering loop.
  • This has seen some “pretty good results” in improvement performance, but the internal testing is still at too early a stage for stats to be made public, and it is felt there is at least another month of work to be done before the work will start to come closer to being ready for a public appearance.
  • In difference to the last meeting, to now appears this work could well be surfaced in a project viewer of its own, rather than being merged with other in-development viewers. However, and as noted above, there is no time frame on when it may made a public debut.

Date of Next Meeting

Thursday, October 21st.

Terrygold’s Horror Museum in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Solo Arte October 2021: Terrygold – Horror Museum

I’ll say up front that I’m not a great fan of the “Halloween season”. Not because I dislike horror or anything; it’s just that I sit just on the side of the age divide (and also the Atlantic) where I look upon all the fuss and things like trick-or-treating as a dubious import¹. However, every so often something comes along that is related to the “season”, and which catches my eye – such as the first iteration or two of Linden Lab’s Haunted House or the odd region design.

One such place that did this for 2021 is a modest but engaging art installation by Terrgold, which is now open at Solo Arte  to form both an immersive art space and precursor to an event space that will likely see activity throughout the month.

Solo Arte October 2021: Terrygold – Horror Museum

Horror Museum is a small semi-interactive exhibit in which you can witness scenes associated if not with Halloween per se, then most certainly the annals of cinematic and written horror. The core element of the installation is a visit to a museum – or perhaps gallery would be a better description – offering a series of images drawn from the worlds and legends of horror. In one hall, for example, we can peer into a scene of Frankenstein’s laboratory; and another, Nosferatu stands as if in greeting as we pass, whilst others offer images of nightmare characters and creatures – clown and giant spiders – with more beside.

Solo Arte October 2021: Terrygold – Horror Museum

But these are not ordinary images; each is in fact a 3D setting in which visitors are invited to step and become a part of the story that has been captured. Most are fairly straightforward in their presentation of a scene, but one takes you a little further than the others, opening as it does into a chamber beyond its frame.

As well as the 3D images by Terrygold, the halls of the gallery include models of monsters and posters from a number of horror films, some of which compliment Terry’s art.

At the end of the gallery spaces is a picture called The Forest, a walk through what is often the favourite setting for horror films, a mysterious forest, this once complete with strange figures and creatures. A path winds through this forest, providing the way to the event space mentioned above.

If I’m totally honest, I’d have liked to have experienced poses within the various vignettes Terrygold provides that are more in keeping within each theme. But at the same time, producing custom poses is no easy task, and its not as if this diminish the content of  Horror Museum nor the fact it is an engaging installation. When visiting, do make sure you follow the instructions at the landing point to set your environment correctly.

1. Yes, you’re allowed to shout “bah! humbug! at me for saying this (even if that does belong to the end-of-year season!).

SLurl Details

October 2021 SL Web User Group summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, October 6th, 2021.

These meetings are generally held on the first Wednesday of the month, with dates and venue details available via the SL public calendar. A video of the meeting, courtesy of Pantera, can be found embedded at the end of this article (my thanks to her as always!), and the following is a summary of key topics / discussions.

Web Properties Updates

  • Back-end / infrastructure work is still on-going and has taken up a lot of time through August.
  • A focal point of the above has been trying to make the Profiles system a little more robust, work that needs to be completed before the necessary changes can be made is support of moving profiles back into their own floater in the viewer (as per the current Legacy Profiles project viewer available through the Alternate Viewers page).
  • Marketplace improvements:
    • A number of “small” fixes have been implemented through the past month.
    • New feature: the ability to move items from your Shopping Cart to your Favourites (and thence to your Wishlist).

Premium Name Changes

  • A number of Last Names have been retired: Aviator, Caboose, Knickers, Orlando and Primless.
  • New “seasonal” Last Names have been deployed for Halloween: Ghostly, Lecter, Pumpkin, Treat and Trick. These will be available through until November 1st, 2021.

Upcoming Work

  • Once the infrastructure work has been completed, the web team will embark on a complete refresh of all web properties.
    • First in line for this is Search (search.secondlife.com), which includes in-world search as well.
    • The work will include both cosmetic improvements to how Search looks, and improvements to things like search results – relevance, etc.

In Brief

  • No updates for Mobile in the past month.
  • A reminder that multi-factor authentication is now active cross key Account options available through the Second Life dashboard.
  • A question was asked about having separate login names and user names, so the former need never be revealed. While not entirely ruled out, this would require some significant changes to the current log-in methodology and infrastructure (and likely widespread back-end changes across multiple services), ergo, it is not something that is likely to be undertaken in the immediate or medium-term future.
  • The subject of having more general in-world meetings with Lab staff, rather than just the current specialised user groups (e.g. with a mix of people  from the product teams, the engineering teams, the land team, etc), in order to encourage greater attendance by users.
    • This is something that would likely be welcomed by users, but if taken up, unlikely to be a monthly event.
    • Several years ago, LL did re-instigate quarterly Town Hall meetings (to the extent of re-vamping a set of regions to host them), which were immensely people and featured both the CEO at some, and a cross-section of senior staff at others. These were popular at the time, and could be beneficial if reinstated.
  • SL wiki updates (or the lack thereof in the case of many pages):
    • LL re-iterated that the policy is still to move more generic / maintained information to the Knowledge Base, and to focus just on maintaining those wiki pages of particular technical importance (and as the entire scripting portal and pages).
    • A problem with the Knowledge Base is that it is not as relevantly searchable as the wiki. There is also, frankly a vast trove of information on the wiki that, while useful, is becoming increasingly outdated or confusing appearing in multiples places and with different levels of information – a subject oft raised at Content Creation User Group meetings in relation to good building  / design practices, avatar-related information, etc.
    • It was pointed out that those with knowledge and understanding of capabilities, etc., can still apply for wiki editor access via support.
    • As an alternative, those who have specific updates that should be made to wiki pages, these can be e-mailed to Alexa Linden, who has headcount to help with wiki updates as time allows.
  • E-mail notifications based on on log-in location: a lot of web services will send a log-in notification if an attempt is made to access your account from outside of your “normal” location. This is something that could be done with SL web properties, but would require scoping and work. A feature request has therefore been requested for the idea.
  • A request has been made for “official” support for shopping events through the SL web properties. This would require careful work in terms of ensuring fair representation (including for non-shopping events) and how / where it would be presented, and as such a feature request has been asked for, although the matter will be raised internally at the Lab.
  • Marketplace related:
    • Categories and sub-categories were raised. Again, those who feel there should be additional categories or categories that could be better broken-out by sub-categories, are asked to raise a feature request with specific details.
    • As per the September meeting: a feature request, BUG-231142 “Questions and Answers’ tab for marketplace product pages” has been received and accepted by the Lab.
      • This would essentially allow questions to be asked of a product that can be answered by (for example) the listing owner, their appointed store manager(s) or perhaps even a customer who has actually purchased the item.
      • If this were to be implemented, LL would consider some supporting tools – e.g. the option for listing creators to explicitly indicate if they do not want the feature enabled for some of their products, or automatically disabling the option on free items listed on the MP, etc.
    • Animated gifs on the MP: another frequent request. The short answer is that this is not on the roadmap, simply because of the infrastructure required to store the (invariably) large file sizes & make them available to product listings.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, November 3rd, 14:00 SLT.

GLTSL 3: Dreamshire Village, Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Dreamshire, October 2021

Back in April of 2021, I paid visits to the Zany Zen Railway and the Valkyrie Light Transport Railroad, two members of a small group of railway systems in Second Life called The Great Little Trains of Second Life; the “little” here not being because they are necessarily small in terms of distance travelled, but rather the fact they celebrate narrow gauge trains and rolling stock (with a distinctly English lean to things in places!).

Those interested in learning more about those lines can do so by catching up on the Zany Zen here, and the Valkeryrie here. However, there is a third stop in any tour of GLTSL that deserves mention – and one I should have written about a lot sooner, given I also dropped in a couple of times in April and May, but due to assorted failures on my part, the article has been delayed in leaving the station, so to speak. As such my apologies to Nimoui Chenier (Nimoui) and Lily (LilyChenier), the creators of Dreamshire, home to the Dreamshire village, district and railway.

Dreamshire, October 2021

The overall design is that of an English village dating from the Victorian era, although the old gate towers looks older, whilst other aspects of the village – such as the fires station with its Landrover fire truck, make it clear the village has left the Victorian era so distance in the past. At the time of my most recent visit, the village also lay decorated in the modern style for Halloween., so there is already something of a rich mix here.

The railway system – which runs a narrow-gauge tram rather than steam locos – runs around the island passing through a number of little stations that present the opportunity to hop on and off. The largest of the stations – Winkle – sits just below the landing point and serves Dreamshire village, Other ports of call include Dragonspire, Wobbly Knot, Promenade and Dolphin Bay. Some these  – like Promenade and Dolphin Bay – offer hints at to what might be found on dismounting the trams. Others, such as Winkle and Wobbly Knot might sound like contrived names, but when it comes to village names here in England, do remember we have places like Nether Wallop (Hampshire), Matching Tye (Essex), Blubberhouses (North Yorkshire), and many more, they aren’t that out of place as local names with an English bent!

Dreamshire, October 2021

A complete ride around the tracks of the region takes around 10 minutes if taken without jumping off), and offers a good opportunity to gain visual familiarity with the setting, which in places is rather eclectic in its mix. Dragonspire, for example, not only evokes thoughts of the stories by James E. Wisher, it actually includes both dragons and a fantasy castle (with rooms to explore).

Similarly, the south-western corner of the setting offers an interesting mix of very Victorian steam boat drawn up alongside the stone wharf that sits between Wobbly Knot and the Promenade, with a very 1950’s American style diner sitting at the far end of the latter, the two providing an interesting mix of times within easy reach of one another. In addition, Wobbly Knot offers a nice walk out to the gardens and tower of one of the two lighthouses that watch over the region’s western coastline.

Dreamshire, October 2021

The stop at Dolphin Bay provides access to the beach on one side, sitting below the tall finger of the second lighthouse, and the animal sanctuary and bay on the other. The latter offers the chance to sea a range of waterfowl and and wildlife, but I confess that – not being overly fond of the modern take on Halloween – I found the seasonal elements there a little too OOT, resulting in the use of the Derender option in the viewer when taking photos.

Across the far side of the animal sanctuary grounds, and tucked under the east hills is a small train yard and shed. Here can be found a couple of “traditional” narrow-gauge trains (one a scratch build by Nimoui) and information boards on narrow gauge railways and trams. A short walk from Winkle Station (and the landing point), it might nevertheless be easily missed, but is well worth visiting. And talking of the eastern hills, do please be aware that these are the home of two private residences – one clearly visible, the other cunningly hidden but the path to it clearly signed as private, so do please respect people’s personal space, as either one may be in use.

Dreamshire, October 2021

Gently charming, with touches of whimsy, Dreamshire makes for an engaging visit And should you prefer not to walk, a choice of bicycle or (for couples with the right penchant!) a pony cart is available to ride around the village and outlying paths and roads.

SLurl Details

Dreamshire (Midnight stars (rated Moderate)

2021 SUG meeting week #40 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Adored – For Bambi, June 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 5th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and the video is embedded at the end of this summary. Note this summary focuses on the key points of the meeting; where there is something to report, the video should be referred to should full details of the meeting wish to be reviewed.

Server Deployments

There are no planned deployments or restarts this week, due to the rolling restarts made on Friday, October 1st to correct an expiration issue related to Let’s Encrypt certificates that resulted in failures for in-world scripts making HTTP calls to websites secured with a Let’s Encrypt certificates.

SL Viewer

There have been no updates to the current crop on official viewers to mark the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

  • Release viewer: version version 6.4.22.561752, formerly the CEF Update RC viewer, issued July 24 and promoted August 10.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Apple Notarisation Fix RC viewer, version 6.4.23.564172, issued September 24 – this should remove the warning messages which are currently popping up.
    • Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.4.23.564063, on September 21.
    • Simplified Cache RC viewer, version 6.4.23.562623, dated September 17, issued September 20.
  • Project viewers:
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.4.23.563579, issued September 3.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

In Brief

  • The next maintenance update for the simulator will include a longer read for notecard lines (1024 bytes) that will be retroactive.
  • PRIM_PROJECTOR is a new parameter for llSet/GetPrimitiveParams. Documentation is already on the wiki, but the simulator code isn’t ready to deploy for using testing on Aditi yet.
  • It still has not been indicated when the Land team will flip the switch to ease the issue of some Mainland regions having darken default EEP settings.
  • The simulator engineering team is “finishing up” some retooling, and will be moving on to starting to address performance improvements “in the next few months”.
  • BUG-229205 “Re-enable PRIM_CAST_SHADOWS” – this has been seeing some discussion within the Lab, but no inform as to when it might be actioned.
  • An interesting question was asked about using EEP to create an aurora effect that would be seen across the sky when used. The suggestion is to try using a texture in place of clouds, which would give a degree of motion (but whether this could mimic the “motion” of aurora streams would be interesting).
  • Monday, October 4th saw a log-in update that “caused some issues for Firestorm”. The main fix is in place, but the issues is still being worked on for Aditi (the beta grid).