October 2022 – Page 9 – Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

Karma’s Little World in Second Life

Posted on October 5, 2022February 3, 2024 by Inara Pey

Currently open at Terrygold Art Gallery (TAG), operated and curated by Terrygold, is My Little World, an exhibition by Karma Daxeline (Karma Weymann).

Located within an environment recognisably put together by Terrygold, and which is itself expressively minimalist and softly reflective of the exhibition’s title, give the sense of moving through a unique world, this is a selection of 20 avatar studies by Karma which might be said to offer a journey through her life within Second Life and a reflection of her love of photography (an additional frame within the exhibition offers the opportunity to view further pieces of Karma’s art).

Each picture offers a vignette; a single-frame story focused on Karma’s avatar. However, these are not your typical avatar-centric stories. Karma has a natural gift for presenting scenes and settings that are at once minimalist in feel and look, yet deeply expressive of mood; that are characteristically atypical of the normal avatar studies so frequently seen, and all the more richer in content and tone for it; and which offer seemingly ordinary activities laced with the more extraordinary sense of humanity, life and – in some – sensuality – which all again reach far beyond the more usual focus of avatar expressiveness.

Utilising considered angles, focus and cropping, together with a very real understanding of the power of colour mix or monochrome scale, lighting, and use of shadow, all combined with a lightness of post-processing touch, the twenty images resent within My Little World are among the most richly expressive I’ve seen within Second Life, both in terms of the narrative each contains and for the way the pieces individually offer subtle counterpoints of style and idea within them.

In this, Karma’s art is marvellously supported by the environment Terrygold has provided: the islands of green and autumnal browns, floating as they appear to do within a night sky, suggest moments in time and life, just as do Karma’s surrounding images. And by sitting with those parts of the environment where seating is provided, we can indirectly become a part of Karma’s little world.

When visiting, do make sure you have Advanced Lighting Model enabled (Preference Graphics check Advanced lights Model), and use the teleport disk from the landing point to reach the exhibition space.

SLurl Details

Terrygold Art Gallery (Peaceful land, rated Adult)

Premium Plus gains Speedlight benefits & some thoughts

Posted on October 5, 2022November 19, 2022 by Inara Pey

On Tuesday, October 4th, Linden Lab announced that Premium Plus members can now leverage the Speedlight client as a part of their Plus benefits.

For those un familiar with Speedlight, it is a client specifically designed for use within browsers and on suitable Android and iOS devices, one I have covered in these pages – although admittedly, not the more recent updates.

Since its inception, SpeedLight has steadily increased the capabilities it offers such that it now includes (but is not limited to) chat, IM, Group chat, inventory management, friends list functions, search options, the ability to switch between devices (on SpeedLight) without having to re-log – and basic 3D world view rendering with avatar movement capabilities. A full list of available features and capabilities is available here.

The core product is offered free-of-charge, albeit it with some limitations (log-in time is limited & requires re-logging every 6 hours). However, there is also a dedicated subscription option called Gold (and quite distinct from the Lab’s Premium Plus), which in turn can be tiered through associated Patreon options to offer additional benefits,

The benefits offered to Premium Plus subscribers have been placed between the existing Free and Gold options offered directly by the SpeedLight team, and are summarised within the Lab’s announcement as:

Unlimited online time at SpeedLight.
Access to Speedlight’s Advanced 3D World view [the cutting-edge element of Speedlight’s 3D rendering capabilities, offering options and abilities first, some of which may (or may not) eventually filter down to Free accounts].
Prioritised support (tickets and live chat).

*SpeedLight is now available to Second Life Premium Plus subscribers with special options. Image via Speedlight*

Given the frequent calls for the Lab to supply a mobile option for accessing Second Life – particularly since the stagnation of Android-based Lumiya -, and with its multi-platform reach, list of capabilities and a basic world rendering capability, Speedlight does have a lot to offer.

However, I would be remiss if I did not mention the graphics used in the Lab’s announcement. Placing a full-feature in-world image of Second Life on both a laptop and mobile device screen might lead to misguided expectations among some (e.g. users relatively new to SL) that SpeedLight offers the same graphics fidelity as an actual viewer; something the SpeedLight team would be the first to acknowledge is not the case. So perhaps a footnote stating the images are not from SpeedLight might be in order to avoid this and accusations of misrepresentation?

That aside, this is an interesting turn in Premium Plus subscription benefits. Not so much the SpeedLight offer itself, but rather if the move might signal a start of other “partnership benefits” for Plus subscribers – such as with creators / businesses from within SL own ecosystem, or with some of the Lab’s content partners. If this is the case, it’ll be interesting as to what might come next.

2022 SUG meetings week #40 summary

Posted on October 4, 2022September 27, 2024 by Inara Pey

*Wild Branch Brewing Co, August 2022 – blog post*

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 4th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Server Deployments

At the time of writing, there was no published deployment plan for the week.

On Tuesday, October 4th, the Main SLS channel were restarted with no deployment, leaving them on simulator release 574921.
On Wednesday, October 5th, the simhosts on the RC channels should receive simulator release 575421, which did not have an release notes available at the time of writing
- This is the release from week #39, which was ultimately postponed as a result of an 11th hour bug showing up in QA testing.
- These release should contain two new functions llGetObjectLinkKey (specified under llGetLinkKey) and llSHA256String.

Available Official Viewers

The Performance Floater / Auto-FPS project viewer updated to version 6.6.5.575378, on October 4th.

The rest of the current crop of official viewers remains as:

Release viewer: version 6.6.4.575022 – hotfix for Crash at ~LLModalDialog() – promoted September 15 – no change.
Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
- Maintenance 3 RC viewer, version 6.6.5.575257, September 23.
- Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.5.575055 September 19.
Project viewers:
- Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.574545, issued on August 30.
- Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.

Experience KVP Change

Rider Linden offered a heads-up on a forthcoming change to Experience Key Value Pairs (KVP), which can be used to store large amounts of data related to an experience in-world, and make them accessible anywhere, any time, within the experience. Rider described the changes thus:

We are doing some work on the Experience KVP. The new tech that we are using doesn’t let us easily monitor the number of bytes that have been used be any particular experience. SO the proposal that is on the table is that we change the limit to a number of keys [and]:

- A field would be tacked on to the end of llCountKeysKeyValue() that would be the allotted number of keys.
- llDataSizeKeyValue would be changed to return the number_of_keys*4096 (which is the maximum size of the value that a key can store.

– Rider Linden

This sparked a discussion, and those who use experiences – or use the KVP table in an experience for any form of data storage, should refer to the video [29:21-end] in order to gain the full context of the proposed change and the discussion.

In Brief

BUG-232037 – “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating” has been a bone of contention for many for the last few months, Commenting on the issue, Rider linden there are at least a couple of points in back-end communications where the problem might occur, but it will take time to properly diagnose.
Viewer-side: as noted in recent TPV Developer meeting summaries, there is a lot of work going on on the viewer build side of things (move to github for repositories, tool and library updates, etc. Whilst not strictly a part of the SUG meeting, Signal Linden wanted to get a couple of points out for viewer devs to note. One of these points relates to 3rd party code contributions to LL, the other on a library location under the new github structure:

So, some minor early notes wrt to opensource development. We are reviewing our contributor license agreement (CLA) and the process for collecting signatures. Ideally, I’d like for the CLA to be able to be signed in PRs on github. This will take some work with legal, and I don’t have anything definitive yet 🙂

Also, if you are not on the opensource-dev mailing list, the llsd python serialization library has been moved to its own repository; https://github.com/secondlife/python-llsd We are also starting to finally get the PyPI packages updated for autobuild.

– Signal Linden

Pumpkins and things with Cica in Second Life

Posted on October 4, 2022October 15, 2024 by Inara Pey

*Cica Ghost, October 2022 – Pumpkins and Things*

So, October has rolled around for 2022 (why do the years seem to speed up the older you get?), and with it, inevitably, comes Halloween and thoughts of ghosts, monsters, hauntings, and more, together with their familiars in the form of pumpkins and black cats, bats and spiders.

It’s a time of year when it is hard to avoid such things in Second Life, where the Americanisation of Halloween has very deep roots. Call me a humbug or grumpy so-and-so, but by-and-large I tend to find all that goes on around October 31st largely a bit tiresome and repetitive – although there are exceptions that get me to park my case of grumps at the door and go with the flow – such as the Calas Halloween build (which will be popping up in these pages very soon) and, for 2022 Cica Ghost’s Pumpkins and Things.

Just as with Cica’s September installation of Pink Fairytale took a light-hearted look at fairy tales and childhood stories (see: Cica’s Pink Fairytale in Second Life), so Pumpkins and Things offers an easy-going look at the Halloween period, and the aforementioned creatures, witches and so on – albeit with a little warning from the Master of Macabre himself, Edgar Allen Poe.

Caught under a pumpkins sky (do make sure your viewer is set to Use Shared Environment, this is a setting where black flowers offer toothy, maniacal grins, and large worms slither (some with very human-like arms, hands and faces) as they tower over a landscape of twig-like trees, pumpkin flowers, large pumpkin houses, a blocky little town and the toothy flowers – some of which resemble spiders sitting on sticks, whilst Cica’s black cats are to be found throughout (together with some of Cica’s trademark sit points and dances!).

Again, like Pink Fairytale, this is an installation to be seen and enjoyed, rather than described or shown in still shots. Monsters they may be, but it’s hard to believe any of the characters sitting within Pumpkins and Things would actually do anyone any harm – hence, perhaps the little warning from Mr. Poe, as used by Cica for the installation:

Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see

Used in a short story by Poe in 1845, the quote became very closely associated with the California gold rush at the end of the 1840s, when it stood as a admonishment against believe everything said or written about concerning the ease with which the gold rush lead to riches. Here, as well as possibly underlining the idea that for all their looks and teeth and strangest, the characters in Pumpkins and Things really mean no harm, the words might be taken as a little poke to remind us that no-one should really take the Halloween period too seriously, and simply have fun!