A rendering of the Chinese Tiangong space station as it appeared immediately following the Mengtian science module’s arrival. From left to right: The Mengtian module attached to the axial port of the Tinahe-1 docking hub; Centre: the Wengtian science module attached to the starboard port of the hub. Centre right: the Tianhe-1 core module with the Tianzhou 4 resupply vehicle docked against its after port. Just visible and extending away from the nadir port of the docking hub, centre, is the Shenzhou 14 crew vehicle. Credit: CMSA
China has completed all major construction activities with its Tiangong space station following the arrival of the ~20 tonne Mengtian laboratory module at the station. Launched at 07:37 UTC on Monday, 31st October, 2022, the module arrived at the space station 13 hours later, completing an automated docking with the axial port on the station’s docking hub, the docking overseen by the current crew on three on the station – Chen Dong, Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe.
Following this, on November 3rd, ground personnel used the docking manipulator on the module to literally grapple itself around to the hub’s portside docking ring. once a hard dock and pressurisation of the inter-module area had been confirmed, the hatches were undogged and the crew entered the module to commence preparing it for operations.
Next up for the station is the flight of the Tianzhou 5 automated resupply vehicle, due to launch on a Long March 7 rocket on November 12th. This will deliver additional supplies to the station ahead of the handover of the station from the Tianzhou 14 crew to the Tianzhou 15 crew, which is due to take place before the end of 2022.
A rendering of Tiangong as it now appears: to the left, and “pointing towards Earth” is the Wengtian science module; Shenzhou 14 can be seen docked at the nadir port on the docking hub, and Mengtian is in the foreground, forming the station’s T-bar with Wengtian. Extending back from the docking hub is the Tianhe-1 core module and the Tianazhou 4 resupply vehicle. Credit: CMSA
This was not the end of the story for this launch however; on Friday, November 4th, the core stage of the Long March 5B rocket made an uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere. As I noted in my previous Space Sunday update, China has cavalier attitude towards large parts of its Long March core stages surviving re-entry to potentially fall on a populated area. In this case, the final track of the booster core saw it passing over numerous population centres in southern Europe and the Middle East, including Lisbon in Portugal, Barcelona and Madrid in Spain, Marseille in France, and Rome in Italy. As a result, emergency services were on alert, and an air safety notice was issued, closing EU airspace along the track of booster against the risk of smaller debris striking airliners and cargo aircraft.
Tracked by the US Space Force and EU Space Surveillance and Tracking (EUSST), the booster eventually re-entered the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, the remnants falling into the seas there without incident. The re-entry of this vehicle means the core stages of the Long March 5B account for 4 of the six largest objects making uncontrolled re-entries; only the U.S Skylab (1979; ~77 tonnes) and the Soviet Union’s Salyut 7 (1991; ~40 tonnes), are the only higher mass events.
Artemis 1 Back on the Pad; Artemis 4 Regains Lunar Landing
NASA’s Artemis 1 mission, featuring the first launch of the space agency’s massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket has returned to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Centre.
The vehicle, which is due to launch an uncrewed Orion vehicle to cislunar space, has seen numerous issues and delays in making its maiden flight, and was most recently held-up by the arrival of hurricane / tropical storm Ian in late September. The roll-out to Launch Complex 39B on November 4th marked the fourth (and hopefully last) trip back to the pad, departing the Vehicle Assembly Building at 04:00 UTC, and reaching the pad 8.5 hours later. Following arrival, work immediately began integrating the mobile launch platform on which the vehicle sits into the the pad systems in readiness for the next launch attempt.
A unique fisheye lens view of the Artemis 1 mission SLS vehicle moving out of the Vehicle Assembly Building, Kennedy Space Centre, at the start of its fourth journey to Pad 39B, November 4th, 2022. Credit: Joel Kowsky / NASA
If all goes according to plan, the rocket will lift-off on Monday, November 14th, at the start of an extended 39-day mission which will see the Orion vehicle and its service module spend some 15-16 days in a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) around the Moon before returning to Earth, with the uncrewed capsule splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. Providing no significant issues are encountered, the mission will pave the way for a second such flight in 2024/25- Artemis 2 – carrying a crew. Then in 2027, Artemis 3 should undertake the first crewed landing on the Moon since the Apollo missions of the late 1960s / early 1970s.
in addition, NASA announced that Artemis 4 – the third crewed flight of an SLS vehicle to the vicinity of the Moon – will now include a lunar landing, marking a reversal to plans announced earlier in 2022. Under those plans, Artemis 4 was going to be a mission focused solely on the construction of the new Lunar Gateway station, due to be placed in a cislunar halo orbit in support of lunar landings. This was to allow time for NASA to switch away from using the SpaceX Starship-derived lander vehicle of Artemis 3 with lander craft to be supplied under the Sustaining Lunar Development (SLD) programme.
Artemis 4 was to have focused on the assembly of the Lunar Gateway space station. However, it will now also include a lunar landing. Credit: NASA
However, NASA also has a so-called “Option B” in its contract with SpaceX that specifies the latter to develop and supply – funded by NASA – an enhanced version of the Starship lander, and it is believed that this option has now been exercised to enable a crew landing on the Moon with Artemis 4, which will still use the upgraded Block 1B version of SLS to deliver a crewed Orion vehicle and the Gateway station’s habitation module to lunar orbit in 2027.
In the meantime, Dynetics, one of the two contenders for the original Human Landing System (HLS) contract, has indicated it may well pursue the SLD contract, whilst Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman – the three main contractors in the so-called “National Team” and third contender for the original HLS contract – have indicated they will each independently pursue SLD contracts, with Lockheed Martin examining the use of nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) in it vehicle architecture, seeing NTP as a key element for future human exploration of Mars.
Starliner Will Not Fly to ISS Until 2023
The first crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner to the International Space Station (ISS) has been further delayed to April 2023. However, the delay this time is not due to technical issues with vehicle, but rather to “deconflict” multiple planned arrivals at the station.
After a series of extended delays, Starliner finally completed an uncrewed flight to the ISS in May 2022, the second attempt at such a flight after software issues with the original December 2019 mission left the vehicle unable to achieve a rendezvous with the station.
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner capsule “Spacecraft 2”, docked at the International Space Station during the uncrewed OFT-2 mission in May 2022. Credit: ESA
Whilst this second uncrewed flight was a success, there were a number of minor issues which meant the hoped-for December 2022 crewed flight to the ISS – called the Crewed Flight Test-1 (CFT-1) – had to be delayed until February 2023. However with a another crewed flight using a SpaceX dragon vehicle and a further resupply mission both due to reach the station in February 2023, the decision has been taken to slip the Boeing flight and reduce the volume of traffic arriving at the ISS in a relatively short time span.
Currently open at the Third Eye Gallery, curated by Jaz (Jessamine2108), is an exhibition of art by Zia Branner entitled EUNOIA, drawing on the ancient Greek word.
Essentially meaning “beautiful thinking, a well mind”, the word’s usage is more complicated than that. Originally, it was applied to the art of oration, and the need for speakers to cultivate a sense of goodwill between themselves and their audiences to encourage a better reception of their ideas and / or viewpoint. However, Aristotle used it to define the foundations for an ethical existence: the kindness and benevolence flowing between spouses. In this, it might be taken to mean approval, sympathy and readiness to help.
Both Isocrates, and (later) Cicero leaned towards a more political usage of the term (eúnoiã, in the case of the latter): as a means to describe an individual’s feelings toward party, or the city-state, and the benevolence in which the city-state or party so hold city-state should bear towards the honest citizens, and allow them their right to hold an opinion. Much more recently, it is used as a means of referencing good mental health and general good disposition.
Third Eye Gallery: Zia Branner EUNOIA
It is in terms of finding that mental balance and our desire / need / want / struggle to achieve it that Zia presents this collection of her art. Presented in her familiar mix of abstract and impressionistic work, these are piece in which – as the artist notes in her introduction to to this exhibition – the ebb and flow of colours (for Zia, red and blue) represent the ebb and flow of our emotions in that drive to try to achieve that sense of equilibrium.
In all lives from time to time it isn’t easy to have a mind in balance. We have our downs, we have our challenges. There is cold, there is warmth. Our strength then lays in our goodwill, in our kindness and with this the balance in our mind and our well being goes up again.
– Zia Branner
There is something faintly ironic in the idea that “balance” is something that should be sought after; the idea that we must strive for it through meditation or study or exercise or whatever so often can lead to frustration or annoyance that the calming balance we desire remains tantalisingly out of reach. Yet through art we can find that balance, be it as the artist or the witness. For the artist, the act of creating art can be a harmonising act; bringing the disparate parts of self together to present a finished work; for the witness, it presents the opportunity to become lost within the flow of a piece of art, to naturally put aside consciousness of self, and thus achieve that inner equilibrium.
Third Eye Gallery: Zia Branner EUNOIAAll of this is present in the 11 images offered in this collection. Whether you see the expressions of mood / emotion in Zia’s red and blue or other colours or whether to see the expression of a coastal scene or of a daydream matters not; these are pictures in which it is easy to lose oneself in the flow of colour or the contrast of hard and soft line – and in doing so, perhaps find a balance of thought for yourself.
Come Write In, November 2022 – click any image for full size
November is a notable month for many reasons; however, for budding (and some established) writers, it is National Novel Writing Month (often shortened to NaNoWriMo) – a 30-day challenge to write a novel of at least 50,000 words. The brainchild of San Francisco freelance writer Chris Baty, the project was actually first held in July 1999, but moved to November in 2000 to take advantage of the “miserable weather”.
During its first year, the project saw 21 people take part. In 2000, 140 participated, and the project gained the attention of US national press and also bloggers such that by 2001, the numbers taking part had grown to 5,000; and things snowballed from there. By 2005, the project had been registered as a non-profit organisation in the US and had gained international status with budding writers the world over participating annually.
Come Write In, November 2022
I mention this because Kestrel Evergarden has established Come Write In – a Writer’s Retreat, a place where Second Life writers can visit, relax, hone their writing skills and develop their NaNoWriMo entry – or simply write for their own pleasure or talk writing. Occupying a cosy parcel on the north side of Heterocera, Come Write In offers numerous points of retreat, indoors and out, where writers might relax in-world and listen to the voice of their muse.
The home of a small, but growing community of writers – visitors are welcome to join the local Come Write In (CWI) group – the setting offers, in the words of its Destination Guide entry:
Private tents and communal space, games to unwind with, and an inspiring setting beautifully landscaped to call for your Muse … CWI offers prompts, resources, and more to help you reach that 50k in 30 days goal, and more.
Come Write In, November 2022
Nor is this purely a Second Life only adventure – Come Write In is an officially recognised NaNoWriMo virtual write-in location, open to writers from outside of SL.
From the roadside landing point, CWI offers a number of indoor spaces (one of which looked to be a new development at the time of my visit) built around a deck and open-air café. Alongside of these sits a terrace space for discussions, a games area with table-top games and a winding path that winds through a landscaped setting visitors and writers alike might explore.
Come Write In, November 2022
This meandering path wanders past a round pond fed by a stream that tumbles its way through the setting, passing under a pair of bridges which bracket the pond, before vanished into a tunnel. The path also offers access to the private tents mentioned in the DG description. These are available for short-term rental (L$50 a week, and provided with their own furnishings. These are offered for the purposes of unwinding and (again) retreats where one might exercise one’s writing muscles – or use as a place to toss around ideas with a close friend or two.
Rich in plants and wildlife, with plenty to see, CWI forms an excellent retreat for both budding writers and for those looking for a quiet, natural retreat.
Are usually chaired by Reed Linden, who is the Lab’s Product Manager for the Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
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 subject timestamps to the relevant points in the video are provided. Again, the following is a summary of key topics / discussions, not a full transcript of everything mentioned.
All of the currently planned updates are complete and are awaiting the opportunity to “turn them all on”. This will likely happen (with an announcement) ahead of US Thanksgiving, 2022.
Some of the noted updates include:
Merchant and store names will no long be searched in product searches.
Searches for exact matches (using quotation marks around search descriptors) has been added.
Wildcard (e.g. using *) will be possible.
The back-end supports fuzzy matching to better handle typos when inputting searches.
There should be a noticeable increase in speed of search results being returned.
Once running, these updates will allow LL to add-in the relevance engine AI to the Marketplace search (as a separate API entity to the relevance engine already running on the web search).
Work will resume on Marketplace Styles (allowing multiple colours, etc., for an item to appear within a single listing rather than each requiring its own listing) as soon as the MP Search updates are officially enabled.
It is hoped this capability will be available towards year-end.
It will obviously be up to merchants as to whether they use it to group variances in a product within a single listing or continue to list them separately – single listings for multiple versions of an item will not be mandatory.
A complete re-write of every route by which users can obtain and hold land, from Premium (+Plus) Linden Homes, obtaining Mainland (incl. Abandoned Land), and private island regions, and renting from private estates.
The first element of the land work to be user-facing will be the new Land Portal, a central hub from which to get to all aspects of land “ownership”.
Overall, this work is not liable to be surfaced much before the end of 2022.
When it does, it should be looked upon as a template / proof of concept for overhauling the rest of the Second Life web properties to give them a coherent appearance; make it easier to maintain existing web portals and pages and to add new ones; make SL’s web presence more performant overall and ensure it works on mobile devices as well as desktops / laptops.
The new subscription option is to be called simply (if possibly confusingly) “Plus”.
This is designed to sit between Basic and Premium.
Its core intent is to unlock the ability to hold land on the Mainland, although it will have a modest stipend associated with it + a small bump in the number of allowed Groups.
Pricing is subject to the formal announcement that Plus is available, which is anticipated as being by the end of November.
It is hoped that once available and given time to determine how it performs / users respond to Plus, that further subscription levels – which may possibly include an “a-la carte” option – can be defined and added to the selection.
Premium Plus (and Premium) to be Renamed in the future?
It was suggested that the new subscription level would be better named “Basic Plus” – something that was not dismissed by Reed as an informal means of referencing it.
However, the Lab is apparently considering single-word names for all current and future subscription offerings, and Reed indicated that if this is the case, then Premium Plus is likely to be renamed at some point in the future, and this renaming might extend to Premium as well.
In Brief
It is hoped that a future Marketplace update will allow store owners to have access to search metrics for their items (e.g. which items are being popularly searched / purchased, etc.). However, this is not part of the Search updates described above.
The web properties updates will likely include improvements to the web version of the World Map. However, what these changes may be & which they might be implemented is very much still TBD.
Web profiles will not be entirely shut down for as long as the profile Feed remains popular with users – this is the one element of Web Profiles that has not been moved back into the viewer (and appears unlikely to do so).
It has been noted that if a user has the Profile Feed set to Private, the new Legacy Profile viewer code shows a broken version of their web profile in the Web tab.
For all other discussion points, please refer to the video below.
Next Meeting
Wednesday, December 7th, 2022. Venue and time per top of this summary.
I found it hard to believe that two years have passed since I last visited an exhibition of Milly Sharple’s fabulous digital art; so when I recently happened across a Landmark to her current gallery, I knew I would have to pay a visit.
For those who may not be familiar with Milly and her work, she is a successful artist and photographer in the physical world. Not only is her art sold on a global basis, it has been used for book and CD cover art, in promotional material, posters for theatrical productions, and even on bank cards. In 2020 she was invited to do a collaboration representing the Covid pandemic with Salvador Dali’s protégé, Louis Markoya.
Milly Sharple – November 2022
Milly joined Second Life in 2008, and established her first gallery the following year. Not content with simply displaying and selling her work in-world, she also established the Timamoon Arts Community, which in its day, hosted over 40 resident artists and was regarded as one of the most successful and popular art communities on the grid before circumstance forced Milly to retire the region on which it was based.
As one of the pioneers in introducing the world of fractal art to Second Life audiences, and while in recent years her work has diversified as she continues to develop and extend her range of artistic expression, fractals have remained an integral part of her creativity. To produce these pieces, she works with Apophysis, and open-source software package which allows her to create soft, flowing, liquid effects that sets her work apart from other, more rigidly geometric fractal art that can also be found displayed within Second Life. It’s an approach that not only acts a a differentiator between her work and other fractal art, it also gives her work a stunningly organic look and feel, rich in life.
Milly Sharple – November 2022
Alongside her fractal pieces, Milly also produces digital portraits that combine her use of organic forms with the human face and body. Flowing with intentionally rich and vivid colour, these pieces have a life that is both connected to, yet utterly separate from, her fractal pieces, containing as they do their own stunning depth of expression. These portraits share the upper floor of the gallery along with pieces that enfold within them elements of abstract expressionism, pure abstractionism and touches of surrealism in a further engaging selection of digital images.
And if this weren’t enough, the gallery offers a rich vein of Milly’s 3D sculptures and pieces. These again fold within them those elements of natural, organic form and multiple artistic genres to offer a rich and engaging select of pieces that work individual and collectively as works suitable for display in one’s own home.
Taken individually or as intentional sets (such as We Didn’t Start the Fire … Or Did We? – a quite marvellous commentary on climate and ecological disasters that can be said to have their roots in our own role in impacting the world’s climate), Milly’s work is always expressive not just visually, but in offering an idea or story.
Milly Sharple – November 2022
Offering the full richness of Milly’s art, a visit to her gallery is a must for anyone interested in either her work or in the potential of Second Life presents to physical world artists to display their work to a global audience.
This capability was deployed to the Main Grid Release Candidate (RC) regions, which account for ~30% of the entire grid, on Wednesday, November 2nd. If all goes well, the capability will be available grid-wide after the deployments of Tuesday, November 8th, 2022. But until the capability is grid-wide, it is important to note that:
The capability will only work on the RC regions where it has been deployed.
If an object containing Linkset Data is moved (physically or via teleport) from a region that supports the capability to a region that does not support it, all Linkset Data stored with the object will be lost, even if you go back to a region that supports the feature.
Therefore, until such time as functionality is deployed to all main grid regions:,
The functionality should be used for testing purposes only.
Products that use it should not be sold or otherwise released until such time as the Linkset Data functionality is grid-wide.
Update, November 15th: LSD functionality is available grid-wide on Agni (the Main grid).
Hello, my name is NeoBokrug Elytis, and I’ve been a creator in Second Life since 2005, with a focus on scripting, project management, and exploring the bleeding-edge features of SL. Today I’m a guest contributor here to tell you all about Second Life’s newest upcoming feature – Linkset Data (LSD).
I’m super excited about it, because I think it will forever change SL similarly in the way that rigged mesh changed avatars; but for scripts.
A Brief History of Scripts
In the early days of Second Life scripted content was crude and simple. All code, custom functions, and stored variables had to fit within 16 kilobytes (kb) – as that was the limit for scripts back then. For comparison, the HTML alone for viewing a single tweet is over 200kb, not including any images.
If you wanted a complex scripted object back then, you needed to add more scripts and use link-messages to communicate between the scripts. Think of it as a scripts-only chat inside an object where they’re listening and reacting to each other. It’s still used quite a bit today.
Back then and still today objects can communicate with each other using chat, typically on hidden channels. Another way objects could communicate was with features such as XML-RPC calls, and object emails. They were a bit clunky, hard to work with due to memory constraints, and required a bit of a hack-y solution to be practically useful.
Eventually Mono was introduced to the simulator to make scripts better. There were a few significant things that made it better than what we had been using. First, was the speed of script execution which was over 200x to 500x faster for math-intensive workloads. Second, mono could do byte code sharing — which means copies of the same script shared the same memory in the simulator; a gigantic advantage for SL. But the biggest gift of this update was that scripts would have 64kb of memory to work with instead of 16kb!
Even after the Mono update, and consolidating lots of tiny scripts into single but bigger and more efficient scripts; scripters in Second Life kept pushing the boundaries of what is possible in-world. Eventually projects became so complex and big, that multiple scripts were needed once again.
Over time more and more features were added to scripting, including a function for making HTTP requests. It allowed objects to have a shared memory on external servers. For example if you sold a game where it kept track of high scores across 100s of copies of the game, you could do that! But it was still an external server, so if there was ever any communication problem, or the server went offline, you had to write more code to gracefully handle those errors.
Fast-forward many years, and Second Life introduced Experience Tools. But the rub of Experience Tools is that you or your customers need to allow your experience on their land. And just to have an experience, you need a premium account. One less commonly known perk is that you can read and write key-value-pairs to a table of data associated with your experience. That table could hold up to a whopping 128 megabytes of data! So if you wanted to keep track of player scores across the grid you could, AND you wouldn’t need your own external 3rd party server. For example your key could be “player_uuid” and its value could be “player_score”. You could store this information with any object that’s on any land that is a part of the experience. Then anywhere else on the grid where the experience is allowed, another object could read or change that data.
Using HTTP and Experience Tools requires a set of connections in a chain of communication in that they both need to contact a server that is not part of the region itself. In my experience HTTP is a bit more fickle than Experience Tools because it has to travel over the greater internet, and you’re less in control of the hops it has to make to get to its destination. That’s not to say Experience Tools hasn’t suffered from SL grid-weather itself; but it still has to travel internally, so once in a blue moon there are a few issues. Not to mention the requirement of a premium account.
The Hacks We’ve Used (and Still Use)
The methods I’ve described so far all are good examples of how persistent data is traditionally stored, or data that doesn’t change after a script reset or crash. And for the most part, that’s been it – except for creative scripters trying to find solutions that don’t involve other servers. I and others have been known to use a lot of little hacks here and there, just so we don’t have to use external servers or experiences.
One of the earliest and possibly most well known methods is to save persistent data in a note card that a user can edit. But reading note cards is quite slow, and you can only read the data; you can’t ever write data to a note card. I know that sounds strange, so here’s a fun fact: Every time you save a note card it creates a new asset on the asset server.
Another option is to have another script just to store data. While it is faster than a note card, it is another script in your project which might just get wiped out if the script is ever deleted, resets, or crashes.
That begs the question; where else can scripters read AND write persistent data in an object? The object description of course! While the length of the data in an object description is limited to only 127 bytes (characters), it’s good for saving simple product configurations and user options. Most big projects in SL use this, including the well known and now Linden Lab owned CasperTech. There are a few more places to save persistent data including invisible hovertext, storing keys on hidden faces of objects, etc., etc. None of which are “private”, and may cause viewers to try to download non-existent textures. That last bit I’m not 100% sure of, but reasonably — it makes sense.
Overall, the hacks folks use only allow small amounts of data, could be slow, might just be an extra script, or might cause some problems here and there.
What IS Linkset Data?
So far everything I’ve described has some sort of gotcha or caveat. What I didn’t mention was that workarounds for all of those caveats typically take a big bite out of your measly 64kb of script memory. Despite a lot of JIRA feature requests to add persistent data storage over the life of SL, nothing has really come of it… until now!
Linkset Data is a new collection of script functions and one optional event that reads and writes key-value-pairs to a small 64kb table of data that is part of a root object. These new functions clear out a ton of hurdles scripters have faced, and solve some long-standing issues that SL scripting has had since the start.
Think of it as an invisible table of information that travels with the object, except that only scripts can read and write key-value-pairs to it. Because this data is now part of the object itself, it doesn’t need to rely on external servers. It also doesn’t add any script time or script memory to the region because it’s not a script. It’s just a small ledger of information the object carries with it.
During the Simulator User Group meeting, it was asked if this data could be protected because some creators like to give out modify objects, but not modify scripts. It took less than a week for the server developers to add llLinksetDataWriteProtected and llLinksetDataReadProtected to the feature set. The way this works is the data is protected by a password. If you try to read, write, or delete it without the password, nothing happens (note: at the time of writing, the protected functions are not listed in the wiki article). It should be noted that the data can still be deleted with llLinkSetDataReset, which purges all the data in the linkset.
You may be asking, “Well what happens if I have two prims with Linkset Data on them, and I link them together?” The Lindens thought of this and here’s what happens:
The new root becomes the new Linkset Data, and all data on other links in the newly formed linkset are checked for duplicate data which is discarded.
Remaining data in child prims is then merged to the Linkset Data until the 64kb limit is reached, where after more data is discarded.
In summary, it imports what it can up to the 64kb limit.
If you boil it down it all sounds real simple, but it’s probably the biggest and most impactful change to scripting in Second Life since HTTP requests were introduced!
How Will It Change Second Life?
Most importantly, Linkset Data is persistent. A script may be deleted, reset, or crash, but it won’t clear out the data. It’ll still be there for whenever a script needs it again.
LSD is better than Experience Tools because it doesn’t require a premium account, and doesn’t require land to allow an experience to run. It’s better than HTTP for certain applications, because there’s not going to be any communication errors in accessing the data. It’s better than note cards and all the little hacks we use now, because it’s crazy fast, and doesn’t require a lot of code to read and write data. In testing, it’s been reported that there can be over 6,000 reads and writes per second to the LSD.
We won’t need little “memory-bank” scripts or note cards to store large swathes of unchanging data. For instance in The Wastelands I have non-player characters NPCs that have dozens of lines of text stored in a script which easily takes up most of a script’s memory; now I can just store all of that as key-value-pair data!
All scripts in the object can access the data stored in the LSD – and the fact that any in the object can, and can modify the data in a linkset is a complete game changer. One of the causes of simulator-side lag is the volume of “Script Events per Second” (“eps”) it has to manage.
To explain: whenever a script has an outside influence that it’s waiting for, it will trigger an event; this can be as simple as hearing chat, being touched, or as complex as getting information from a HTTP request. An object can queue up as many as 64 events before they begin to be discarded. Currently, many objects in SL (vehicles being a good example) relay on link message events: the control scripts in the root of the object which send messages to the scripts in other prims in the object, which have to listen for them; so if the object has 10 links all listening for messages from the root – that’s 10 script events. Using LSD could eliminate those link messages entirely, helping us remove some of the load from the simulator!
If all this script talk seems overwhelming; let me phrase it like this: When Second Life got Windlight skies, it was a big deal. When SL got mesh, it was a bigger deal. When Second Life got rigged avatar mesh, it changed our in-world appearances permanently. This is as big of a deal as that was, but for scripting.
As of now, these new features are testing on the beta grid. They might be on the Release Candidate regions by time this article is published, which means that this new set of features should be on the main Second Life Servers within a couple of weeks, assuming that there are no issues with the project. I’m super excited!
I want to give my profound thanks to all the Linden region/simulator developers. I know those office hour meetings can be hard, but I am grateful you listen to the users. I want to thank Inara and Pantera for dutifully keeping track of all the office hours, and the opportunity to write this article. This all started out as a long tweet thread when I got excited about the feature!
About NeoBokrug Elytis
NeoBokrug Elytis
NeoBokrug Elytis (“Neo” to his friends) has been active in Second Life for 17 years. He has defined his time within Second Life in many ways – as a creator, a region designer, a community builder, a teacher, and an innovator. His passion for the platform has remained constant throughout his time in-world, where he has not only founded (and continues to play a lead role in managing) The Wastelands, the largest post-apocalyptic community in Second Life, he has also provided services to third-party organizations as a recognized Second Life Solution Provider.
This service, offered via his business entity, Desolate Studios, has enabled clients like Brooklyn Law School establish a presence in Second Life, as well as being contracted by the Electric Sheep Company to develop their 2007-2008 multiplayer first-person shooter and role playing game, Survival: I Am Legend, designed as a tie-in to the 2007 Warner Brothers motion picture, I Am Legend, which starred Will Smith.
Today, Neo continues to provide help and support to organizations wishing to establish a presence in Second Life, as well as continuing to help innovate the platform through the submission of considered, well-documented feature requests, many of which have been accepted and implemented by Linden Lab.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 