Exploring Nederlanse Bergee in Second Life

Nederlanse Bergee, April 2023 – click any image for full size

Held by Aloriana Shadowstar (Aloriana77) and designed Marie Nova, Nederlanse Bergee is a Homestead region currently open to the public and offering, in the words of the About Land description:

A beautiful island, ideal to get away from everything. A place to explore, to discover, to enjoy, to relax.

The region sits as three islands – two relatively large, and the third much smaller. Of the two larger islands, one forms a ribbon running from the south-west corner of the region and around to the north, separated from the second by a narrow channel which broadens into a bay as it and the ribbon island run north and then east. The third, small, island sits to the north-east.

Nederlanse Bergee, April 2023

The ribbon island is home to the region’s landing point. Ruggedly wild, the island offers a mix of temperate and tropical trees, little beaches, and cosy retreats. The latter range from a beachfront coffee house, passing by way of a little retreat and a small café to a parade of coastal shops tucked behind the island’s high northern peaks.

Somewhat incongruously, this island includes a small tram station. Quite where the trams used to run to / from is unclear; however, none seem to have been running for a good while, and the one that is present at the station has long since been converted into a little diner.

Nederlanse Bergee, April 2023

The channel between the two main islands is spanned at a single point by a wood and rope bridge, well towards its southern end. Footpaths on the far side of the bridge in turn lead to a gazebo sitting on a small promontory in the south-east corner of the region or to a second  little parade of shops which have, perhaps, more of a European lean to them compared to those in the north, which have a holiday island feel to them.

Dominated by a large flat-topped hill, this second island is also home to numerous places where visitors might spend time. These range from an outdoor gathering place that looks like it might be the home of the poetry reading events periodically held in the region (at the time of writing, the next is scheduled for April 28th), through to a coastal holiday home, the aforementioned gazebo and, within the northern bay, a little wharf against which a little boat with Bimini raised sits.

Nederlanse Bergee, April 2023

The smallest of the island might be tucked in close to the ribbon island, but, save for flying, appears to be the hardest to reach; none of the boats scattered around the region appear to be available for use by visitors, and the channels separating the little island from the others are deep. However, it offers a quite retreat in and of itself, with a summer house, wild flowers and a hammock under the shade of trees.

When seen under its default environment settings, Nederlanse Bergee has some of a painting’s look and feel about it; something that increases the Dutch tone evoked by the region’s name. However, the setting also lends itself to a wide range of EEP setting for those who are so inclined to experiment; for once, I stayed with the local EEP for the photos here.

Nederlanse Bergee, April 2023

Restful, a touch romantic and very photogenic, Nederlanse Bergee makes for a gentle, easy-going visit. My thanks to Shawn Shakespeare for the pointer!

SLurl Details

2023 SL SUG meetings week #16 summary

Burrow Wood County, February 2023 – blog post† 

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  April 18th 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

  • On Tuesday, April 18th, the SLS Main channel servers were updated with simulator release 579248, previously deployed to the RC channels. This means the doubling of linkset data memory (to 128KB) and the three LSL functions for strided list management – llList2ListSlice(), llSortListStrided(), and llListFindListStrided() – are now grid-wide.
  • On Wednesday, April 19th, simhosts on the RC channels will be restarted, but there will not be any new deployments to them.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

  • It is still hoped to get the server-side support for PBR materials to at least one RC channel – Preflight, with the potential it might also go to Snack as well – but there was no ETA on this at the time of the meeting. Currently, it remains with LL’s QA team.

Viewer Updates

No official viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

  • Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • Maintenance T RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
    • Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version 6.6.11.579238, April 4th.
    • Maintenance S RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
  • Project viewers:
    • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.579401, April 10 – This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

In Brief

  • llGetAgentInfo received a new flag – AGENT_AUTOMATED – in week #15, however, the simulator side has et to be released; it is currently in a maintenance simulator support which may go to QA for testing in week #17.
    • This raised concerns of whether or not llGetAgentInfo was the right place for this flag, and whether it could result in the dataserver being spammed with requests from people wanting to know if visitors to their land were avatars or scripted agents. However, as Rider Linden pointed out, the simulator already has information on scripted agent, so there is no requirement for the simulator to query the dataserver.
    • See the video for the broader discussion on when the flag for a scripted agent is propagated across the grid.
  • There was a general discussion on possible LSL enhancements. This included:
    • Possible improvements to notecard handling by LSL (e.g. searching notecards – e.g. BUG-4906 -, faster notecard reading, a safe means of sending back the contents of a notecard so a script doesn’t need to build a web page on the fly / read the entire contents of the notecard into memory).
    • HTTP response expansion.
  • Objects rezzing objects: it has been noted that if an object is set to rez other objects (e.g. say a “crate dispenser” which might be used as a visual enhancement to Get The Freight Out to simulate cargo loading), the rezzing tends to work perfectly when the rezzing object’s owner is present, but can experience issues when the owner is not present.
    • This tends to occur if rezzing within the land is restricted to Group membership, and object owner did not correctly set their active group prior to placing out the rezzing object.
    • As the owner’s group is checked when present, this allows the rezzer to work correctly, hence why the problem only surfaces when they are absent.
  • For all other discussions, please refer to the view below.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.