Day: April 21, 2023

Fantasy Faire 2023: previewing the LitFest and FilmFest

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Stump Theatre , Fungalmire – home of the Fantasy Faire 2023 LitFest and FilmFest

Fantasy Faire 2023 is now open, and with it comes the Fantasy Faire Literary Festival (LitFest), now in its ninth year, and the Fantasy Faire Film Festival (FilmFest), returning for its third year at the Faire.

The LitFest

Centred on the Stump Theatre in Fungalmire the LitFest is a special place where the magic of the spoken word will weave tales of wonder, relate stories of great adventure and daring; where talks by authors, discussions, creative writing sessions and performances will all take place. In addition, literary hawks and writers will be encouraged to join daily LitFest tours of the Fairelands and afterwards compose pieces related to their travels.

This year, our theme is anthropomorphic fiction – that is, fiction in which animals displaying decidedly human traits form an important part of the narrative. Think of the likes of Aesop’s Fables or legends out of Africa and the orient, or the retelling of Hamlet through the likes of The Lion King, to evergreen favourites like The Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh and Charlotte’s Web.

Guest Of Honour

Anne Louise Avery

The LitFest 2023 Guest of Honour is Anne Louise Avery, author of Reynard the Fox, the beautiful novel that draws upon medieval sources. Anne also creates Twitter vignettes that tell stories of a world where animal and humans live together.

Born in London to bohemian parents – her mother was a novelist and her father a journalist who worked with Ian Fleming and Graham Greene in Naval intelligence during the War – Avery received a First Class degree in art history at the School of African Studies (SOAS), University of London, one of the world’s leading institutions for the study of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She then held a fellowship at Brown, and studied Japanese at the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, before becoming an art historian and writer.

In 2020, she published Reynaud the Fox, which takes William Caxton’s bestselling 1481 English translation of the Middle Dutch tale of a subversive, dashing, anarchic, aristocratic, witty fox from medieval East Flanders and weaves a new interpretation of the story, complete with innovative language and characterisation and themes of protest, resistance and duplicity fronted by a personable, anti-heroic fox making his way in a dangerous and cruel world.

Sunday, April 23rd
 11:00 – An interview with Anne Louise Avery

LitFest Fairelands  Tours

The popular Fantasy Faire LitFest Tours will once again be taking place, leaving daily from the LitFest home base in the Drifts of Anamnesis to explore the Fairelands and seeking the stories they have to tell as well as their special secret places and details. Stories can also be submitted for publication on the Fantasy Faire website, provided they are submitted within two days of each tour.

The Tours depart daily from Fungalmire, and at the time of writing, the tour schedule is as follows (all times SLT):

Fri. April 21
 17:00 – Safe Haven Sat. April 22 13:00- Spirits Crossing
17:00 – Fairelands Junction
Sun. April 23 13:00 – Sialdor
17:00 – Frostweald		 Mon. April 24 17:00 – Dingir
Tue. April 25 13:00 –Giraphoria and Sambeaubee
17:00 – Sipala		 Wed. April 26 13:00 – Nysaris
Thur. April 27 13:00 – Giggenwhirl
17:00 – Fungalmire		 Fri. April 28 13:00 – Khumbala
Sat. April 29 17:00 – Winding Valley Sun. April 30 17:00 – Isles of Aquarius
Mon. May 1st 17:00 – Flambois Tue. May 2 13:00 – Syzstrum Synod
17:00 – Glimmering Meadows
Wed. May 3 17:00 – WooHoo! Bay Thur. May 4 13:00 – Nova Nadiya
17:00 – The Shimmering Fen
Fri. May 5 17:00 – Opera

The FilmFest

The Film Festival is returning for its third year at Fantasy Faire. Events will include: talks, discussions and retrospectives of the works of different machinimatographers, three film premieres, including the premiere of the third episode of the ongoing series, Harland Quinn and the Omega Hex. And don’t worry if you missed Episodes 1 or 2 – these will also be shown.

The Film Competition

2023 will see the second edition of the Fantasy Faire Film Festival Competition, complete with awarding of the Wafflies!

Open to all, the competition is based in the Fairelands, and comprises three categories, with the winner in each will receive a golden Wafflie statue.

Category 1 – 5-minute  fiction   Tell a narrative story, set in the Fairelands
Category 2 – 5-minutes factual This could be a documentary, a tour of a region, a special Faireland event and – if the creator is willing – perhaps a short interview.
Category 3 – 10-minute Livestream
 Either edit a ten minute sequence from the livestream, or give a timeframe of 10 minutes from the longer livestream.

The LitFest and FilmFest Calendar

The calendar blow lists all of the LitFest and FilmFest events – click on any link for more details.

LitFest and Film Festival Highlights

All times below SLT.

Weekdays April 21-May 5
 06:30 LitFest The Milkwood Dash – a chance for you to spend 15 minutes writing your own prose or poetry based on a writer’s prompt, and then share what you have created with your fellow authors.
Friday April 21 11:00 FilmFest Chantal Harvey and Saffia Widdershins explain what will be happening at the FilmFest
Sunday, April 23
 11:00 LitFest An interview with Anne Louise Avery at the Stump Theatre, Fungalmire.
Tuesday, April 25 11:00 FilmFest An interview with Pryda: discussing her machinima work, some of which – the Future Shock series – has been featured in this blog.
Wednesday, April 26 11:00 FilmFest An interview with machinima maker Teal.
Friday, April 28 10:00 FilmFest An interview with Macguyver Mode, followed by the premiere of his new film.
Saturday, April 29 11:00 FilmFest An interview with machinima maker Chantal Harvey.
Saturday, May 6 14:00 FilmFest The Wafflies Awards
Saturday, May 6 17:00 LitFest The Mythos of the Fairelands- Zander Greene and Aoife Lorefield are in conversation about the Mythos the underlies the Fairelands.

Additional Links

2023 week #16: SL CCUG meeting summary (abbreviated)

Posted on by Inara Pey
OCWA Experience The Ocean, February 2023  – blog post†

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, April 20th, 2023 at 13:00 SLT. 

These meetings are for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current work, upcoming work, and requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work. They are usually chaired by Vir Linden, and dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.

Notes:

  • These meetings are conducted in mixed voice and text chat. Participants can use either to make comments / ask or respond to comments, but note that you will need Voice to be enabled to hear responses and comments from the Linden reps and other using it. If you have issues with hearing or following the voice discussions, please inform the Lindens at the meeting.
  • The following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting, and is not intended to be a full transcript of all points raised.

Additional note: unfortunately, my audio recording died whilst saving to disk, leaving me with just the first 10 minutes of audio from the meeting available for playback / summary. Given responses to questions in text are supplied in Voice, it is impossible to provide any reasonable summary beyond the point at which the recording save failed, so this is therefore a very foreshortened report, and not representative of the entire meeting.

Official Viewer Status

The Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version  6.6.11.579629 on April 20th.

The rest of the official viewers remain as:

  • Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance T(ranslation) RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
    • Maintenance S, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
  • Project viewers:
    • The PBR Materials / reflection probes project viewer, version 7.0.0.579401, April 10th.
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

The Performance Floater / Auto FPS viewer looks set to become the next viewer to be promoted to de facto release status in the coming week.

glTF Materials and Reflection Probes

Project Summary

  • To provide support for PBR materials using the core glTF 2.0 specification Section 3.9 and using mikkTSpace tangents, including the ability to have PBR Materials assets which can be applied to surfaces and also traded / sold.
  • To provide support for reflection probes and cubemap reflections.
  • The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • In the near-term, glTF materials assets are materials scenes that don’t have any nodes / geometry, they only have the materials array, and there is only one material in that array.
    • It is currently to early to state how this might change when glTF support is expanded to include entire objects.
  • The project viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page, but will only work on the following regions on Aditi (the Beta grid):  Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
  • Please also see previous CCUG meeting summaries for further background on this project.

Status

  • Viewer:
    • The viewer is now very close to being promoted to Release Candidate status. Issues within the viewer build farm prevented it from getting fully cleared by QA, who are currently taking one more look at it.
    • It is believed that all the significant showstoppers thus far found have been dealt with (although more may show up as a result of it becoming available to a wider audience in RC).
    • The above should include the issue of objects in the camera’s view failing to render unless occlusion culling is disabled and the issues of some mesh items “exploding in the the viewer’s viewer both being fixed.
    • Ton mapping has been updated so there is no longer the ability to change / turn off tone mapping. This has been done in the name of “trying to keep things consistent” with older contents that has tone mapping built-in. This does lead to a few edge cases (such as not being able to get totally pitch black environments), but also fixes some issues around general exposure (e.g. preventing full bright objects changing brightness depending on camera distance).
    • It is likely that the work on exposures will eventually be fed into the snapshot tool, so photographers can adjust the exposure settings for them pictures.
    • There is still a collection of minor issues / bugs still to be resolved – such as getting parity some some of the current sky settings – which will be dealt with in RC as the viewer progresses.
    • Those who do find significant issues in using the viewer in RC are asked to report them via a BUG report ASAP.
  • When the view does go to RC, it is likely the server-side support will be deployed to one (Preflight) or possibly two (Preflight and Snack) small simulator RC channels to allow for testing on Agni (the Main grid). Details of the available regions will be published in my project summaries as and when available.

Future glTF Work

  • There is an internal (to LL) design document in development which is intended to set-out the next steps in the glTF work; however, this is not currently ready for public release.
  • Past indicators have been that it is possible the near-term work for glTF could include planar mirrors (with some controls around their use) and also glTF mesh uploads.

Next Meeting

  • Thursday, May 4th, 2023.

† 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 gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.