Day: August 1, 2023

2023 SL SUG meetings week #31 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
NordShore, May 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  August 1st 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.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Server Deployments

  • On Tuesday, August 1st, all simhosts on the the SLS Main channel received the “Summer Blues” simulator update, comprising:
    • llGetPrimitiveParams will be able to identify animesh.
    •  The estate ban limit gets raised to 750, and the number of estate managers to 20, Not that the viewer-side changes to access these updates can be found in the Maintenance U(pbeat) RC viewer, listed in the Viewers section, below.
    • Two new LSL functions for LSD llLinksetDataDeleteFound and llLinksetDataCountFound.
    • Changes to UUID generation on certain items per my week 26 SUG meeting summary (e.g. textures, notecards, materials (particularly the upcoming PBR Materials)) to reduce the amount of duplication. These changes will not impact  UUIDs for objects rezzed in-world or made by the viewer.
    • Further work to correct some of the friends issues (as seen with BUG-232037 “Avatar Online / Offline Status Not Correctly Updating”). However, how effective these updates might be will not be fully understood until the update has been more widely tested through general use on Agni.
    • The update also included a certificate update for the simulators.
  • On Wednesday, August 2nd, the RC channels should all be restarted without any deployment.

Upcoming Simulator Releases

Simulator release now appear to be getting informal names (hence “Summer Blues”, above). The next up will be:

  • Dog Days – likely to include the unbinding of the Experience KVP database read / write functions from land (users will still require an Experience to access the KVP database), and set to be the next release to be deployed.
  • Bugsmash – currently with QA, and as the name suggests, contains a range of simulator-side bug fixes. It will also see the welcome return of visible RC channel names (now, if only we could see the return of server release notes ahead of the actual deployments).  Some of the fixes in this update comprise:
    • A fix in llRetunObjectsByOwner so that it won’t hit a throttle on large returns, and a fix to estate manage object return.
    • A change to the stack that gets displayed in the case of some script faults, intended to make it a easier to read.
    • A fix for the GroupMemberData cap giving out intermittently incorrect (but still well-formed) responses.
    • A minor fix about abandoned group land not showing correct previous owner.

Viewer Updates

No updates at the start of the week, leaving the current official viewers in the pipeline as:

Note: the alternate viewer page also lists “Win32+MacOS<10.13 – 6.6.12.579987” as an RC viewer. However, the Win 32 + pre-Mac OS 10.13 was promoted to release status on July 5th, and viewer version 6.6.12.579987 points to the Maintenance S viewer, promoted to release status on May 16th.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video for details on the following:

  • There is a general discussion on an exploit of llMapDestination().
  • BUG-234197 – “[PBR] Many duplicate material override messages for same object” – a potential need to throttle / omit scripted materials changes.
  • A further request was made for BUG-225228 “llStopAnimation is stopping all animations on detach instead of only the one specified” to receive LL TLC, together with requests for a series of other bugs and feature requests (such as the ability to click-through objects.
  • A question from Leviathan Linden on whether object inventory names – i.e. the names of items contained in an object – should be opened to allow leading / trailing whitespace. Short answer: “no”; suggestion, if whitespace alone is used in an object name, have the system replace it with the object type (e.g. object, notecard, texture, etc., possibly with a numerical indicator.

 

Note: there will be NO Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, August 8th, as the simulator team will be engaged in an internal meeting at the Lab.

† 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.

Art, AI and Totems in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Third Eye Gallery: Lalie Sorbet – Totem
Totem
tō′təm – noun
An animal, plant, or natural object serving among certain tribal or traditional peoples as the emblem of a clan or family and sometimes revered as its founder, ancestor, or guardian.
A representation of such an object.
A social group having a common affiliation to such an object.

So reads a typical dictionary definition definition for totem, a word believed to have entered the English language in the 18th century courtesy of the Ojibwe people, indigenous to the Subarctic and north-western woodlands of the North American continent. It is a term which perhaps most readily brings to mind the totem pole, although this is only one form a totem can take. It is also the one given by Lalie Sorbet to her latest exhibition of art, which opened at the Third Eye Gallery curated by Jaz (Jessamine2108) on July 29th, 2023.

Totem offers 16 AI generated, animated pieces representing plant totems intended not as emblems of a specific clan or family or ancestor, but in recognition of Nature itself – the greatest guardian for life and beauty there is on Earth.

Third Eye Gallery: Lalie Sorbet – Totem

Each of the pieces has been generated through the use of the Midjourney AI software, using a phrase or comment by Lalie, to produce images of leaves and flowers in exquisite close-up detail (thus mirroring Lalie’s equally captivating physical world macro photography). These images are then layered onto “blocks”, each with two faces (both facing the observer) each bearing an image, animated via script to move gently in opposition to one another to give the finished piece a sense of three-dimensional depth and life.

These are incredibly beautiful pieces, large in size, caught as if by a light breeze, their colours and brightness shifting in response to SL’s ambient lighting – make sure you are using the Shared Environment when visiting (World → Environment → Use Shared Environment) when visiting. They are rendered (presumably by considered post-processing by Lalie) to offer unique pieces, captivating in their presentation and potentially layered in their possible interpretation.

Third Eye Gallery: Lalie Sorbet – Totem

Take the pieces showing leaves for example. These have generally been rendered to present the lamina in a gossamer lightness, allowing major and minor veins to come to the fore, sometimes in a feather-like beauty, as they flow outwards from midrib to margins, gorgeously emphasising the life flowing through them.

In doing so, they reveal the marvellous complexity and elegance of nature’s design inherent in a leaf which otherwise tends to pass us by unseen. At the same time, the detail brought forth within each of these images echo other life-giving marvels of nature; the veins fanning outwards from the midrib, for example, are like the many outflow channels crossing the delta of a river, turning the wetlands between them into richly diverse living ecosystems.

Similarly, the pieces featuring flowers bloom not only present stunning studies which bring home the beauty and complexity of such blooms petals, stamen, stigma, anther, filament et al, their macro presentation reminds us, perhaps of both the interconnectedness of life on Earth through the simple, yet complex dance of pollination, and that it is also delicate and fragile; that if we do not learn to be better stewards of the world around us, to become better guardians of our planet, then its beauty, its very essence of life, will be all too fleeting.

Third Eye Gallery: Lalie Sorbet – Totem

I would have perhaps liked to have seen the terms Lalie used in initially used to generate each of the images through Midjourney displayed with each piece. However, this is a personal point of view and it does not diminish in any way from what is an engaging exihibition of AI art.

SLurl Details