Day: June 21, 2024

SL21B: your completely unofficial pocket guide to the celebrations

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab

Second Life marks its 2st anniversary in 2024, with a month of activity kicking-off through until Sunday, July 21st. Celebrations will be taking place across the Birthday regions in Second Life, and and with previous years includes live music, DJ sets, art, shopping (via the dedicated Shop and Hop event), exhibits by Linden Lab and – particularly – exhibits by Second Life residents and communities.

The following is intended to provide a general overview of the celebrations and provide calendars, SLurls and anything else that might be useful to you when visiting the regions.

IMPORTANT NOTE: many of the builds at SL21B, particularly the stages, etc. have been built using PBR materials, and the skies are rendered as HDR. Therefore, to see the regions at their best, you should preferably be running a viewer that is “PBR enabled.”

SL21B Welcome Area

Theme

This theme for Second Life’s 21st birthday (SL21B) has been given as Elements, which the Lab describes thus:

This theme invites us to explore the fundamental components that make up our vast virtual landscape and the diverse communities within it. From the fiery passion of creators and artists to the fluid adaptability of our social environments, from the solid bonds within our communities to the fresh breezes of innovation that propel us forward, “Elements” is a celebration of the core forces that shape our experiences in Second Life.

– From the official SL21B announcement blog post

SL Birthday Calendar

The best way the stay abreast of all that’s going on is via the official calendar of events, which I’ve embedded below.

  • Use the Week / Month options, top right to change the calendar view.
  • Click on any given line item on any given day of festivities to view more information, including teleport SLurls.
Stonehold Stage

Key Events

Shop and Hop

The SL21B Shop And Hop event is taking place across 20 regions, and features 400+ creators and merchants. The best way to find out about this event is via the Shop and Hop Destination Guide entry and via the SL21B Shop and Hop Participating Merchants list.

Linden Lab Town Halls and Community Round Table

As per usual, SL21B will feature a series of events featuring various members of the Lab’s Board, management team and advisors. These will be a mix of live and pre-recorded sessions, per the schedule below.

The Aquatorium

Event SLurl: Aquatorium

Day (Times SLT) and Event Featuring
Tuesday June 25th 13:30
Product and Engineering Town Hall		 Senior VP of Product & Engineering Grumpity Linden; Director of Engineering Second Life Server & Viewer Signal Linden; Director of Engineering Web & Platform Kali Linden; Senior Product Manager Sntax Linden; Product Manager Kyle Linden.
Wednesday June 26th 13:30
Product Operations Town Hall		 Senior VP of Product Operations & Marketing Patch Linden; Support Operations Manager Keira Linden; Product Operations Manager Derrick Linden; Creative Producer Izzy Linden.
Thursday June 27th 13:30
Town Hall		 Philip Rosedale, interviewed by Brett Linden.
Friday June 28th 13:30
Town Hall		 Meet the Moles of the Linden Department of Public Works.
Monday, July 1st 11:30
Community Round Table		 Linden Lab Executive Chairman Oberwolf Linden and Senior VP of Product Operations & Marketing Patch Linden.

Entertainment and Performances

Over 500 live performers are lined-up to perform across  four stages at SL21B between Friday, June 21st and July 1st. The complete schedule can be seen below.

The Nimbus Stage

The Welcome Area

Never been to an SLB event before – try starting at the Welcome Area where you’ll find lost of help, things like the SL21B Hunt HUD, and more!

The Tapestry of Time and Gift Area.

First presented in 2018, the region-wide Tapestry of Time presents visitor with a walk-through of Second Life’s history from 2003 through to the present day using images, text and videos. True, not everything has been recorded, but there’s enough within the region to be of interest to the historically minded.

within the Tapestry of Time can be found the SL21B Gift Area, offering gifts from the Birthday exhibitors and from merchants participating in the Shop & Hop event.

Exhibitor Regions

via Linden Lab. Click for exhibitor list

As is common for SLB events, the mix of content is varied, and the representation of interests broad. Role-play groups, arts, communities, are represented across the nine regions open to exhibitors; some are static, others are interactive in nature.

  • Direct links to the exhibitor regions can be found in the SLurls lists at the end of this piece.
  • Information / SLurls for individual exhibitors can be found in the SL21B Exhibitor Showcase.

Note that teleport boards are available at the centre of all Exhibitor regions for easy of moving between them.

Adult Exhibitor Regions And Adult Shop and Hop

2024 sees the Adult content and groups exhibitor regions combined with the Adult Shop and Hop regions and the  Once again, the celebrations include Adult content and groups, with exhibits at the event, with four dedicated regions  – separate to the main exhibitor regions – open to visit. These have a dedicated Teleport Hub sitting kitty-corner admits the four regions, and I’ve also included individual region SLurls at the end of this article.

SL21B Last Names and Physical World Merchandise

To mark the event, Linden name available a special series of SL21B themed last names focused on the theme of “elements”. Also launched to mark the event is a range of SL21B merchandise for the physical world, including t-shirts, baseball caps, tote bags, laptop sleeves, pins, mug note books and more.

sL21B Elements Last Names for Avatars SL21B Physical World Merchandise available via the SL Redbubble Store
  • Cirrus
  • Blowhard
  • Windyfloofs
  • Cinder
  • Hotman
  • Pyroclaw
  • Boulder
  • Soil
  • Pebblepaws
  • Ocean
  • Torrent
  • Frostfangs

These are, as usual available via your secondlife.com dashboard, under the Account drop-down

Advice on a Better Experience

The SL21B regions can get exceptionally busy. To help ease the pain for you:

  • If you have a high draw distance, reduce it to  as low as is comfortable for your enjoyment.
  • Turn off shadows in your viewer if you usually have them enabled.
  • Go to Preferences → Graphics and reduce the slider Max # Non-Imposter Avatars to a minimum and dial-down your Complexity slider.
  • Remove texture-heavy HUDs to free-up more texture memory.
  • To assist the simulator, remove unnecessary scripted attachments.
  • Dress lightly, avoid accessories of high complexity.
Firestone Keep – Adult region music and entertainment stage

SLurls and Destination Guide Links

Core Event Region SLurls

General Rated Exhibitor Region SLurls

SLB Beguile SLB Blissful SLB Breathtaking SLB Captivate SLB Celebrate SLB Delightful
SLB Electrify SLB Enchant SLB Fabulous SLB Glamorous SLB Incredible SLB Marvelous
SLB Outgoing SLB Sparkle SLB Spectacular SLB Stupendous

Adult Rated Regions

Destination Guide and Other Links

2024 week #25: SL CCUG summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Joyful Gardens, June 2024 – 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, June 20th, 2024.

Meeting Purpose

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work. This meeting is held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
  • In regards to meetings:
    • Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.
    • Commence at 13:00 SLT on their respective dates.
    • Are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
    • Are open to all with an interest in content creation.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers Status

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.9.9469671545, June 14.
    • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes) 7.1.8.9130881608, June 10.
  • Project viewers:

WebRTC Voice Update

Not strictly a Content Creation tool / subject, but of import to SL as a whole.

Summary

  • A project intended to replace the Vivox Voice system with the WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”).
  • Will see the removal of the SLplugin.EXE from the viewer, to be replaced with a library wrapper within the viewer.
  • Offers much better and more flexible voice support across platforms, with improved capabilities (e.g. automatic echo cancellation, automatic gain control, better noise cancellation) with better audio sampling / quality.
  • Also opens the door to adding new features and capabilities to SL Voice, some of which have been long-requested.
  • Care is being taking to address potential security issues (e.g. preventing eavesdropping, exposing users’ IP address (by using an internal proxy server), etc.).
  • During the transitional period as WebRTC is deployed on the back-end and gradually made available by viewers, support will be provided for both Vivox and WebRTC (i.e. if you are using a viewer using the Vivox plug-in, you will connect to voice via Vivox, and if using a viewer with WebRTC, then that protocol will be used.
  • Both Vivox and WebRTC work together, but their may be some initial limitations / issues until the project is fully deployed and the switch made.
  • Feature requests for WebRTC made via the WebRTC board on the SL Feedback Portal are being evaluated and some are being actioned, together with issues being investigated.

Status

  • There is a Project viewer available on the Alternate Viewers page. Thus is expected to to to Release Candidate status very soon.
  • The server support is currently available on the region WebRTC on the main grid.
  • The focus is currently on getting the viewer code up to release status so it can be adopted by TPVs, with a gradual deployment of the server code, however, it is unlikely the latter will be widely deployed until after the viewer code has been more fully adopted.
  • That said, this is something of a priority project, likely to be fast-tracked as much as possible.

Graphics / glTF

Terrain

  • Cosmic Linden is working on PBR terrain custom repat controls allowing for improved Texel densities to help reduce the “stretching” of textures of elevation changes)  and better support 2K textures.
  • Most of the viewer work for this is now almost complete, but is awaiting simulator-side support on Aditi in order to be offered in a test viewer.
  • There is a more general bug where PBR terrain does not render in planar mirrors, and Cosmic is also working on trying to resolve this issue.
  • PBR Terrain painting: depending on how the above progress, Cosmic hopes to be able to start looking into the potential for PBR terrain painting in the near future. Currently the tentative plan is:
    • To allow land owners to control the mix of the four PBR materials on terrain, rather than the current situation where it’s determined by some elevation weights plus some noise added on top.
    • This capability will potentially be allowed for whoever can edit the terrain heights in a given parcel.

glTF Scene Import

  • Runitai Linden is continuing to work on glTF scene import. The focus remains on the viewer-side code.
    • As previously noted, this allows glTF scenes to be uploaded, tied to an in-world object and previewed in the viewer.
    • The support for this is available on the Rumpus Room regions on Aditi (the Beta Grid).
  • Actual simulator / back-end support for glTF scene will not start to be implemented until after the viewer side of the code is in better shape.
  • The overall goal is to get scene import working with Blender (and in accordance with the glTF specification), and mee the requirements /  guidelines outline in the Blender glTF Imort / Export documentation. The plan is to:
    • Support all of the animation data defined in the document.
    • Support “most” of the materials data in additional to the already supported  metallic roughness & emissive unlit.
  • As this work is still in the prototype phase no decisions have been made regarding the potential Land Impact for scenes or how LI will be calculated. This will come later in the project, once LL have more of a handle on things (upload, streaming, download, runtime cost, etc.).
  • There are also a lot of additional decisions yet to be made regarding this work – the LSL API, avatar limits (which can be attached to an avatar within a scene), all of which mean it will sill be a while before glTF scene imports are ready for any form of testing on the main grid (Agni).

General Notes

  • Runitai Linden is looking at the render pipe and possible optimisations and the potential to improve things like rendering objects, etc. Some of this work is likely to find its way back into production viewers in time.
    • This work also includes refinements to mirrors (e.g. so they get occluded, improvements to the update rate, etc).
  • Geenz Linden continues to work on Transmission and Index of Reflection (IOR), however, as they were out of the office for this meeting, no update was available.
  • Proper support for HDRI skies is being increasingly requested as a result of the Graphics Featurette viewer, and this work may  be accelerated. However, they will require a new asset type.

Next Meeting

† 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.