The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday January 3rd, 2024. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy, is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.
Meeting Overview
The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), the forums.
As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
Meetings 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.
Marketplace
The meeting started with an apology for the issue over the New Year period which included items merchants were trying to list failing to appear, items and stores failing to show up in search results (see BUG-234924). The Lab believe the causes of the issues have been fixed, and processes have been put in place for the back-end systems to better alert support / engineering when issues of this nature occur.
A request was also made for any merchants still experiencing problems in trying to list items or in having their items / stores show up in searches, to file a Jira with LL.
The above was followed by a meeting-length discussion with what are seen as getting to be long-term terms issues with the MP, some of which are the results of changes which have inadvertently given rise to opportunities for the Marketplace to be gamed, and merchants losing revenue as a result. Key among the complaints being made were (but not limited to):
Active stores seeming to vanish from the Marketplace entirely.
Listed items failing to show up in any searches.
Exploits such as items being falsely labelled in the Product title field producing misleading search results.
Exploits being opened as a result of the 2022/23 overhaul of ElasticSearch (the engine powering MP searches), and relevancy weightings being given to product titles .
Exploits allowing spamming through the features tab which further influences search results in favour of those doing the spamming.
It was noted that these issues – including the problems of items and stores not appearing in searches – go back over several months (rather the the issue witnessed over the new year period being a “one off”), and they are giving rises to across-the-board upset and frustration among MP merchants, and with their customers.
The conversation was very much one in which people spelled out the issues being experienced, whilst Lab representatives at the meeting mostly listened and took notes. This being the case, and rather than risk parsing the meeting through my own subjective presence as someone who is not a merchant, I will refer readers to the video of the meeting as embedded below, and encourage anyone experiencing any of the issues raised to file a Jira bug report with Linden Lab on the matter.
Marketplace Styles
Part of the above discussion touched on Marketplace Styles (allowing things like different colour variants for a product in a single listing).
This was promised as being an active project throughout 2022, with (the since departed) Reed Linden stating in November 2022 (see November 2022 Web User Group: new “Plus” subscription level) the capability could appear before the end of that year or in 2023.
As more than a year has passed without mention, I raised the topic at the end of the meeting, requesting the actual status of the work (particularly as when it was raised in 2023, not long after Sntax Linden has taken over the WUG meetings, he did not appear to be aware of the project). The response was:
Styles is at the top of my list for things for MP. Just need to find the right time to slot it in. I can’t promise when but I am hopeful we can make headway on it this year.
– Sntax Linden
Which probably means that if you are a Merchant who has been looking forward to this capability, probably best not to hold your breath for its arrival. Unless you’re especially fond of blue.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024 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 meeting is embedded at the end of this summary, my thanks as always to Pantera for recording the meeting and providing 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.
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.
Simulator Deployments
No scheduled deployments, just region restarts.
Viewer Updates
The current official viewers list starts the year unchanged from where it saw out the old year.
Release viewer: version 7.1.1.7039128750, formerly the Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, issued December 1, promoted December 14 – displaying user-customized keybindings in chat – NO CHANGE.
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.
In Brief
A quiet meeting as a number of the engineering team are on extended vacation (so no Rider, Leviathan, et al).
LL are continuing to work on the issue of repeating collision sounds on the RC channel and the Fall Colors update (see:
BUG-234835 “Can hear Collisions “play” on RC channels”). This should have been reverted over the holiday period to minimise the annoyance, but no news on when an actual fix is likely to be deployed.
Simon Linden has been poking at the Avatar Appearance message, so that at some point soon it will get both a list of attachments as well as some info on pending attachments. He’s also tweaking ObjectUpdate for root prims so it will include the number in the linkset.
A lot of general conversation on region crossings, PBR (and the issues being experienced by those on PBR-enabled viewers). Please refer to the video below for specifics.
† 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.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, December 31st, 2023
This summary is generally published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog.
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Release viewer: version 7.1.1.7039128750, formerly the Maintenance V(ersatility) RC viewer, issued December 1, promoted December 14 – displaying user-customized keybindings in chat – NO CHANGE.
A computer-generated image of NASA’s Artemis 2 mission about to depart Earth orbit for its loop about the Moon – one of the major space missions targeting 2024. Credit: NASA / Liam Yanulis
With the ending of a year comes the start of another and with it an opportunity to take a look at some of what I consider to be the notable space events of 2024.
Space Missions
India
2024 is scheduled to get off the pad with the January 1st launch of the India Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) X-ray Polarimeter Satellite (XPoSat), another ambitious mission designed to further demonstrate India’s ability to stand alongside the likes of the United States, China an the European Space Agency at the forefront of space science.
ISRO’s XPoSat with solar panels furled, undergoing ground-based systems testing. Credit: ISRO
XPoSat’s 5-year primary mission lifespan of 5 years is to study cosmic ray polarisation by observing the 50 brightest known sources in the universe, including pulsars, black hole X-ray binaries, active galactic nuclei, neutron stars and non-thermal supernova remnants using its two primary instruments. Studying how radiation is polarised gives away the nature of its source, including the strength and distribution of its magnetic fields and the nature of other radiation around it.
January 7th should see India’s Aditya-L1 solar observatory, launched in September 2023, enter its operational halo orbit at the L1 Lagrange Point, located between the Earth and Sun at some 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. Once in place, it will spend an initial 5 years carrying out continuous observations of the solar atmosphere and study solar magnetic storms as they develop, together with their impact on the environment around the Earth.
In February, the most expensive Earth observation satellite should launch. The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) is intended to observe and understand natural processes on Earth, and will be able to observe both of the planet’s hemispheres over a period of at least 3 years. Intended to measure some of the planet’s most complex natural processes, including ecosystem disturbances, ice-sheet collapse, and natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and landslides, NISAR data will be made globally available within days of it being gathered – or in near-real time should it detect any natural disaster, so that agencies and organisations responsible for disaster relief might use the information in their planning and operations.
Also scheduled for the first quarter of 2024 is the first uncrewed test flight of India’s Gaganyaan space vehicle. Designed to carry crews of two or three into orbit, the capsule and its service / propulsion module, will be capable of spending up to 7 days at a time in orbit, and is the formative part of an ambitious programme to establish a national space station in orbit and send crews to the lunar surface.
A screen capture of Vyommitra, obtained during a telecon organised by ISRO featuring the robot responding to prompts. Credit: ISRO
Depending upon its outcome, the fully automated, 2-day Gaganyaan-1 mission could be followed before the end of the year by two further test flights, at least one (if not both) will include Vyommitra (from Sanskrit: vyoma, “space” and mitra, “friend”), a complex robot in the form of a female human upper body.
Initially intended to assess the effects of g-forces and weightlessness on humans flying in Gaganyaan, Vyommitra could in fact play an active role in crewed flights as well in place of a third person. It is not only programmed to speak Hindi and English, recognise various humans and respond to them, it can perform multiple mission-related tasks, including environment control and life support systems functions, handle switch panel operations, and give environmental air pressure change warnings.
Once the 3 uncrewed flights have been completed, the first crewed flight of Gaganyaan is set to occur in 2025, and if successful will mark India as only the fourth nation in the world to independently fly crews to orbit after Russia, the United States and China.
Finally (for this article that is – India has a number of other missions planned for 2024), at the end of the year, ISRO should launch their Venus Orbiter Mission, unofficially known as Shukrayaan (from the Sanskrit for Venus, “Shukra”, and yāna, craft”/ “vehicle”). Intended to study the atmosphere and surface of Venus, the mission will include an “aerobot” balloon it will release into the Venusian atmosphere.
United States – NASA
NASA obviously has a lot going on all the time, so the following really is an abbreviated “highlights” list.
In February, the remarkable Juno vehicle will complete the second of 2 extremely close approaches (both to 1,500 km) to Jupiter’s innermost Galilean moon, Io. These very close flybys (the first having occurred on December 30th, 2023) allow the probe to observe the most volcanically active place in the solar system in extraordinary detail, with the February flyby also allowing the spacecraft to reduce its orbital period around Jupiter and its moons to just 33 days.
Another mission to Jupiter will commence in 2024, with the October launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper at the start of a 5.5 year cruise out from Earth to Jupiter, with assistance from Mars and Earth (in that order) to get there. Once in orbit about Jupiter in 2030, the mission will commence a 4-year primary study of the icy moon of Europa to help scientists better characterise the moon, including the potential for it have an extensive liquid water ocean under its icy crust.
A rendering of the Europa Clipper vehicle. Credit: NASA/JPL
In terms of NASA’s human spaceflight operations and ambitions, 2024 should see three landmark flights:
April 2024 should see the first test flight of Dream Chaser Cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). An automated space plane which is launched via rocket (generally the ULA Vulcan Centaur) but lands like a conventional aircraft, Dream Chaser is intended to deliver up to 5.5 tonnes of cargo (pressurised and unpressurised) to the ISS, although for this first flight, the Dream chaser Tenacity will be limited to 3.5 tonnes. The flight will be the first of at least six the Dream Chaser system will make in support of ISS operations through until 2030, carrying both supplies to, and equipment and experiments from, the space station.
April 2024 should also see the long-overdue Crewed Flight Test (CFT) of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner to the ISS. The eight-day mission is due to see test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams fly the reusable capsule to a rendezvous and docking with the space station. If successful, the mission will clear the way for operational flights of the Starliner vehicles carrying around 4 people at a time to the ISS from 2025 onwards.
Artemis-2 . Targeting an end-of-year launch, this mission – officially referred to Artemis Exploration Mission 2 (EM-2) will return humans to the vicinity of the Moon for the first time since 1972 and Apollo 17. Utilising the third Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), Orion CM-003, the 10-day mission will see the four-person crew of Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Jeremy Hansen launched on a flight that will loop them around the Moon, with Glover and Koch respectively becoming the first person of colour and first woman to fly in space beyond low Earth orbit. The focus of the mission is to carry out multiple tests of the vehicle in preparation for the commencement of missions to return humans to the surface of the Moon with Artemis 3, officially targeting at end of 2025 launch date, but more realistically slated to fly no earlier than early-to-mid 2026.
The Artemis EM-2 crew (l to r): Commander Reid Wiseman (USA); Mission Specialist 1 Christina Koch (USA); Orion Capsule Pilot Victor Glover USA); Mission Specialist 2 Jeremy Hansen (Canada). Credit: ABC News
The US, with the largest share of the commercial spaceflight market will also see numerous private venture missions – some in support of NASA’s lunar exploration ambitions – take place. For me, the most notable commercial flights taking place in 2024 are:
January 8th, 2024: the maiden flight of the Vulcan Centaur rocket. The new workhorse launch vehicle for United Launch Alliance (ULA), this first flight will hopefully see the much-delayed launcher send the Peregrine Lander to the Moon. Also a private development (by Astrobiotic Technologies) the Peregrine Mission One has been funded under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload services (CLPS) programme to deliver science and technology payloads to the Moon. If successful, the launch should be the first of 7 Vulcan Centaur launches for the year on behalf of NASA, the US military and commercial customers.
August 2024: the maiden flight of Blue Origin’s heavy lift launcher, New Glenn. With a first stage designed to be reused up to 10 times, New Glenn is intended to be Blue Origin’s entry into commercial and government-funded space launch operations, capable of delivering large payloads to a range of orbits around Earth and sending them into deep space. For its first flight, New Glenn will be responsible for sending NASA’s EscaPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) orbiters to Mars.
Starship IFT-3: the third attempt by SpaceX to achieve a semi-orbit around Earth with their controversial-come-questionable Starship / Super Heavy launches combination. The exact date for the attempt is unknown given the on-going investigation into the failure of the second integrated flight test and the further loss of both vehicles.
Polaris Dawn: the first in a trio of privately-funded crewed orbital missions utilising the tried and trusted SpaceX Crew Dragon. Spearheaded by billionaire Jared Isaacman (who funded and flew the Inspiration4 flight in September 2021), the mission will feature Isaacman and three others – form USAF fighter pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon – none of whom are professional astronauts. As will as carrying out a range of experiments and raising money for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, the mission will attempt to set to records: become the highest Earth-orbiting crewed spaceflight to date (1,400 km above the Earth) and perform the first ever commercial spacewalks, utilising EVA suits designed and developed by SpaceX.
European Space Agency
The European Space Agency hopes to finally launch its Ariane 6 booster on its maiden flight around the middle of the year. Another launcher development programme that has had its share of issues, Ariane 6 is intended to replace the already retired Ariane 5 as ESA’s workhorse medium-to-heavy lift carrier, capable of achieving all of the common Earth orbits with payloads of up to 21.6 tonnes (LEO) and able to lob up to 8.6 tonnes into a lunar transfer orbit (LTO). The maiden flight will see the vehicle hopefully deliver an international mix of government and private missions to LEO in a rideshare arrangement, and will be followed by a French space agency / defence agency mission before the end of the year.
An artist’s impression of ESA’s Hera spacecraft studying the 170-metre across Dimophos asteroid, with its two cubesats called Milani and Juventas on their way to attempt soft landings on the asteroid. Credit: ESA
Later in 2024, ESA will utilise a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster to send its Hera spacecraft to rendezvous with the binary asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos, which it is scheduled to do in December 2026, 26 months after launch. Once there, Hera’s primary focus of study will Dimorphos, the target of NASA’s DART Impactor mission, which slammed into it in September 2022 in an attempt to assess the theory of kinetic impact as a means to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. As well as examining the physical aftermath of DART’s impact on Dimorphos, Hera will attempt to characterise both asteroids in detail, land two cubesats – Milani and Juventas on Dimorphos before itself attempting a landing on Didymos at the end of its mission.
2024 will also see the launch of the joint ESA-JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) EarthCARE (Cloud, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer) mission, designed to investigate the role that clouds and aerosols play in reflecting incident solar radiation back into space and trapping the infrared radiation emitted from Earth’s surface to better understand the evolution of Earth’s temperature.
Get the Red Carpet treatment at the Bay City Prim Drop 2023/24
Sunday, December 31st 2023 will once again see Bay City celebrate the turning of the year with their annual Prim Drop festivities.
An outdoor, black tie attire and/or full dress event, the Prim Drop is open to all Second Life residents, with festivities opening at 23:00 SLT at the Bay City Fairgrounds in North Channel. Marianne McCann will be providing the music and fireworks in a 2-hour extended DJ set, and food and drink will be provided.
This will also be the final opportunity for 2023 to donate to Child’s Play Charity, a US 501c3 non-profit organisation which helps seriously ill children around the globe during their hospital stays with the purchase of games and gaming equipment. So even if you can’t make it to the event itself, do please consider taking a couple of minutes out of your SL day and stopping by the Bay City Fairgrounds and making a donation via one of the collection bins there.
The Bay City Prim Drop 2022/23: seeing in the new year in Second Life
About Bay City and the Bay City Alliance
Bay City is a mainland community, developed by Linden Lab® and home to the Bay City Alliance. The Bay City Alliance was founded in 2008 to promote the Bay City regions of Second Life and provide a venue for Bay City Residents and other interested parties to socialize and network. It is now the largest group for Residents of Bay City.
Currently open through the end of 2023 within Akiko Kinoshi’s (A Kiko) Akijima events region are three exhibitions of art I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending to readers of this blog. All three are located within the same sky platform, and thus between them make for an excellent joint visit, whilst between them presenting very different selections of art.
Sisi Biederman is someone who really needs no introduction to established patrons of art in Second Life; she is one of the most accomplished and engaging digital mixed-media artists in SL, as well as a skilled artist working in more “traditional” mediums such as photography and acrylics. Her work is utterly unique and completely captivating, offering a richness of imagination, style and colour. Her subject matter tends to be wide-ranging, covering everything from the natural world through in-world settings to the fantastical and even touching on the abstract and the near-surreal.
Akijima, December 2023: Sisi Biedermann
For this exhibition she presents some of her favourite pieces produced in 2023, bringing together a mix of images visitors can literally trace by month / season, and which although primarily digital in form, wrap themselves around genres such as abstractionism, watercolour and expressionism. With a strong focus on floral scenes, also folded into the collection is at least one memory of a place Sisi appears to have visited (and which is among my personal list of favourite places around the global I’ve been fortunate enough to visit and witness), and perhaps hints of others as well. Vibrant and fairly pulsing with a sense of vitality, this is a superb selection with which to whet one’s appetite for witnessing more of Sisi’s work.
Another physical world artist who has established a deserved reputation of producing some of the most visually expressive art in Second Life is Milly Sharple, who is the second of the three artists at Akijima.
Akijima, December 2023: Milly Sharple
For those unfamiliar with Milly, she is a successful artist and photographer in the physical world whose work has not only sold on a global basis, but has also been used as book and CD cover art, within promotional pieces including posters for theatrical productions and has even be used on bank cards. In 2020 she was invited to do a collaboration representing the COVID pandemic with Salvador Dali’s protégé, Louis Markoya.
Within Second Life, Milly probably initially became recognised for her fractal art – being one of the first artists to introduce this particular art-form to Second Life audiences. For several years she was also responsible for 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.
Akijima, December 2023: Milly Sharple
Here Milly presents a glimpse of the breadth and depth of her digital work, only touching lightly on her SL fractal art “roots” (if I might use that term). To attempt to describe these pieces would serve no purpose; as the images accompanying this article hopefully show, Milly’s work transcends mere written description and should be seen first-hand
I first witnessed the work of Guille (Antoronta) whilst visiting the Annexe of the Limoncello gallery in 2021, which at the time was hosting his exhibition Unseen Beauty (see here). He is in fact the virtual incarnation of Antonio Guillén, a noted doctor in Biology and professor of Natural Sciences whose research projects have spanned the environment, microbiology and astrobiology.
Akijima, December 2023: Guille
And when I say “noted”, I mean precisely that; his work has been exhibited in such august centres as the National Museum of Natural Sciences, Madrid, and has garnered awards such as Spain’s National Prize for Scientific Photography and the Giner de los Ríos Prize, the country’s most prestigious educational award, whilst his project The Hidden Life of Water received the first world award at a Google Science Fair in 2012.
Within Second Life, Guille has sought to bring the incredible beauty and diversity of the microscopic world which inhabits all of us as much as we inhabit the visible world, through such exhibitions as Unseen Beauty and his 2022 exhibition Invisible Beauty (see here) and – whilst it has now apparently closed – through his former in-world education centre El Universo en una Gota de Agua – the universe in a drop of water.
At Akijima, Guille once again allows us to dive into this unseen universe of tiny life forms through a collection of images captured via CCD and microscope, allowing is to witness this unite world of algae, ciliates, amoebae and other micro-organisms in all their glory and (at times almost geometric) forms. Offered as a set of individual slideshow focused on a specific aspect of the microscopic, these are fabulous glimpses into a universe we otherwise rarely get to see; my only small regret being that unlike Guille’s past exhibitions, this one (for whatever reason) is sans any accompanying text for the pieces (which should not be taken as a critique of the exhibition or the artist, but as a purely personal observation).
Akijima, December 2023: Guille
None of the art presented by the Artists is offered for sale; this is a trio of exhibitions purely for the eye and mind to appreciate. However, if you are looking for art to hang in your Second Life home, the fourth building on the platform may also be worthy of a visit. This is home to the Second Free Museum, where are from numerous artists is available free-of-charge to anyone wishing to obtain copies.
