Currently open within the Sky Gallery at Mareea Farrasco’s Imago Art Galleries is Vague Disclosures, a collection of twelve images by Carelyna, who herself runs the ArtCare gallery within Second Life.
Having studied art, focusing on oil-on-canvas, Carelyna has carried her love of painting into the digital realm, using the tools available to her via her computer to take the images she produces using the viewer and turn them into digital paintings. This gives her work a freshness and an almost tangible depth rich in a sense of life.
This is very much in evidence with the pieces presented at Vague Disclosures. No gallery or artist’s notes are supplied for the exhibition, leaving all twelve open to personal interpretation. There is no accident or oversight in this: Carelyna openly admits she does not plan her works in advance; each piece she creates is part free-form composition, part experimentation and part therapy / a release of a sense of creative fun, often given birth through a need to delve in a new world of such expression.
Imago Art Galleries: Carelyna – Vague Disclosures
Vague Disclosures is such a dive; whilst each piece is unique and open for study / interpretation, all of them offer explorations in the use of soft focus / depth of field as a starting-point for expressing moment of shared and personal intimacy. Each suggests a story within its frame; but what that story might be is up to the eyes of the beholder to decide.
Is the ring mounted on extended finger a gift symbolising the love the giver wished to express to the wearer, or might it be a something the wearer saw and liked, and so purchased on whim? Is there perhaps another story waiting to reveal itself to you? Similarly, and across the room, is the single arm and hand resting languidly along the side of a bath as the owner luxuriates in hot water and bubbles? Might it be a hand gripping the back of a sofa or bed in a moment of passion, or again, something else?
Imago Art Galleries: Carelyna – Vague Disclosures
Thus, throughout, there are stories here; from initial opening to final chapter; stories capable of remaking themselves each time we look at them, allowing us to share in Carelyna’s explorations and discoveries in her journey through art and expression.
Under the Northern Lights, December 2022 – 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, February 16th 2023 at 13:00 SLT.
My chat transcript and the video recording of the Friday, February 17th TPV Developer’s meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy and embedded at the end of this article. My thanks, as always, to her for recording these meetings.
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 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.
Official Viewers Summary
Available Viewers
The have been no further updates to the currently available official viewers sine the PBR materials viewer was updated at the start of the week, as reported in my week #7 SUG meeting summary. Therefore the pipelines remain as follows:
Release viewer: Maintenance Q(uality) viewer, version 6.6.9.577968 Thursday, February 2, 2023.
Performance Floater / Auto-FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.9.577251, January 4, 2023.
Project viewers:
PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.578161, February 14, 2023. 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.
General Viewer Notes
It is hoped that the Performance Floater RC viewer will be promoted to de facto release status within the week, which would allow all official viewers to leverage Visual Studio 2022 on Windows builds going forward.
There are some changes to be made to github due to all the pull requests (PRs) going to branches which can change over time, causing issues as they do so. In the future, it is likely that PRs will go into the Main branch (which only changes on a per release basis) and from their moved into their intended branch.
CCUG – 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.
A major new bug is the discovery that the UV treatment is off-specification. This appears to be due to OpenGL putting the 0,0 coordinate in the lower left corner of the image rather than the top left. This does mean that all PBR materials uploaded to Aditi (the beta grid) prior to the fix going into the viewer will effectively be “broken” post-fix. Viewer:
The lighting model for water in the project viewer has been updated to use the glTF specification lighting model for water so that reflection probes can be used to generate reflections on water. However, trying to adapt the “old” water shader to use the glTF lighting model is proving difficult, due the “bonkers” way things like fresnel offset and scale have been implemented. This issue is to be addressed.
It is believed that most existing content should render reasonably faithfully under the PBR / glTF, with the exception of the known issue of alpha blending on colour curves. Runitai Linden has a couple more ideas how this might be improved, but overall, it might come down to having to explain that the colour space is changing for glTF, and as a result some alpha blended content will need to be adjusted in order to render correctly.
As Advanced Lightning Model (ALM) will be enabled all the time in the PBR viewer (the Forward renderer will be disabled), the viewer’s quality settings are being updated so that Shadows will be disabled by default across a much wider range of settings, as these are what causes the significant performance hit when ALM in enabled, rather than ALM itself (but Shadows can still obviously be manually enabled).
This viewer also causes instrumentation regressions within the Performance Floater viewer, which will likely be addressed when the code is ready to be merged with the release version of the viewer. .
It is hoped that the simulator-side support can be deployed to an RC on the Main grid (Agni) in the near future in order to further advance viewer testing as that moves from project to RC status as well.
CCUG – Mirrors(!)
The “very next thing” LL plans to implement after PBR Materials reaches Release Candidate status is – mirrors!
These will be planar mirrors, so best suited to flat surfaces such as the face of a cube, rather than curved or spherical surfaces.
Mirrors will effectively be a real-time 1:1 rendering of what is seen within the scene that is being reflected, but with some limitations to cater for performance. Those limitations / controls under discussion at the Lab include:
The mirror effect will only be generated in viewers that are very close to it.
Perhaps limiting the number of mirrors which can be active within a viewer to just one per scene (so if there are two mirrors close by your avatar, only one will be active at a time). Or allowing user select the number of mirrors they wish see “working” at any given time.
Adding a viewer Preferences option to enable / disable mirrors, depending on the user’s needs.
Nevertheless, even with precautions such as the above, there will be a performance impact in having real-time mirrors active in the viewer.
Mirrors will likely support LSL control over them.
It is already being recommended that mirror surfaces are only used as mirrors, not as a means of generating “reflections” in general – which should be left to reflection probes / cube maps.
It is hoped that the way the mechanism for rendering reflections onto a mirror surface would use the same channels as reflection probes – so when the mirror is seen from a distance, it uses the reflection rendering based on the local reflection probes, but when approached, the reflection probe rendering would fade out, and the real-time planar mirror reflection rendering would fade in.
That said, precisely HOW real-time mirrors will work is still subject to discussion and planning: at the moment, the focus has been only considering time in terms of ensuring the PBR work does not block opportunities for adding real-time reflections, and that they will play nicely with the PBR Materials work when they are being developed.
CCUG – Avatars / New Start Avatars / Ecosystem
A question was raised about the upcoming new mesh starter avatars previewed at SL19B in June2022. These have yet to be releases, and are not intended to compete with existing mesh avatars, also LL hopes creators will help develop an ecosystem in support for the avatars as the devkits for them are released – there is no confirmed release date for the avatars.
The above lead to a general discussion on the learning curves involved in getting to grips with avatar bodies and heads, trying to math heads to bodies, etc., the need for more discussions on avatar capabilities, helping people understand the avatar content creation process so they can join the ecosystem, etc.
The was an agreement that more discussion on avatar-related content creation, real and perceived limitations on the avatar system – particularly rigging clothing and attachments and the reliance on additional toolsets (e.g. AvaStar MayaStar, etc.), issues of supporting information available through the SL Wiki / Knowledge Base, etc. See In Brief for more on discussions / potential new meetings.
There are internal discussions going on at the Lab concerning avatar physics, enabling the simulator to “know” more bout the avatar, how it is being animated, having the simulator-side physics engine fully recognise the avatar body as a physical object (rather than just a simplified capsule), etc., via the likes of the Puppetry project and elsewhere, but solutions are still TBD.
In Brief
CCUG: Alpha blending issues on avatars – there was a general discussion on alpha stacking/ordering and blending issues, with Beq Janus’ blog post on the subject relating to avatars / outfits being referenced as a good primer on the issue and steps to mitigate problems.
TPVD: work is continuing on the Inventory thumbnails work, but nothing ready for any form of public release.
TPVD: it has been suggested that LL might want to add code to the new Group Chat History functionality to indicate the end of historic Group chat within a Group chat tab / panel, as people appear to be getting confused as to why they are opening Group chat to find past conversations displayed (due to word about the new functionality taking time to spread).
TPVD: concern was raised that the allowance of lossless Normal Map under PBR will lead to a lot of abuse with people using it to upload lossless textures as well, which it was feared would hit people’s VRAM. Runitai pointed out that lossless does not necessarily hit VRAM, but does impact caching and bandwidth. This sparked a general conversation on textures, resolution, quality, etc. However, the risk of people abusing the upload was acknowledged, and store will be monitored for unexpected spike in usage after the release of PBR.
TPVD: a discussion on viewer development as support for AAA game-style rendering. Please refer to the video for details,
Both meetings: user on-boarding – at both the CCUG and the TPVD meeting it was suggested that there needs to be a regular user group meeting to discuss user on-boarding, engagement and retention and how to address these on an ongoing basis.
This led to a lengthy discussion on the issues of engagement + retention which illustrated one of the core issues in just discussing it: everyone has a different opinion on what “the problem” is with engagement / retention. Some see it as primarily being an expense issue (the cost of creating a good-looking avatar); some see it as people being unable to find interesting this to do; some see it as being performance / hardware / overall appearance of SL.
The problem with the above is (and as demonstrated at the TPVD meeting particularly) it can lead to very siloed outlooks where disagreements as to “the problem” become the focus of conversations, rather than agreement that all of these issues can play a role, and as such, solutions need to be perhaps more “holistic” in nature and encompassing all of the perceived pain points.
It has been suggested that an upcoming CCUG or TPVD meeting could be utilised as a kick-off session for broader discussions about on-boarding, etc.
The Ocean Care World Alliance (OCWA) is a group of environmentalists concerned about the negative impact we are having on the world’s oceans and marine life the pollution, dumping and more. Utilising the opportunities presented by virtual tools, they aim to provide a better understanding of our marine environments and the need to protect the vitual role they play as part of the world’s ecosystem, working in partnership with the SEE Turtles Organisation.
Within Second Life OCWA – founded by JT Castanea and SL partner Megs (megscandles) – hosts the Experience The Ocean, which occupies and Full private region adjoining a Homestead region and an Openspace region, each of which play a role in OCWA’s facilities.
OCWA Experience The Ocean, February 2023 – click any image for full size
Our mission is to educate and create awareness of current human impact on marine environments. Using science, technology and the virtual world platform, we can promote more public involvement through support of ocean conservation organisations.
– OCWA Experience the Ocean mission statement
Visits begin on the deck of the main structure in the region – a facility which might be imagined as a re-purposed oil or gas rig, now serving in the role of a Marine Science Centre – a conservation, rescue and research facility and home to OCWA events and educational activities. It forms the main landing point for the facilities, and for those visiting as a part of an educational tour, offering plenty of space for gathering the group together on arrival.
The main level of the centre provides the OCWA’s mission statement (above) and the Sea Turtle information hall in one wing and the ocean virtual learning centre in the other.
OCWA Experience The Ocean, February 2023
The latter takes the form of nine numbered media stations, providing information on a range of ocean-related subjects. These can be activated by hovering the mouse over any one of them (or clicking on it) to display the related web page. The screens do not necessarily have to be followed in numerical order, as each provides self-contained information. The former, by contrast offers a set of information displays on sea turtles that, which clicked, will offer a link to an external web page.
Above these halls can be found the Ocean Art Gallery and the centre’s auditorium for educational and related events / activities, while the upper level is home to office space and access to the centre’s helipad and – more particularly – open-air event space for musical performances.
OCWA Experience The Ocean, February 2023
Also within the centre are information kiosks and display boards, the former providing further links to ocean-related conservation and educational groups, such as The 5 Gyres¹ Institute, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation focusing on reducing plastics pollution in rivers, lakes and the oceans through research and education.
On the deck of the centre is the Lunasea Memorial Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Hospital, representing the work put into rehabilitating and releasing turtles affected by pollution and ingesting plastic particulates that result from the saltwater breakdown of certain plastics dumped in the sea. It is here that visitors can obtain a note card to join a unique role-play experience: the Rescue a Virtual Turtle Experience. This takes place in the regions to the south – Whale Fall and Vida de Tortuga. Click the information board for details when visiting the Hospital.
OCWA Experience The Ocean, February 2023
Beneath the centre are the docks servicing the centre’s submersibles and research boats and, below that on the seabed, an undersea laboratory. These can be reached via the teleport stations found around the centre, stations which also provide access to the remaining outdoor locations in the main region. The latter take the form of the Alaska Fossil Beach to the east, and to an area modelled on the south the Cape St. Francis lighthouse and Seal Point, South Africa. Both offer opportunities for surfing, whilst the docks offer the chance to go kayaking using single or 2-seater boats, with little motor boats also available.
With opportunities to donate to SEE Turtles throughout the centre and the regions, the notes opportunities for activities and plenty of ways to learn about the oceanic ecosystems, Experience The Ocean makes for an engaging and potentially educational visit.
A gyre is a large circular r spiral motion or form. It is particularly used in reference to giant circular oceanic surface currents. In all there are five major subtropical gyres in the worlds oceans (hence “5 Gyres”) – North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Indian Ocean, South Pacific and and the Great Pacific (itself split into to east and west), all of are home to an estimated 270,000 tonnes of plastic dumped in ocean (which is less than 1% of the new plastic made in a single year).
Saint Phalle (Perpetua1010) La Serenissima, February 2023
Running through until March 11th, 2023 is La Serenissima, a two-part exhibition at the Venezia/Venice region in Second Life by Sophie de Saint Phalle (Perpetua1010). I say two parts, as the exhibition is split between indoor and and outdoor display area.
Sophie is an artist in the physical world who uses Second Life to reach audiences who might not otherwise encounter her work. She does this through exhibitions like La Serenissima and also through her own gallery/studio space Subcutan Art Gallery and Multimedia Centre. I’ve covered her work several times in these pages and have thoroughly enjoyed doing so; her art is rich in content and form, drawing as it does on many of her own travels and experiences – as with Infinite, a magnificent celebration of indigenous Australian art I reviewed a year ago.
Saint Phalle (Perpetua1010) La Serenissima, February 2023
Some of the pieces from Infinite are displayed in the outdoor section of La Serenissima, together with some pieces from an exhibition hosted at Niccoli Sweetwater’s Basilique region back in September 2020, and which formed my introduction to Sophie’s work. I point to both of these exhibitions not because I’ve written about them, but because the appearance of pieces from them nicely underscores the focus of La Serenissimia: a personal retrospective by Sophie featuring a selection of art she has produced over the course of the last decade.
A graduate of the Academy of fine Arts Vienna, Sophie is by turn also a cartoonist – having had a particular focus on political satire -, an author and a ghost writer for certain well-known comedians. As an artist, her focus was initially the nude body and abstract art, but her range and scope have since broadened, even reaching into 3D art within Second Life. She is very much an experimentalist and also an expressionist – as her work repeatedly demonstrates.
Saint Phalle (Perpetua1010) La Serenissima, February 2023
A red carpet leads the way to the indoor exhibition. Occupying three floors, this section features gouache paintings on the lower floor, watercolours on the middle floor and a selection of her nude studies on the upper.
All three levels are as captivating as the outdoor works, but I have to admit to being drawn particularly to the middle level watercolours as they depict Sophie’s travels through Italy and Switzerland. For me, they are pieces which capture the spirit of the places they represent in a fabulously minimalist and / or focused style.
Saint Phalle (Perpetua1010) La Serenissima, February 2023For those familiar with Sophie’s work through individual exhibitions, La Serenissima offers an opportunity to experience the breath of her work in a relaxed setting. For those who have not seen Sophie’s work before, I recommend a visit to this exhibition while it remains open, perhaps followed by a visit to Subcutan Art Gallery and Multimedia Centre.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 14th, 2023 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, February 14th 2023, the simhosts on the Main SLS channel were restarted without any change to their simulator code, leaving them on release 577734.
On Wednesday, February 15th, 2023:
The majority of simhosts on the RC channel will be restarted without and version change.
The BlueSteel RC will be updated with release 578100, comprising:
New function llReplaceSubString(): find and replace instances of one substring with another string
New function llHMAC(): generate the HMAC hash of a message
New function llSignRSA(): generate an RSA signature of a message, given a private key
New function llVerifyRSA(): validate whether an RSA signature for a message is valid, given the public key
New parameters for llGetEnv(): “grid” and “region_rating”
The BlueSteel deployment further includes a fix for BUG-233288 “Scripts do not operate properly under this new server version 577942”. This was cause of the February 1st, roll-back as described in this official blog post.
Available Official Viewers
On Monday February 13th, 2023, the PBR Materials project viewer updated to version 7.0.0.578161, February 14, 2023. This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
The remaining official viewer pipelines stay as follows:
Release viewer: Maintenance Q(uality) viewer, version 6.6.9.577968 Thursday, February 2, 2023.
Performance Floater / Auto-FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.9.577251, January 4, 2023.
Project viewers:
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.
In Brief
The new Group Chat functionality is currently available in the Maintenance R (above) is also being picked-up by some TPVs. The hope at LL is that once the capability has been available for a while, it will be improved (e.g. allow Group owners set their own parameters for it.
The code branch which provided the Group Chat history code also contains code which allows for text chat translation. If an external translator is correctly configured, the viewer can send a translation request on receipt of a foreign language group chat. This has yet to be implemented.
LL have received requests from residents to be able to submit changes to the XML file used to provide the content for the hover tooltip when writing LSL scripts. This work may be carried out in the next quarter, and the file may be converted to JSON.
The SL wiki has been unavailable for some, apparently as a result of a CDN issue.
It’s time to highlight another week of storytelling in Voice by the staff and volunteers at the Seanchai Library – and this week previews the launch of a very special event.
As always, all times SLT, and events are held at the Library’s home in Nowhereville, unless otherwise indicated. Note that the schedule below may be subject to change during the week, please refer to the Seanchai Library website for the latest information through the week.
Monday, February 13th, 19:00: Robin Scott’s The Big Connection
A scientist develops a rabbit, “Rabbit Number 9”, a highly intelligent variant of the fast breeding species. And not intelligence in rabbit terms, but human terms.
With Gyro Muggins.
Tuesday, February 14th, 19:00: A Universe of Love – Words and Music
Thursday, February 16th, 19:00: Tristan and Iseult, Part 2
Tristan and Isolde (with Husdent) by Hugues Merle (c. 1870)
Perhaps best known as Tristan and Isolde in English – although it has had numerous names down the ages, Tristan and Iseult is a tale which has been told in many forms since the 12th century. It has had a lasting impact on Western culture, with its many versions told and re-told across Europe from the Middle Ages onwards. A chivalric romance, the story is based on a Celtic legend (and possibly other sources), it tells the tragic story of the illicit love between the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Iseult.
After the defeat of the Irish knight Morholt and his army, largely as a result of his efforts, young Prince Tristan is dispatched to Ireland by his Uncle, King Mark of Cornwall. His mission is to escort the fair Iseult back to Cornwall that she might be married to King Mark and therefore seal a lasting peace between the two kingdoms. However during their return journey, the two ingest a love potion – possibly accidentally, possibly deliberately – and fall deeply in love. Their affair continues after their arrival at the court of King Mar and Iseult’s marriage to the king – something which can only end in tragedy.
[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/inara-pey/]Inara Pey[/url], on Flickr)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 