Author: Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.

The charming whimsy of a Lightning Bolt in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Lightning Bolt, February 2021

Lightning Bolt is the name selected by Valarie Muffin Meow (Zalindah) for her latest region creation. It’s an interesting name that appears to be less connected with the region’s presentation than with the fact that it is likely only to be around for a limited period of time, as the About Land description notes:

Made for a special wolf. A temporary nature escape to explore & spend time with love ones. Full of animal friends to hug.

I assume the wolf in question is Dice Starlight, Zalindah’s SL partner – but the region is going to appeal to anyone who appreciates the more unusual, and / or places with a focus on animals and / or with a lean towards the oriental and / or who enjoy whimsy and a twist of fantasy.

Lightning Bolt, February 2021

Those who visited the now-closed Kintsugi – which I wrote about back in May 2020 –  will know that Zalindah very much the eye for creating environments that are captivating and which can, as with the now departed Kintsugi, tickle the grey matter.

With Lightning Bolt, this eye for design and attention to detail is very much on display through the setting, although rather than tickling the grey matter, this is a location intended to simply delight the eye and lift the spirit, and it does so quite marvellously.

Lightning Bolt, February 2021

Forming a curving island that captures within its open arms a north-facing bay, the landscape rises from the landing point on the western headland to the hills enclosing the bay, before dropping gently down to lowlands on the eastern side.

From bamboo groves to walks between tall fir trees and over razor-backed ridges and through grass and wetlands and with a mix of building – some with a Japanese lean – scattered throughout, the setting offers a lot to take in without even getting to what makes it even more appealing to eye, heart and camera.

Lightning Bolt, February 2021

This comes in the form of a series of animal-focused vignettes, each of which exists within its own space and can be taken as being independent of the rest whilst also being fully a part of the overall setting. From lions to deer to cats to dogs, with pandas, otters, pine marten  foxes, rabbits, bears, red panda lynx and orca, all in the mix. Lightning Bolt is even a place where we can even say, “here be dragons!”, as witnessed at the landing point and up on the hills above the bay. And,of course, there are the wolves.

Not only do these animals come in a multiple of species, they also come in a wide variety of forms, large and small and even entirely plushy and  / or cuddly. The best way to see them all is to follow the path from the landing point as it winds up through the bamboo and fit trees and thence around the hills.

Lightning Bolt, February 2021

Doing so with introduce you to the lynx, lion and the first of the dragons, before moving you on to some of the smaller critters – and be sure to take a careful look at the stone tiers of the garden on the slopes below to catch the otters.

From the top of the hills the path curves onwards past the strangest collection of sheep you’re likely to see, to dragons that look to have a hint of gryphon blood in them. The route then drops down to the eastern side of the island, where more awaits.  A nice touch is that as you explore, you’ll more-than-like encounter collision triggers that will use local chat to display a description of the vignette you are about to enter.

Lightning Bolt, February 2021

Within the buildings spread across the region are further scenes to appreciate. These range from the cosy / romantic and little places simply to sit and pass the time, some of them including their own little critters to appreciate.

There are also numerous outdoor spots to visit, from the wolves in their ruins through a little bamboo pond of koi, to my favourite the piano (surprise!) on its own little island where you can play to an appreciative red panda, enjoy a cup of tea and watch the orca in the bay.

Lightning Bolt, February 2021

Throughout its design, Lightning Bolt offers a tremendous amount to see and enjoy. No specific region environment has been set, so I do recommend experimenting with your EEP setting as the region’s depth can be greatly added to with a well selected Fixed Sky setting.

Given its proposed short-term availability of the setting, I strongly recommend that if you haven’t already done so – hop along and pay visit.

Lightning Bolt, February 2021

SLurl Details

A little Edelweiss in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
The CONVAIR Edelweiss Chalet at Isla Caitinara with a Trompe Loeil pavilion on the deck

In December 2020 I picked up the CONVAIR Bridge House by Tobias Convair for use on our main island home in Second Norway (see: A Bridge House in Second Life). It’s a nice looking house with a good internal layout and it fits well with the Second Norway environment, having something of a Scandinavian feel.

It is also a design that gave me something of a taste for CONVAIR builds. So when we recently visited The Redwoods (see: Exploring The Redwoods of Second Life) and saw another CONVAIR build being used as the park lodge, I started getting the itch to see how well it might fit as yet another alternative for our house – and as it turns out, it does so fairly well.

The design in question is the Edelweiss Chalet, a two-storey design with wood exterior and exposed beams and woodwork inside. Unfurnished at purchase, it is priced at L$2,200 both in-world and on the Marketplace, and is supplied Copy and Modify. While delivered boxed, it doesn’t come with a rezzer. Instead, the entire 99 LI building is a single item that can be pulled out of inventory and positioned as required.

The layout comprises a single large main room on the ground floor with two smaller rooms at one end. the upper floor area is split between a bedroom and gallery overlooking the main room and one end and reached via a staircase, with a loft-like space accessed via a ladder located at the other end of the house. This sits over a broad verandah that also continues along the length of one side of the house.

The CONVAIR Edelweiss Chalet at Isla Caitinara with a Trompe Loeil pavilion on the deck

This verandah is one of the attractions of the house. As it is raised on stilts, the house can sit partially over water, making the long arm of the verandah – with suitable modification – ideal for mooring boats.

Having said that, the slits were something we needed at Isla Caitinara, as the water’s edge there is sufficiently elevated. This allowed me to locate the house at ground level, the verandah neatly forming a part of the existing moorings while also allowing me to remove the eternal steps leading up to the verandah and to the two doors leading into the house on the other side, together with their attendant transparent prims. Making the space available to boats was then a simple matter of removing the railings guarding the edge of the verandah.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

In terms of living space, this is a house that really has a lot to offer: the main room has plenty of space for use as a living / dining / kitchen area, as I hope the slideshow above demonstrates. The two additional downstairs rooms could be used as a separate bathroom and toilet or as a small bathroom / toilet and second bedroom. The upstairs bedroom has a reasonable amount of space, although given the slope of the ceilings, fitting taller furnishings might be a little difficult.

I particularly like the gallery overlooking the main room; this both offers a lower ceiling for a kitchen area helping to make it feel cosier, whilst also offering a nice location for one of my pianos so that it isn’t crowding out the main room – but the space could just as easily be a little office area or similar. Across the main room, the “loft space” is similarly very flexible – it could be a little reading space with books or – as we’ve done, a little snuggle spot, made warmer through the addition of a wood-burning stove that uses the main fireplace flue.

That said there are a few niggles with the build. There is a slight over-reliance in the use of transparent prims. The main floor,for example, uses a mesh and two transparent prims – so why not simply forego the former and make the latter visible and texture hem? That’s what I did. The use of baked shadows can also be an annoyance when modding the build. Again, replacing the main floor solved this in part, although I had to retexture the exterior walls in order to get rid of other nuisances. Finally, some of the textures are disappointingly blurred: I’m still fiddling with options to replace the texture used for the wooden beams.

A mug of hot chocolate before bed, after outfitting the new house

Fortunately, there aren’t insurmountable problems;  as noted above, I solved them easily enough, allowing for fixing the texture blurring. I will admit I felt this let what is otherwise a very capable and worthwhile design down. certainly, the interior mesh faces are more than sufficient to allow comfortable re-decorating of the walls if you wish (I did!), and as noted you get a good deal of space in which to make a home – indoors and out.

Link and SLurl

Moki Yuitza’s CELLS in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Sim Quarterly: Moki Yuitza – CELLS

CELLS is a new region-wide animated installation created by Moki Yuitza that is now open at Electric Monday’s The Sim Quarterly. As is common with exhibits in this Homestead Region – and as indicated by the region’s name – the installation will remain open for a period of three months, allowing people plenty of time to visit and re-visit.

Moki’s work embraces many subjects – the art of creativity, the relationships between sound and colour, perception, the inner workings of the mind, the interpretation of dreams, explorations of abstraction, geometry  and more. Several of these aspects are combined within CELLS to present a unique environment that is both frustrating and fascinating at the same time.

Before visiting the installation, you should make sure your viewer is correctly set-up:

  • Enable Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) – Preferences → Graphics → ensure Advanced Lighting Model is checked. Note there is no need to have Shadows enabled as well.
  • Set your Draw Distance to greater than the width of a region – I would suggest 300m.
  • Ensure your viewer is set to Use Shared Environment – menus → World → Environment → make sure Use Shared Environment is checked.
  • Consider using the region’s audio stream  as it adds a certain aural depth to the installation.
The Sim Quarterly: Moki Yuitza – CELLS

Teleporting will initially deliver you to a sky platform over the main installation where a note card on the installation will be offered. Be aware that the avatar mover at the landing point can be a little aggressive – it planted me in a wall with sufficient force to leave me stuck and in need of a teleport offer from Caitlyn to get free.

Once safely on the platform, touch the blue glowing sphere in the opposite corner to the landing point to be transferred to ground level and the installation itself, which Moki describes as an attempt to look inside the brain of an artificial intelligence to determine how it works, and what we might see as a result.

It’s a highly abstract idea – we all probably have our own views on the matter – and Moki’s presentation is thus justifiably abstract and entirely unique. Blending light, colour, motion and – if you opt to have the audio stream active – sound, the installation is perhaps best described as a kind of lattice of cube-like (or the most part) spaces that climbs upwards through several levels.

The Sim Quarterly: Moki Yuitza – CELLS

Within the cubic spaces of this lattice are groupings of spheres – some coloured and solid, some themselves a simple lattice, some large, some small. Some sit within defined cubes, others float freely. Every so often, and frequently in close succession, these groupings on sphere will rotate around a central axis (with those inside a defined cube turning with the frame of the cub itself) to create new alignments with their neighbours.

Given the context of the installation, this motion perhaps suggests the passage of thought and / or the firing of individual synapses and the AI brain processes information. And visitors can become part of this: at the centre is a double helix-like strand of ramps that climb up through the installation. I doubt their form is accidental, but I’ll leave it to visitors to determine how they interpret them. Along the way they pass through the levels of the installation, allowing visitors to step off the ramps and wander through the spheres as they rotate.

The Sim Quarterly: Moki Yuitza – CELLS

It is here that frustration creeps in as frankly, travelling on foot through CELLS diminishes both its beauty and its complexity. This an installation that should the soared through and witnessed from within and without. As such, I urge you to consider taking flight when visiting (and if you’re comfortable flying in Mouselook, so much the better), or if (like me) you are graced with a 3D mouse – make use of it.

Simply put, beings able to free translate movement from vertical to horizontal and to be able to rise and fall through this installation without constraint utterly alters one’s perspective and heightens appreciation of, and engagement with, CELLS.

The Sim Quarterly: Moki Yuitza – CELLS

A colourful, engaging, potentially mesmerizing and visually impressive, installation, CELLS is definitely worth taking time to visit and explore (again,particularly aerially). For those who like hunting gifts, look out for the conical white prims that are scattered through the installation and rotate   around their own axes. Touch the right one and accept the folder it offers, and you might just gain a reward for your efforts.

SLurl Details

  • CELLS (The Sim Quarterly, rated Moderate)

 

 

 

 

 

2021 SUG meeting week #7 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Isle of Elar, December 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 16th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.

Server Deployments

At the time of writing,  this is yet another week without published release notes. However, there was no deployment to the SLS Main channel on Tuesday, February 16th, leaving it on simulator release 555570.

Simulators on the BlueSteel channel are due to be subject to “some experiments” – one of which apparently involves splitting up the simulators currently on that channel into smaller channels.  It is not anticipated that any of these experiments will have any user-visible impact.

Mazidox Linden also indicated that the LeTigre deployment channel may also be subject to being split into smaller channels, although this has yet to be confirmed.

The aim of this work is to hopefully to make it easier to tune groups of simulators for better performance on their underlying servers, with Oz Linden noting:

We have many more possible system types than we had before… we picked one for the initial uplift, but there are lots of others and many configuration options…. finding the best combinations requires lots of experimentation.

SL Viewer

The Simplified Cache viewer, which incorporates a replacement for VFS caching, was promoted to Release Candidate status on Tuesday, February, 16th, 2021 with the issuing of version 6.4.13.555641.

The rest of the current pipelines remain as:

  • Current release viewer Dawa Maintenance RC Viewer, version 6.4.12.555248, dated January 25, 2021, promoted February 1st, 2021 – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Project Jelly viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.13.555567, February 5, 2021.
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.12.553437, January 7, 2021.
  • Project viewers:
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.12.553511, issued on January 7, 2021.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16, 2019.

In Brief

What does it look like when Second Life is lagging (or otherwise performing poorly) for you. What does it look like when Second Life is performing well?

This rather open question was asked by Mazidox Linden in an attempt to gain as wide a view as possible response – be it about “lag” that might be more directly attributable to viewer-side activities (e.g. rezzing / rendering, which are down to the viewer and may be using data already locally cached), or which are dependent on network connectivity or which may be attributable to definable viewer / server interactions (e.g. drops in general performance when the viewer receives the data relating to an avatar arriving in a region, slow script processing, etc.). From this, it is hoped a more detailed breakdown of server-side impacts for which metrics can be obtained can be drawn up.

It has been noted that some timing appear to be “off”. Examples include:  landmarks failing to refresh, SLurl failing to copy correctly, through to issues of attachment load with RLV that sees the latter engage before all of the former have properly loaded in the viewer). LL are not aware of any Uplift changes that may have caused this (although some – such as the RLV issue were known to exist prior to Uplift).

Land Store – the recent Land Store issues (non-availability of new regions) appears to be down to assumptions made prior to Uplift that “didn’t hold up”, resulting in the need for a back-end bug fix. In the meantime, regions can be obtained by filing a ticket with Support.

The next SUG meeting – Tuesday, February 23rd – will be a farewell party for Oz Linden, who is retiring from the Lab on Friday, February 26th – see: Oz Linden announces his forthcoming departure from Linden Lab.

Lab invites users to suggest new SL last Names

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab

On Thursday, February 11th, Linden Lab announced the release of a new selection of last names for Premium members as a part of the Name Changes capability.

As I noted at the time, the 15 new names added to the list (which also saw the removal of a number of the less popular names from it) included some suitable for the Valentine’s period, and comprised a mix of names suggested by users during the 2019 Last Names competition that was held prior to the launch of Name Changes, and names selected by Linden Lab.

This makes for a quite varied selection of names for those wishing to change their avatar’s last name – but the Lab is always looking for new names that might be suitable.

To this end, the Last Names Suggestions form has been created, allowing anyone who has a suggestion for a potential Second life Last Name to submit it to the Lab for consideration.

When doing so, there are a couple of caveats to note:

  • The Lab does have an extensive list of names already, so submitted and selected names may not immediately appear in any updates to the list of available Last Names.
  • At this point in time, the Lab is not re-using any “legacy” Last Names (those users were able to select prior to 2010) – so be sure to check the list of legacy names before submitting your ideas.

About Name Changes

Name Changes is a Premium-only benefit that allows Premium subscribers to change their first name, their last name or both their first and last name on the payment of fee (US $39.99 + VAT  / sales tax, where applicable at the time of writing). Through it, users can opt to use any first name of their own choice, while last names are selected from a pre-defined list.

If you are unfamiliar with the capability, you can read more via the following links:

 

Oz Linden announces his forthcoming departure from Linden Lab

Posted on by Inara Pey
Oz Linden, circa 2014

On Tuesday, February 16th, 2021, and in a surprise to Second Life users, Linden Lab’s Vice President of Engineering, Oz Linden (aka Scott Lawrence in the physical world) announced his forthcoming departure from the Lab.

Oz joined Linden Lab in 2010, taking on the role of Director of Open Development. At that time, the viewer was in something of a state of flux; the “new” Viewer 2 had not long been launched, the development of which had largely excluded the user community and, particularly, developers who had long been associated with viewer development through the submission of code contributions.

As a result of this and other factors, users and developers alike were at the time feeling alienated and disenfranchised – facts that Oz immediately recognised and sought to address.

In the first instance this was done by replacing the open-source viewer Snowglobe project with a new Snowstorm project, intended to bring as much of the viewer development out into the open as possible – an approach Oz continued to push for throughout his time at the Lab, thus bringing order and surety out of a time that might be best described as having been “chaotic”.

The most obvious areas in which this was demonstrated was his adoption of weekly Open Source Meetings, initially held on Mondays before moving to their current Wednesday slot. These meetings continued alongside other technical in-world meetings such as the Server and Scripter meeting(now the weekly Simulator User Group), which took place even during the drought of other office hours meetings. He also implement the fortnightly Third Party Viewer Development meetings, allow Third Party Viewer developers to discuss all matters relating to the viewer directly with him and members of the Lab’s viewer engineering team.

In 2013, Oz oversaw the complete overhaul of the Lab’s internal viewer develop process, officially called the Viewer Integration and Release Process, which greatly simplified viewer update and viewer feature development. This project also brought me into my first direct contact with Oz when I offered a summary of the new process.  It marked the start of a long and informative acquaintance that I’ve continued to appreciate over the years.

As well as direct contributions to the viewer, Oz also helped open the door to user-led projects aimed at providing broader capabilities for the viewer. While constraints on what could / could not be accepted would always have to be enforced, this approach nevertheless resulted in the adoption of materials in Second Life, and helped to encourage project-based contributions to the viewer that have included capabilities such as the hover height slider, and graphics and camera presets. This approach also included major lab-led projects such as Project Bento also encompass direct user involvement pretty much from their outset.

While it has always been the Lab’s policy to try to recruit personnel from the ranks of users as and when there is a suitable “fit”, in his time at the Lab, Oz has become perhaps one of the most enthusiastic proponents of this approach, frequently seeking – and often succeeding – to recruit qualified users into technical positions under his management.

Oz in his human form. Credit: Linden Lab

As the Lab opted to start work on Project Sansar, Oz decided to pro-actively campaign to take on the work in continuing to develop Second Life, drawing to him those within the Lab who also wished to stay engaged in working on the platform. It is not unfair to say this resulted in one of the most intense periods of Second Life development we have seen, interrupted only be the need to focus on the work of transitioning all of Second Life and its services to run on AWS.

In 2019, Oz – together with Grumpity and Patch Linden – officially joined the Lab’s management team, taking on the role of Vice President of Engineering and putting an official seal on what Grumpity refers to as the Troika: the three of them being largely responsible for determining much of the product and feature direction for Second Life.

In announcing his departure, which sees his last day with the Lab being Friday, February 26th, 2021, Oz states that it has been something he’s been considering for a while:

Some time ago, I reached the point that I could afford to think about retiring but decided to stay to finish moving SL to its new cloud platform. I can’t imagine a better last act in my working life than ensuring that Second Life has this better platform for its future growth. Now that project is done (well, except for a few loose ends), and it’s time for me to move on to the next phase of my life.

He also emphasises – hopefully to prevent the rumour mill turning its wheels – that his decision to leave the Lab is not in any way connected to the company recently being acquired by new investors:

I want to emphasise in the strongest possible terms: my decision has nothing at all to do with the change in ownership of the Lab; the timing really is a coincidence. If anything, I regret that I have overlapped with them for only a few weeks; in that time (and in the time leading up to the change) I have come to respect and appreciate the skills and energy they bring to the company.

For my part, I cannot claim to know Oz as well as I would like to – but I’ve always found find his enthusiasm for Second Life never to be anything less than totally honest and infectious, and his high regard for users utterly genuine and sincere.

As such – and while his actual departure from the Lab is still more than a week away,  – I’d like to take this opportunity to offer him a personal and public “thank you” for all the times he’s provided me with insight and / or encouraged me to get involved in various projects, all of it has been greatly appreciated. I am, and will be, genuinely saddened to see him leave the Lab; we are all losing something in his departure, and the void left will not be easy for the management team to fill.