On Tuesday, October 29th, 2024, Linden Lab announced that the company’s founder, Philip Rosedale has been appointed to the full-time role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO), in a move that will undoubtedly cause excitement in some quarters.
As well as founding the company, Rosedale served as its CEO through until 2010, when he departed the company to work on various new ventures, including Coffee and Power and, most notable, the VR-centric virtual world / social spaces company, High Fidelity.
The latter actually became an investor in Linden Lab / Second Life in January 2022 in a deal which included the transfer of some staff from High Fidelity to Linden Lab, together distributed computing patents held by High Fidelity, which has transitioned by that time toy working on solutions focused on spatial audio that would allow people to work collaboratively whilst geographically separate. Also as a part of that deal, Rosedale took up the role as a special advisor to the Second Life management team and the Board at Linden Lab.
In this role he has spent the last 2+ years providing advice and support to the Lab’s Board under Executive Chairman Brad Oberwager and the executive team, and has been visible at a number of Lab-led town hall meetings and similar events as well as participating in various Lab Gab events.
In his new role as CTO, Rosedale “will guide technology and product strategy daily” alongside the executive management team, and he will also resume a seat on the company’s Board.
Over the last four years since the acquisition, Linden Lab has re-focused itself on improving and serving Second Life. We’ve divested ourselves of unnecessary projects, streamlined our operations, increased the quality of customer support, and grown our overall revenues and profitability. We’re now in a unique position to define the future of virtual worlds, and Philip is returning to help myself and the exec team achieve that goal.
– Brad Oberwager, Linden Lab Executive Chair, via the announcement
Philip Rosedale Round Table Event
The announcement also indicated the Lab will be holding a Community Round Table event on Friday, November 1st, 2024, at 10:00 SLT featuring Philip Rosedale. At the time of writing, the venue for the event was TBA – this post will be updated with details when available. However, questions are being sought from Second Life users, so if you have a question for Philip Rosedale, you can submit it via this form.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, October 27th, 2024
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 7.1.10.10800445603, formerly the DeltaFPS RC, dated September 11, promoted September 17 – NO CHANGE.
Release Candidate: ExtraFPS RC, version 7.1.11.11296522354, October 18 – NO CHANGE.
Ashemi, October 2024 – click any image for full size
Ashemi is a setting which, like the tide, ebbs and flows in and out of Second Life. The work of SL partners Ian Ventori (Jayshamime) and Ime Poplin (Jayshamime), and has been featured in this blog numerous times since 2016. This is because Jay and Ime (sometimes with help from friends) always put together settings which carry within them certain motifs and themes which can be found in previous designs, allowing each version of Ashemi to stand both in its own right whilst also sharing threads of ideas which flow through all of them like a familiar musical refrain.
The last time I visited an Ashemi build, it took the form of a repurposed oil or natural gas platform sitting out in blue waters somewhere, its derricks and drilling and recovery equipment all gone, replaced by the living spaces and businesses of a tiny community, thus making it an island of life in a broad sea. Something of this theme is continued in the 2024 build, but in a very different manner.
Ashemi, October 2024
The region sits as an island, a semi-industrialised place looking like part of a much larger conurbation, but which seems to have fallen on hard times. A single tall smokestack exhales a white plume into the sky as it surpasses the local buildings in its height as it does so. These other buildings rise as factory blocks, apartment buildings with places of business below, and a single, strange structure rising on four stout legs to become a luxury apartment overlooking its downtrodden neighbours and offering shelter to the autumnal trees growing beneath it.
There is little other greenery to be found within the walls formed by the island’s buildings, save for an attempt by someone to make a garden around their trailer home. Here, grass has been planted together with shrubs and rhubarb is being forced under glass. Whoever lives here values their privacy: the trailer home is surrounded by a tall chain link fence topped by razor wire. Outside of this, lanterns hang prettily, suggesting a welcome might yet be found in the trailer whilst adding their illumination to that of the neon signs and hoardings of the surrounding buildings. However, whom they might attract to their businesses is anyone’s guess; even the local swimming pool is looking a tad sad, whilst a once pristine fairground rides have most certainly aged beyond their prime, leaving only the local café as possibly deserving custom within its well-kept interior.
Ashemi, October 2024
Which is also not to stay nature has entirely given up here; trees grow along the southern shoreline, whilst to the southwest the land opens up into s park-like headland where Sakura blossom and other trees offer shade and places to sit might be found (as they can indeed be found elsewhere in the setting). It is from here that visitors can get a good view of the outlying elements of the setting and add to the mystery of its possible backstory.
Two block-like islands sit just off the region’s boundaries. They carry on them squat apartment blocks hunched over their ground-floor business, the lights within them and on their advertising hoards bright and warm, feed by the overhead powerlines following the grid patterns of streets where vehicles and people might be seen.
Ashemi, October 2024
Given their regular shapes, these islands appear entirely artificial – but were they built over the waters around them, or were they once both part of the same landmass, perhaps even joined to Ashemi’s near-deserted form, only to become regularly-shaped bastions of town life as sea levels rose and cut them asunder from one another, whilst also encroaching on their heartland to form it into the island of Ashemi?
A third blocky island rises from the sea on the other side of Ashemi in relation to its park-like headland. It is crowned by massive structures dwarfing anything else to be found, with huge clusters of cables draped in the deep canyons between them. Industrial-looking, dark and almost foreboding, it stands in stark contrast to anything else to be seen, adding a further twist to any story one might try to conjure for the setting’s history.
Ashemi, October 2024
That this is place potential somewhere in the near-future can perhaps most clearly be seen in the design of that third off-region island. However, another clue can be found in the fact that air cars and moving back and forth in the sky, together with what look like automated cargo carriers. The air cars look to be for travel between the town-like islands and between them and the more futuristic island with its towers and cable and dishes. In this, they almost completely ignore the little island of Ashemi and its various attractions, perhaps living it to be visited only by boat.
Rich in detail and with multiple places to sit, this iteration of Ashemi again offers many opportunities for the imagine to wonder about its origins and for the taking of photographs. My thanks to Jay for the personal invite to pay a visit.
A “boarding pass” for a sub-orbital flight aboard Deep Blue Aerospace’s “Rocketaholic” capsule and Nebula-1 booster. Credit: Deep Blue Aerospace
One of the most expansive space programmes, both national and commercial, is that of China. I’ve covered multiple missions carried out by the Chinese national space programme both in terms of human spaceflight and the establishment of an orbital space station, and robotic missions to the Moon and Mars. I’ve also touched on the country’s growing commercial space sector, some of which seemingly “borrowing” heavily from the likes of SpaceX in terms of vehicle design and development – particularly with regards to reusable boosters.
At the top of the list for the latter is Jiangsu Deep Blue Aerospace Technology. Founded in 2016, the company has been recognised for developing a family of semi-reusable launch vehicles called Nebula – which bear a remarkable resemblance to the SpaceX Falcon 9.
The smaller Nebula-1 vehicle-capable of lifting payloads in the 2-8 tonnes range – has been undergoing increasingly ambitious launch and landing tests of the vehicle’s first stage over the last several years. The company had been planning to lunch the vehicle on its first orbital flight, including the booster returning to a landing, be the end of 2024. However, the loss of a Nebula-1 first stage during a high altitude launch and recovery flight in late September has now put this in doubt.
The Nebula-2 vehicle, meanwhile, not only resembles Falcon 9 with very similar landing legs and grid fins, but is also a very similar payload capability, including up to 20 tonnes to low-Earth orbit (LEO) in a full expendable mode (compared to Falcon 9’s 22 tonnes when fully expendable). It is due to make its orbital debut in late 2025.
Whether either vehicle can be considered a direct “rip off” of Falcon 9 is perhaps debatable: form follows function when it comes to flight dynamics; but it’s hard to imagine Deep Blue reaching their rocket design and propulsion choice without them taking a long, hard look at SpaceX.
Deep Blue’s capsule and launch vehicle bear a remarkable similarity to the Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 operated by SpaceX. Credit: Deep Blue
This is perhaps even more true when looking at the latest announcement concerning the company’s other planned area of operations: sub-orbital tourist flight to the edge of space. On October 23rd, 2024, the company’s CEO, Huo Liang, announced these sub-orbital flights will start in 2027, and ticket reservations are now open.
The flights will, according to Huo, be akin to Blue Origin’s New Shepard flights: lift-off using a recoverable booster (in this case, the Nebula-1 first stage), carrying a capsule capable of sitting up to 6 people in two rows of back-to-back seats, prior to the booster separating and returning to a safe landing.
Once separated, the capsule will coast ballistically, passing through the Kármán line at 100km altitude, the passengers getting to enjoy around 5-minutes in weightlessness, prior to gravity making its presence felt once more as the capsule commences its fall back to Earth. Parachutes will be used to slow the descent until just above the ground, when four pairs of mid-mounted motors will be fired for a soft landing. It’s not clear if the capsule will include either a “crush ring” at its base designed to absorb the final impact with the ground (like the New Shepard capsules) or utilise some form of inflatable cushion, as with Boeing’s CST-100 capsules.
What is interesting is the capsule’s uncanny resemblance to the SpaceX Crew Dragon. The two are so similar in overall looks and dimensions, one might be forgiven for thinking they are the product of the same company. The only at-a-glance difference (outside of the paint scheme) being Crew Dragon had two viewports on one side of the vehicle, and the Deep Blue vehicle – which at the October 24th announcement bore the somewhat clumsy name of “Rocketaholic” in slides and literature – has six primary viewports, three on either side and aligned to give all six passengers a view out of the vehicle, and one more to either sides of the seating, for a total of eight.
Internally, the differences are likely to be more noticeable, including the back-to-back seating arrangement of the Deep Blue vehicle and the fact that whilst slightly smaller than Crew Dragon, it potentially has a larger internal volume available to passengers as it does not have any docking and hatch mechanisms in the nose area.
Renderings of Deep blue’s Rocketaholic capsule. Note that like Crew Dragon, the vehicle has an oval, rather than circular cross-section when seen from above. Credit: Deep Blue Aerospace
Whether or not operations do commence in 2027 remains to be seen; it is entirely unclear as to where development of the capsule stands or when practical testing will commence (if it hasn’t already).
Deep Blue is actually the second Chinese entity to “borrow” from SpaceX for space tourism flights. In 2021, CAS Space – a private venture spin-off of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) – announced they would start conducting fare-paying space tourism flights in 2024, after a (surprisingly) short 3-year flight development and test cycle of a capsule and booster system.
In this, CAS Space perhaps borrowed even more heavily from SpaceX. Not only do full-scale mock-ups of its capsule show it to be another to borrow heavily from Crew Dragon (and which shares pretty much the same dimensions as the Deep Blue capsule), the booster somewhat resembles Blue Origin’s New Shepard – but is designed to make a return to the launchpad, a-la the SpaceX Starship / Super Heavy – where it is to be grabbed by arms on the launch tower, rather than landing on the ground.
Two views of a full-scale mock-up of the proposed CAS Space sub-orbital space tourism capsule, which is approximately the same size as Deep Blue’s. Credit CAS Space (2022)
Since the initial announcement, CAS Space has (unsurprisingly) revised the date on which they plan to start fare-paying flights, moving it back to (currently) 2028, in order to allow sufficient time for vehicle development and testing. However, they have also indicated plans to operate it not from a spaceport, but from a dedicated “Aerospace theme park”, with one flight taking place roughly every 4 days. Flights on either Deep Blue or CAS are rumoured to be in the US $210,000 per person, and be interesting to see whether either will come to pass.
Space Evasion and Detection Avoidance
In my previous Space Sunday article I wrote a little about the increasing issue of space debris in orbit around Earth and the increasing need for satellites to manoeuvre away from chunks of dead satellites which beak-up in orbit, used rocket parts and so on. However, that’s not the only reason for some satellites requiring an ability to adjust their orbit. Another is to evade or avoid detection.
This is something particularly used by so-called “spy” satellites, like the various families operated over the decades by the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Many of these include the ability to be “re-tasked” – have their orbital periods and inclinations changed – so as to be able to overfly targets of interest or to take longer to pass over a country in order to gather more detailed intelligence. However, the degree to which this is possible has always been somewhat constrained in terms of how much propellant these satellites might carry and how much they can use to achieve orbital adjustments without unduly shortening their anticipated operational life. But that might all be changing in the future, thanks to the US Space Force’s X-37B automated spaceplane.
X-37B 1 sits on the runway after landing at the Shuttle Landing Facility, Kennedy Space Centre, November 12th 2022, the 909th day of the OTV-6 (USA-299) mission. Note the USAF markings, as the vehicle lifted-off in 2020, prior to the official formation of the US Space Force. Credit: Staff Sgt. Adam Shanks, USAF/USSF
Also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), the X-37B is a highly-secretive vehicle programme capable of exceptionally long-duration missions in orbit. For example, OTV-6 launched on May 17th, 2020 and returned to Earth on November 12th, 2022, spending a little under 3 hours shy of 909 complete days in space. The USSF / Department of Defense is pretty quiet about the purpose of the two X-37B vehicles, other than stating they are for carrying out research into advanced technologies for space application and the fact that they do carry experiments related to NASA as a part of their payloads.
But in October 2024, the USSF was a little more forthcoming, revealing that the current X-37B flight, which launched in December 2023, has been carrying out a series of aerobraking tests in Earth’s atmosphere to examine the use of such capabilities to radically alter an orbital vehicles trajectory and inclination around Earth.
Aerobraking – using the frictional heat of the upper layers of an atmosphere as a means to both decelerate a space vehicle and / or to alter its orbit – is a process that is well understood on paper and has been used by both NASA and the European Space Agency. The former has used it on their of its Mars missions: Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter; whilst ESA has used aerobraking in conjunction with its ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission to Mars and its Venus Express mission.
Data from all of these missions was used in the preparations for X-37B to make use of Earth-based aeorbraking to significantly alter its orbital period and orbital shape around the Earth. The attempt – carried out some time between October 10th and October 15th – was designed specifically to lower the overall perigee of the vehicle’s elliptical orbit and make its orbit more circular without the use of propellants, and bring the craft into a position where it can carry out the next phase of the mission.
An artist’s rendering of the U.S. Space Force’s robotic X-37B conducting an aerobraking, using the drag of Earth’s atmosphere, to alter its orbit. Credit: Boeing
Whilst the manoeuvre was fairly basic, it is seen as a precursor to more complex manoeuvres by the vehicle on future missions as the USSF researches the use of aerobraking as a strategic tool which could be employed by future generations of MilSats as well as vehicles like the X-37B.
By carrying out an atmospheric dip of this nature, the X-37B demonstrates its ability to become a very effective operational, rather than experimental vehicle. Having such a craft that could in theory be deployed to orbit reasonably rapidly and equipped with a range of intelligence-gathering equipment would be exceptionally worrying to another military power.
Under normal circumstances, satellites are highly predictable; locate one, track it for a while, and you can predict when it is going to be below the horizon (and therefore unable to see / hear you) and when it is going to pop back up again. Thus, it is very easy to determine when you might be able to carry out an operation you’d rather others didn’t know about immediately – such as the large-scale movement of troops and materiel to a foreign border or the deployment of a fleet to open sea.
However, if you can never be sure exactly where those eyes are or whether then are looking at your forces, things get a lot more complicated, resulting in potential second-guessing, delay or even backing away from what might be seen as overly aggressive actions.
[The X-37B is] fascinating [because it] can do an orbit that looks like an egg and, when it’s close to the Earth, it’s close enough to the atmosphere to turn where it is. Which means our adversaries don’t know – and that happens on the far side of the Earth from our adversaries – where it’s going to come up next. And we know that that drives them nuts. And I’m really glad about that.
– Former USAF Secretary Heather Wilson
Of course, the flipside of this is the further militarisation of space and the risk of it becoming a future combat environment.
A rare (and rotated) look at the X-37B’s payload bay, looking down over the rear of the vehicle. The payload bay (2.1 m long by 1.2 m wide) is shown with the doors open, but the vehicle’s solar arrays used to generate electrical power in their stowed position. Credit: Boeing
The aerobraking is not the only unique aspect of this mission. During their first 6 flights the two OTV vehicles operated in low Earth orbit. Prior to the mission launching, the USSF indicated that in part it would involve testing the effects of radiation on various materials and technologies whilst in an elliptical orbit sufficient for the vehicle to pass through the Van Allen radiation belts. However, it was not until February 2024 that amateur sleuths who track orbital craft were able to confirm the vehicle’s exact orbit: an inclination of 59.1 degrees to the equator, and ranging between 300 km and 38,500 km from the surface of the planet!
This discovery led to speculation as to how the vehicle would survive re-entry when coming home, as it would be entering Earth’s atmosphere at a speed closer to that of a vehicle returning from the Moon or Mars than from LEO, and thus experience much higher temperature regimes on a direct passage back into the atmosphere in order to land. Now, with these orbital adjustments carried out, the vehicle has no need to make such a high-speed re-entry, as it is once again operating at a significantly lower orbital velocity.
Quite when the vehicle will return, however, is unclear. Until now, each successive X-37B mission has been longer than the last – but there is no absolute requirement for this. Also the USSF has said on the matter than now it is established in it new LEO, the vehicle will commence the next phase of its mission.
A Second from Disaster
Whatever one’s view of the SpaceX Starship / Super Heavy launch system (and there are multiple reasons to doubt its actual viability as a genuine flight system / revenue earner), the capture of the Super Heavy booster at the landing facility during the recent Integrated Flight Test 5 (IFT 5) on October 13th was a remarkable achievement. However, audio accidentally released on October 25th reveals the flight of the booster almost ended in it striking the ground in close proximity to the launch tower and stand.
I gotta be really up-front about scary shit that happened …We had a misconfigured spin gas abort …and we were one second away from that tripping and telling the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower. We had a whole bunch of new aborts and commit criteria that we tried to double-check really well, but, I mean, I think our concern was well-placed, and one of these came very close to biting us.
– Unnamed SpaceX official
According to SpaceX engineers, the Super Heavy booster used for the October 2024 IFT5 came within once second of flight systems acting on an incorrect abort signal which would have seen the booster smashing into the ground close to the launch stand facilities. Credit: SpaceX
The audio was released inadvertently as a result of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk taking a call from his engineers about a post-flight engineering review whilst apparently more interested in a video game he was playing, and then subsequently releasing a clip of his game-play which included audio of the discussions.
What is striking about the audio is that it is made clear that the engineers had plenty of data indicating the flight was on the edge, and that some of the issues could have been addressed before the flight (fore example, they have evidence the vehicle could lose one or more of the triangular chines running vertically up the booster to protect essential external equipment during its descent – and that’s precisely what happened), and they knew there had been an insufficient amount of time given to a full pre-flight review ahead of IFT5.
We were scared about the fact that we had 100 aborts that were not super-trivial … which were routed in we didn’t do as good a review for pre-flight one lift-off.
– Another SpaceX official discussing the review of IFT5
The audio also includes a hint that the engineers are concerned about the next flight is turning into a struggle between trying to get it ready in a short a period of time as possible and actually having the time to properly address and mitigate the problems identified with IFT5.
Obviously, given the brevity of the recording, it is not clear was was said in the rest of the meeting, or what Musk’s overall response to the concerns raised might have been. However, later the same day he did take to Twitter / X.com to state IFT6 would be happening sooner rather than later.
Grauland / Primary Colors, September 2024 – blog post †
The following notes were taken from my audio recording + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, October 25th, 2024. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.
Meeting Purpose
The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development. This meeting is held once a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they re conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.
Release viewer: version 7.1.10.10800445603, formerly the DeltaFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, etc), dated September 11, promoted September 17 – No change.
Performance improvements: enhanced texture memory tracking, broader hardware compatibility and higher FPS gain; additional code to improve texture streaming on rigged attachments (e.g. if an earring is made with 2K textures, the viewer will correctly calculate the required resolution for the textures and download them, rather than downloading the full 2K textures), etc.
Aesthetics improvements: new Antialiasing setting – SMAA; Contrast Adaptive Sharpening; Khronos Neutral Tone Mapping (can be changed to ACES via the RenderTonemapType Debug setting).
UI Optimisations: lessening the impact of UI rendering on frame rates / performance (discussed more fully at 16:52-18:04].
Upcoming Viewers
ExtraFPS is described as having some “high priority” bug which require fixing before it progresses to release status.
The next RC viewer to follow ExtraFPS is likely to be the Maintenance B build, which includes work put on hold while the focus was on PBR and non-PBR related performance fixes.
Performance improvement will continue to be part of the on-going work with the viewer, but once ExtraFPS is promoted to release status, it is unlikely that the Lab will produce viewers dedicated only to performance fixed for a while.
From the comments made, it appears as if LL are going to try to pull work from what had been the Maintenance C RC viewer (also put on hold whilst the performance work was going on) into the next viewer build as well.
It was acknowledged that this approach may need toa delay in getting the updated Maint B viewer out and to release status, but it is hoped that in the long run, it will mean a faster release cycle with the viewer builds which eventually follow behind Maint B.
[Video 21:09-22:27] Vir reiterates that as the Maint B(/C) viewer appears, it should mark the return of Linux to the list of official viewer builds.
However, the Linux flavour will be based on code contributions rather than dedicated support from with in the Lab.
If things break with it, the Lab will attempt to fix them, but will not hold back viewer releases as a result of Linux-specific breakages / bugs.
The replacement of the Vivox Voice service and plug-in, with the WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”). Roxie Linden is leading this work.
Key benefits:
WebRTC supports a wide range of real-time communications tools in common use (e.g. Google Meet), supporting audio, video and data communications, and is thus something of a “standard” approach.
Offers a good range of features: automatic echo cancellation, better noise cancellation and automatic gain control, much improved audio sampling rates for improved audio quality.
Opens the door to features and capabilities to voice services which could not be implemented whilst using Vivox.
Status
There is now a “pretty significant fraction” of users still using a non-WebRTC capable viewer.
LL would like this number to be further reduced before they completely pull the back-end support for Vivox. As such, the exact time frame on when the switch might be thrown is still TBA.
[Via chat throughout the 10-25 min point in the meeting, and with some Voice from approx 18 mins] It was noted that Voice roll-off under WebRTC should work the same as for Vivox, BUT the range at which is rolls-off completely is greater (60m).
Some have reported that this does not appear to be the case, with roll-off potentially not working at all (also reported at the last TPVD meeting).
The first part of this update referenced rigged attachment texture streaming as noted in the ExtraFPS summary, above.
Also as noted above, the work on improving performance has reached a point of diminishing returns for dedicated viewer updates, so future performance improvements will be folded in ither other viewer updates making it to the Develop branch.
The above noted, LL is still digging into specific hardware types where the viewer does not perform well (e.g. some AMD graphics chips) in order to determine what might be done to improve things.
If people running a viewer with the DeltaFPS code included are still fining they have very poor performance (e.g. single-digit FPS; an already low FPS cut in half, etc.), they are asked to file a Canny report and included information on their hardware (e.g. copy-paste their hardware information as displayed in Help → About, in the viewer).
[Video: 7:57-9:07] A change was introduced with the Delta FPS code such that if the viewer is running in the background on a system for more than 10 seconds, it will down-rez textures to prevent over-use of VRAM when it is not the application in focus.
This has received completely mixed feedback: some feel 10 seconds is too long a period to wait; others feel it is too short; those running multi-screen systems with SL on one monitor dislike the fact that when they focus away from SL to work on their other screen, SL “goes blurry”, etc.
As a result, LL is considering making this a switchable option, so users can decide whether they want to utilise it or not.
[Video 9:20-11:13] A discussion on using Vsync in the viewer vs. limiting frame rates (e.g. through the viewer or via something like the Nvidia control panel).
[Video 27:29-33:33] A discussion on brightness and gamma / PBR vs non-PBR / use of HDR rendering + tone mapping.
In terms of tone mapping, the decision is to move back o ACES as the default in light of feedback, but people will remain able to select Khronos Neutral or ACES through Preferences.
The long-term plan is to have tone mapping and colour correction per sky setting, allowing region holders / designs to choose which ones they want.
As such, content creators are reminded no to bake tone mapping in their base colour / diffuse map but let the viewer’s post-processing handle the tone mapping.
As per previous meetings: in order for PBR lighting to render anywhere close to correctly, alpha blending had to be switched from SRGB to linear colour space. This can cause some older content using Blinn-Phong, to look either more opaque or more transparent than in did pre-PBR.
The fix for this giving people the ability to adjust the alpha/gamma on per texture entry for the object (including no mod items)
A link was provided to an installer for a viewer with the code at the meeting, but this later generated a 404 error.
In Brief
The latter part of the meeting included a discussion on documentation + communication (e.g. communicating more fully the reasoning behind PBR – the move towards better and more consistent content using glTF).
† 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.
The third exhibition at the Kondor Art Museum, a part of Hermes Kondor’s Kondor Art Centre, features a total of six artists exhibiting theough the gallery’s halls. They comprise: Mareea Farrasco, Sina Souza, Ilyra Chardin, Zia Branner and Thus Yootz, with Hermes himself rounding out the six. Some of these artists art among my personal favourites for their depth of expression and presentation, so this has been an exhibition I’ve been wanting to drop into since it opened on October 17th, 2024.
As with the first exhibition at the the Museum in April 2024, Ilyra Chandin’s 3D pieces occupying the foyer of the gallery building, as well as at the entrance and on the roof.
Kondor Art Museum, October 2024: Zia Branner
To the left of the entrance, the first hall in the museum houses a selection of pieces by Thus Yootz, someone who is, in my opinion, one of the most expressive and at times artistically experimental artists in Second Life. Here she presents 10 pieces that very much demonstrate these facts, with landscape pieces in monochrome and colour mixing with gorgeous and expressive line and wireframe styles.
Following Thus, and occupying the rear hall of the museum’s lower level, together with the hall to which it leads, is a two-stage exhibition by Sina Souza, another highly expressive artist I admire. The first part of this selection is a series focused on the colour red, some of which carry something of a social commentary. Beyond this is the right-side hall, containing seven colour / monochrome pieces, all equally evocative.
Kondor Art Museum, October 2024: Mareea Farrasco
Upstairs, the two halls feature a selection of Mareea Farrasco’s always-engaging Second Life landscapes and avatar studies, and across the landing, Zia Branner’s abstract paintings. Again, both of these artists have a unique approach to their work, and I never fail to be drawn into their images and art.
Rounding-out the exhibition, again in the front hall to the right of the entrance, is more of Hermes’ own quite superb photography from the physically world as he takes us on a further visit to Lisbon’s Reservatorio da Patriarcal, also known as the Water Museum. Captured in a black and white, these are quite studding photos in terms of their focus, angle and contrasts of shadow and light which bring the walls and walkways of the museum to life in an almost tactile way; one can literally sense the smooth hardness of the metal railings and steps and the soft roughness of the stone.
Kondor Art Museum, October 2024: Sina Souza
In all, an engaging series of art displays from six equally engaging artists
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 