The limos start to arrive at the spotlights roam the skies outside Caitinara Bar
On Wednesday, February 8th, we opened the new look Caitinara Bar with our monthly Music With Anthony theme night – an opportunity for friends and guests to dress up and come along to the bar and have a little extra fun and conversation.
As February is the month of the Academy Awards, we’d decided to have our own celebration of the music and songs from award-winning films over the decades, as well as music and songs from this year’s nominees. To help set the mood, we did a little decorating as well: spotlight swivelling across the skies outside, a red carpet extending from roadside into the bar, complete with photo backdrop for those wanting to grab a snap or two (we kept the paparazzi outside!), and Oscar himself adorning the walls.
Ylva, Patti and Kerena
As people began to arrive, so the music started to play – Anthony had selected some of the more recent hits from major award-winning films, and as more arrived so the requests came in as well. Of course, there were the classics, like Moon River (Breakfast at Tiffany’s), When You Wish Upon A Star (Pinocchio), Windmills of Your Mind (The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968), to the songs we perhaps grew up with, like Up Where We Belong (An Officer and a Gentleman), through to more recent ballads, such as Adele’s Skyfall – and many, many more.
Everyone took to the evening in style, the gents looking dapper and dashing, the ladies glittering in frocks and gowns, and the conversation flowed around the music. sadly, we didn’t get the red carpet photos we’d hoped, but the sekrit camera was floating around the dance floor, allowing me to capture the odd shot or two :). If you’re not included in the pictures here, my apologies – I’ll make sure to catch you at the next event!
Bou, Anthony, Sam and Sister
If you couldn’t make it to this month’s special event, our next is on Wednesday, March 1st, when we’ll be featuring the music of the New Romantics. BUT! Don’t forget we have music and dancing at the bar every Wednesday and Friday, from 4:00pm through 6:00pm SLT on each evening, with Anthony Westburn providing the tunes on Wednesdays and Joy Canadeo playing them on Fridays.
So, why not make a note in your diaries and come along and join us? And don’t forget as well, Holly Kai Park is always open for visits, complete with our regular art exhibitions and displays.
Holly Kai Park – with the new north-east design to the right
As many readers of this blog know, I both curate the Art at the Park exhibitions at Holly Kai Park, and help to look after the park itself, taking care of landscaping, layout etc. In addition, Caitlyn and I run a small music venue there – Caitinara Bar.
Earlier in the year, Nber Medici, the region’s owner, asked me if a part of the park could be altered to provide room for some of her collection of 2D and 3D art which she has put together over the years, making it something of a Second Life art archive. After some discussion, we decided to re-work the north-east corner of the park, which has been home a quiet art garden and the beach with Caitinara Bar.
The steps up from the Art Park to the new plateau
Unfortunately, I can’t really do “small” changes … so what started out as the intent to keep things much as they were quickly became a major brainstorming session, which in turn culminated in an extensive rebuild of that corner of the park. Hence why, for a time recently, my blogging activities dropped off for several days!
Anyway, the larger part of the work is now done, and the new build is in place. If you’ve visited Holly Kai Park in the past, or if you’re a regular to the park or Caitinara Bar, the changes are pretty obvious, being marked by an extension to the Park’s rocky plateau.
This new rocky outcrop, higher than the main elevation in the park and linked to it by stone steps, will eventually be home to the Medici Collection, featuring both indoor and outdoor displays of 2D and 3D art from Nber’s collection. Right now, the footpaths and buildings are in place, but we’re still sorting through the art, so it will be a little while longer before things are in place and the landscaping is finished.
Going underground: the entrance to the new Caitinara Bar, with steps up to the level above
Directly below this, and accessed via a cave-like opening, is the new Caitinara Bar, which grew out of a suggestion from Caitlyn that we try going underground. It’s a little large than the old beach side bar, with arched brick ceilings and walls, new seating – it even has an actual bar at one end!
We’ll continue to host our Wednesday and Friday night music events at the bar with our DJs Anthony Westburn and Joy Canadeo. In fact, we’ll be christening the new bar on Wednesday, February 8th with a special event celebrating the Academy Awards, so there’s an excuse to don gowns and evening suits and come on over and see the place for yourself!
The north end of the area, reached via an extended Park Walk, will now offer interactive 3D art displays, including Reflections at Midnight, donated by Frankx Lefarve.
The Holly Kai River now sports a new set of falls
We’ll be re-starting the Art at the Park series very soon. But in the meantime, if you fancy visiting the park, you are more than welcome to do so, and Caitinara Bar offers a warm, friendly greeting and great musics every Wednesday and Friday, between 16:00 and 18:00 SLT. Hope to see you there one evening!
Note: this is a compressed version of an article which first appeared in Kultivate Magazine’s January 2017 issue, and which here includes some personal feedback on being peripherally involved in the project.
There can now be few – even among those having only joined Second Life in the last few months – who cannot be aware of project Bento, the work to significantly enhance the Second Life avatar skeleton to better support mesh avatar models, how they are animated and how they might be customised. I was able to observe Bento almost throughout its lifespan. As such, I thought more of a look inside the project might be of interest.
Bento’s heart comes in the form of one person: Vir Linden. Despite the avatar skeleton being one of the most fundamental parts of Second Life which could if interfered with, cause all sorts of issues, Vir was convinced things could be done to make the lot of mesh avatar creators and animators much easier, and without putting additional stress on either the simulator or the viewer. So in early 2015, he started looking at what might be achievable.
Vir Linden, Senior Software Engineer at Linden Lab, and technical project lead for Bento
By roughly April 2015 he felt he had enough information to put together a presentation he could put before senior staff at the Lab. Despite the ambitious nature of the project, potentially adding (at that time) 106 new bones to the avatar, the response was enthusiastic and positive. Troy Linden joined Vir from the Product Team, and Bento was born.
Initially, the work was in-house, involving Lab staff and the Moles. However, as the potential for the project grew, it quickly became apparent that wider expertise would be needed to both give input to the project and help steer the development work. And so it was that a core Bento User Group came together, comprising Lab staff with expertise with the viewer, with the server, and – most significantly – content creators noted for their expertise in developing mesh avatars and avatar accessories (human and non-human), and the people behind the most popular tools for avatar creation and animation: Gaia Clary and Matrice Laville (Avastar) and Cathy Foil (Mayastar).
Like, Vir, Cathy, Gaia and Matrice deserve special recognition for their work on Bento. Not only did they embrace the project and work to update their products to support Bento, they also took on a lot of the grunt work involved in updating essential code used by the viewer to make Bento happen – and they were enthusiastic about doing so. If you make use of a Bento head and are adjusting things using the sliders, offer a word of thanks to the three of them: they’re the people who carefully went through the avatar files in the viewer to get as many of the sliders as possible working with the new facial bones for you to be able to do so.
Vir Linden (foreground) and Matrice Laville (in the top hat, left) at one of the closed user group Bento project meetings (note the fellow in the top hat to the right of the picture is Rider Linden)
Bento meetings initially took place at a small desert island on Agni, the Main grid. This sat on its own channel to ensure the necessary tweaks to the simulator end of things could be made to try out ideas and options and generally lay the foundations of the project. This work progressed over a period of just over six months until there was a good level of confidence that the project could be taken to the next stage.
This involved moving things to Aditi, the beta grid, and opening things to the public at large. The use of Aditi meant that more extensive testing of simulator and viewer changes could take place, more space could easily be made available for people to experiment, and more people in general could get involved. In time, these meetings would eventually move back to the main grid. It also marked the start of my ability to publicly report Bento progress on an almost weekly basis.
Bento enables much more flexibility when creating and animating human and non-human mesh avatars
At the start of the public phase of Bento, the skeleton had stabilised with some 92 additional bones – 60 of which were evenly split between hands and head. However, as the work progressed, this number tended to vary for a time as the need for further bones was identified while some of the new bones were found to be redundant and could be removed. As the same time, additional use cases for Bento were proposed, with every effort being made to incorporate as many as practicable. There were even some fundamental shifts made in how Second Life functions so that more could be achieved through Bento.
An example of this lies with bone translations and rotations. In essence the SL animation system had always worked on the assumption that sliders only affect translation and scale whilst animations only affect rotation, allowing both to work cooperatively.As the animation system was not necessarily seen as an intrinsic part of Bento, little thought was initially given to changing it. However, during the public beta phase of the project, a strong case was made for allowing both translation and rotation through animations – and as a result, the necessary updates were made to the animation system to support this without potential conflicts occurring.
The end of the year is once more approaching, which is often a time of reflection as we look back over the old before pausing to await the arrival of the new. It’s become something of a tradition in these pages for me to look back over the articles and coverage of the year’s events I’ve managed to write-up, and offer a chance to revisit the ups and downs and the good and the bad the last twelve months have brought us.
To keep things digestible, I’ve broken this year’s review into two parts. This one covers July to December. You can find January to June here.
Linden Lab released an update to the Oculus Rift project viewer. A I subsequently reported (see the article updates), people found it suffered significant issues, and appeared to be a step backwards. The JIRA raised for the viewer quickly grew. With a week, the Lab announced they were suspending work on Oculus Rift support in the viewer. CTRL-ALT-Studio offered to bridge the gap, but only on an interim basis.
Caledonia presented the penultimate part of her series on promoting Second Life events, and Draxtor delved into games in Second Life, through the work of Sergio Delacruz. Meanwhile, I received an invitation to find out more about the Helping Haven Community Gateway, before beaming aboard an avatar-sized replica of the original Starship Enterprise, courtesy of Cathy Foil.
Lumiya 3.0 arrived, with a host of goodies, including a new user interface. Rock Your Rack in support of the US National Breast Cancer Foundation was announced, as was the second fund-raising season for Team Diabetes of SL, while the 5th annual Shivers Unleashed music festival took place. The big news for the month, events-wise, was that PULSE SL, in support of the victims and families of those lost in the Orlando nightclub shooting had raised a staggering L$5.5 million.
Sansar
Ed Baig from USA Today presented a video spot about project Sansar. A little later, and as I reported, he later gave a matching write-up on the platform. Latter in the month, I looked at articles on Sansar from THE and Techcrunch.
Personal
I completed a full redesign of Holly Kai Park, which included the Tiered Garden Wall product by Alex Bader, which was also put to use at home. I finally caught the stunning and award-winning animation The Tyger, by Radheya Jegatheva, son of SL’s own Jayay Zifanwe, on YouTube.
Windlight announced a re-branding to Kultivate, and the Lab blogged about recent SL updates and I added some additional info and links to more in-depth coverage in this blog, which included a look at the new Gaming Islands, designed to introduce users to Skill Gaming in SL.
Firestorm updated with Jelly Dolls (or Avatar Complexity to give the formal name for the capability), and I revisited Hitomi Tiponi’s work producing the Starlight UI Skins and goodies for the official viewer from the Lab. The latter announced the new Marketplace search, so long in beta, was finally live. I also picked up on Strawberry Singh’s request to highlight the issue of SL Marketplace full permissions goods scams.
Thanks to bots discovering it, the SL wiki went into lock-down for the second time in recent years, and while the Lab indicated they hoped to have things sorted “soon”, it remains locked as we reach the end of the year. More woes hit SL in August, and April Linden explained why.
Sansar
I produced the second in my Sansar Summaries, rounding-up all the news and information on the platform I’d been able to cull from the Lab, the media and other sources. August saw the Lab announce the first batch of Sansar Creator Preview invitations had been issued. However, what interested me more was the announcement indicated that “Sansar” was now officially the platform’s title – the “project” having been dropped.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 