Category: News

Windows 10 OpenGL issue affecting some Second Life users

Posted on by Inara Pey

win10-logoUpdated, October 7th: AMD and Nividia have released drivers which should hopefully address this issue. See the comment from Lee McKay (below), and my article here.

In August, Microsoft issued their Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which result in some problems for users around the world, notable with the operating system locking-up or freezing (see this Reddit thread as an example).

As a result of the issues, Microsoft issued a series of hotfixes and updates, culminating in a Cumulative Update KB3176938.

However, since its release on August 31st, 2016, KB3176938 has given rise to renewed Windows 10 / OpenGL issues  which are impacting a number of games – and also impacting Second Life.

Whirly Fizzle has raised a JIRA on the problems – BUG-37795 (based on a Firestorm filing by Vicky Aura (FIRE-20034). The issue is intermittent, but when encountered, results in exceptionally low FPS rates (on the order of 1 or 2 fps). The issue tended to occur when moving focus away from Second Life to another running application, and then switching back. Whirly reports that on some systems this problem is intermittent but on other systems it will reproduce after the viewer has lost focus for the first time in a session.

The issue has also been raised on the Microsoft forums by Firestorm developer Ansariel Hiller – but do note, the issues is not related just to the use of Firestorm, other SL viewers can be affected.

Currently, if you are a Windows 10 user and being hampered by this issue, the only known workaround is to uninstall KB3176938. Again, as Whirly points out in the JIRA, How To Geek provides instructions on how to do this – and please refer to the comment from Torric below, when doing so.

Again, please note this is not a Second Life problem, it is an issue within Windows 10 affecting assorted applications and games using OpenGL.

With thanks to Whirly Fizzle.

Lab releases Second Life starter avatars with a “fantasy” theme

Posted on by Inara Pey
Petrol Sue, Jasper, Leah, Emrys and Dmitri - five of the new "fantasy" starter avatars
Petrol Sue, Jasper, Leah, Emrys and Dmitri – five of the new “fantasy” starter avatars. Credit: Linden Lab

On Thursday, September 1st, Linden Lab announced the release of a further set of ten new starter avatars.

Referred to as a set of “fantasy” inspired avatars, the new collection features five male and five female avatars based on the system avatar, but include mesh accessories. Two of the avatars are vampires, providing newcomers with the option to have such characters without having to opt for the fully mesh starter avies.

The ten avatars are paired off into five genres: the aforementioned vampire, plus magic (with an unabashed Harry Potter element to the male character of “Emrys”); cyber / sci-fi; post-apocalyptic (regulars at TPVD meetings may recognise “Petrol Sue”, as worn by Grumpity Linden at the meetings); and steampunk. All come with pets (or in the case of Leah and Jaxon, from the cyber / sci-fi theme, drones).

The Morgan avatar, one of the two "magic" themed avatars, and her familiar, Theo
The Morgan avatar, one of the two “magic” themed avatars, and her familiar, Theo

Commenting on the new avatars, the blog post reads in part:

Over the years, we’ve continued to apply what we’ve learned about building techniques to our starter avatars, improving their aesthetics and optimizing them to load quickly. Our latest Fantasy starter avatars are vibrant examples of what we consider “balanced content” that is both performance-optimized and looks beautiful — they can save you time getting immersed in one of our many role-playing communities without unnecessarily lagging yourself or others. We know that content creators want to create optimized content for their customers, and we encourage creators to study these new avatars as examples of balanced content.

The blog post goes on to state that the avatars have been designed with Avatar Rendering Complexity in mind, and have been fine-tuned for “low ARC” scores. When testing on my system (i5 4590 with a GTx 970 GPU, the female avatars reported at between 8980 (“Leah”), through to 18,352 for “Petrol Sue”. The male avatars fell between 9,837 (“Emrys”) and 14,981 (“Jaxon”).

As with the last set of “system” (or “classic”) avatars (see here), these all use attached AOs, some of which continue to appear a little jerky during transitions (or lack thereof), suddenly flicking from one animation / pose to the next.

The new avatars can be accessed by going to Me (/Avatar) > Choose an Avatar > New Avatars (tab should be open by default). Once an avatar is selected, it is transferred to your inventory and worn.

To mark the release of the new avatars, the Lab also issued a promotional video:

Little Yoshiwara, Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Little Yoshiwara
Little Yoshiwara

I’ve been in an oriental frame of mind recently, hopping around regions with Japanese and Chinese flavours. I’ve been helped in this by a set of note cards put together by Sayu  白湯 (EmpressRoslyn Winslet), who is also one of the people involved in Little Yoshiwara on the mainland continent of Satori,  which Caitlyn and I jumped over to visit one lunch time recently.

Founded in 2007 by Xuemei Yiyuan, and landscaped collaborative by Xuemei and Sayu, Little Yoshiwara is a combination of public, free-form role-play and residential environment modelled after the final years of the Edo period in Japan, which were referred to as Bakumatsu (幕末, literally meaning “closing curtain”), between (roughly) 1853 and 1867. These were tumultuous times for Japan, encompassing both internal strife and external interventions on the part of America, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (including the joint bombardment of Shimonoseki in 1864).

Little Yoshiwara
Little Yoshiwara

Given this, one might expect Little Yoshiwara to be perhaps leaning toward the militaristic in look and feel, but this is not the case at all. Instead, visitors find themselves in a region-wide environment (which actually spills into neighbouring Ribush to the south and connects with two parcels in Chodron to the west), given over to a range of cultural aspects of traditional Japanese life. Through the town, one can find a wide range of classes covering geisha, samurai and shinto traditions, together with classes for those interested in learning about Kabuki (歌舞伎), the classical Japanese dance-drama.

What is particularly pleasing about Little Yoshiwara is the very natural layout: public buildings and classrooms intermingle with private residences; houses rubs shoulders with farm small holdings; shines sit at the sides of paths and tracks, while woodlands, gardens and water features bring everything together. This approach encourages visitors are encouraged to explore widely, increasing the opportunities to encounter local members of the various communities.

Little Yoshiwara
Little Yoshiwara

A subtle aspect to the region is the use of cushions. These can be found scattered across the public areas, but rather than for sitting, they are in fact a networked teleport system, allowing you to hop around various locations, including the Sky Dojo and theatre. To use them, simply right-click and sit, and you’ll be presented with a menu of destinations – although for the most part, I recommend letting shanks’ pony take the strain, it will bring you just as easily to the temples and shrine, as well as some of the more unusual parts of the region – such as the haunted forest.

There are perhaps one or two incongruous elements to Little Yoshiwara; a helicopter parked in the garden of an Edo period house caught me a little off-guard, and there is also a resident’s airport up in the sky (group rezzing of vehicles only). but while surprising at first glance, these speak to the all-embracing nature of Little Yoshiwara as a community; something further reflected in the modern dance / event area.

Little Yoshiwara
Little Yoshiwara

As noted towards the top of this piece, role-play does take place in the region, but visitors are neither required to join-in or to wear period costume; all that’s asked is a respect for private residences, and an openness to discovering and learning about old Japanese culture.

There are a number of activities to be found throughout the town, although some may require group membership (such as the archery, which I tried, but was unable to rez my arrows whilst attempting to shoot). Even so, with its many places to sit and relax, contemplate things spiritual, its many paths and locations, Little Yoshiwara makes for an enjoyable and engaging visit.

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Second Life’s August 23rd woes by April Linden

Posted on by Inara Pey

secondlifeTuesday, August 23rd was not a particularly good day for Second Life, with an extended period of unscheduled maintenance with log-ins suspended and those in-world advised to refraining from rezzing No Copy objects, or making any LindeX related transactions, etc.

At the time of the problem, there was speculation that it might be due to further issues with the central database node (and kudos for Caitlyn for suggesting this 🙂 ). Writing in a Tools and Technology blog post on August 24th, Operations Team lead April Linden confirmed this was in fact the case:

Shortly after 10:30am [PDT], the master node of one of the central databases crashed. This is the same type of crash we’ve experienced before, and we handled it in the same way. We shut down a lot of services (including logins) so we could bring services back up in an orderly manner, and then promptly selected a new master and promoted it up the chain. This took roughly an hour, as it usually does.

Given this has happened in the relatively recent past (see here and here), the Ops Team are getting pretty good with handling these situations. Except this time there was a slight wrinkle in the proceedings. The previous failures had occurred when concurrency was relatively low due to the times they occurred. This time, however, the problem hit when rather a lot of people were trying to get into SL, so as April notes:

A few minutes before 11:30am [PDT] we started the process of restoring all services to the Grid. When we enabled logins, we did it in our usual method – turning on about half of the servers at once. Normally this works out as a throttle pretty well, but in this case, we were well into a very busy part of the day. Demand to login was very high, and the number of Residents trying to log in at once was more than the new master database node could handle.

Around noon we made the call to close off logins again and allow the system to cool off. While we were waiting for things to settle down we did some digging to try to figure out what was unique about this failure, and what we’ll need to do to prevent it next time.

It wasn’t actually until a third attempt was made to bring up the login hosts one at time that things ran smoothly, with services being fully restored at around 2:30pm PDT.

Now, as April notes, she and her team have a new challenge to deal with: understanding why they had to turn the login servers back on much more slowly than in the past. There is, however, a bright spot in all this: the work put into making the Grid Status feed more resilient paid off, with the service appearing to cope with the load placed on it by several thousand people trying to discover what was going on.

None of us like it when the go wrong, but it’s impossible for SL to be all plain sailing. What is always useful is not only being kept informed about what is going on when things do get messed up (and don’t forget, if you’re on Twitter you can also get grid status updates there as well), but in also being given the opportunity to understand why things went wrong after the fact.

In this respect, April’s blog posts are always most welcome, and continue to be an informative read, helping anyone who does so just what a complicated beast Second life is, and how hard the Lab actually does work to try to keep it running smoothly for all of us – and to get on top of this as quickly as they can when things do go wrong.

Lab announces new SL Marketplace search now live

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update: August 16th: Merchants have been reporting a number of reported issues with the new search tool. The Lab has set-up a forum thread for general discussions on issues and problems. If you are experiencing issues with the new MP search, please join the discussion on the forum thread.

If you are noting specific issues which appear to be bugs, the Lab requests you add details to  BUG-37670.When doing so, please provide the following: Affected Field:  (Demo linking, Related Items, Quick Fill, etc.);  Name of Product you are editing:  (What is the name of, or link to, the item listing that you are trying to add a demo or related item); Search Term:  (What is the exact search term you have entered to try to locate the Demo, Related, or Quick Fill Template);  and if possible, provide a screenshot showing the empty search return showing the search text and the lack of results. The exception to this is “Adult rated items that contain profanity”.

On Monday, August 15th, Linden Lab announced the “new” SL Marketplace search is now live.

First issued as a beta test in November 2015, the updated search has been undergoing refinement and improvement (and bug fixing!) since then, hence why it has taken some time to reach a release status.

The new search mechanism is designed to address some of the shortfalls inherent in searching for listings and products on the Marketplace, which can often by a frustrating and time-consuming, as anyone who has used it will be able to attest.

To achieve this, it is said to be a complete step away from the older infrastructure supporting Marketplace search, with the new system hopefully being faster and more robust. In particular, the Lab point to it having a learning algorithm intended to improve search results over time – essentially, the more search is used, the better it performs. The new search also supports the use of boolean operators – AND, OR, NOT – so users can hopefully set-up more focused search criteria.

During testing, the Lab took feedback from merchants and users into account, using it to further refine and improve the new system. This obviously doesn’t mean it is flawless, but the hope is the overall experience will be improved, and will continue to improve over time. Should anyone encounter significant bugs or issues, they are asked to file a bug report. There is also a pinned Commerce Forum thread where general discussions might be continued.

Lab blogs on recent Second Life updates

Posted on by Inara Pey

On Tuesday, August 2nd, the Lab blogged about recent and forthcoming updates to Second Life. It’s a curious post, offering a potpourri of news, some of which is liable to be familiar to many, some of which might be new / surprising / interesting, even for those of us covering Second Life to the best of our abilities.

First up on the post is Project Bento – the project to greatly enhance the avatar skeleton for use with mesh bodies and bits (human and non-human). I have, and am, covering this project through my Bento updates, so please excuse me if I refer you to those reports for specifics, if you’re unfamiliar with the project and want to know more. If you’re completely new to Bento, you might want to start your reading here.

Bento is still very much a beta project – the viewer-side code has yet to make it to Release Candidate status, with the project viewer still being worked on by the Lab. However, Bento is an interesting project, not only because of what it can bring to mesh-based avatars, but also because of the way in which it has been very much a collaborative project between the Lab and content creators and animators.

Aki Shichiroji demonstrates a wearable wyvern utilising Bento bones for animation. Inset: the model under development at a Bento meeting.
Aki Shichiroji demonstrates a wearable wyvern utilising Bento bones for animation. Inset: the model under development at a Bento meeting.

The Visual Outfits Browser (VOB) is next to get a mention. Again, this has a way to go to make it into a release viewer, but was issued as a Release Candidate on August 1st (version 4.0.7.318263). Simply put, this viewer allows you to use the Appearance floater to capture / upload / select images of your outfits and save them against the outfits in a new Outfit Gallery tab within the floater.

Also getting a mention is the QuickTime for Windows replacement viewer, also known as the VLC plug-in viewer, which sees the QuickTime media plugin for the Windows viewer replaced with a plug-in based on LibVLC. At some point in the future, LibVLC will also be used to replace QuickTime in the Mac version of the official viewer. I’ve previously covered both the VOB and VLC viewers in these pages., so feel free to follow the link to read more.

The Visual Outfits Browser viewer is another of the forthcoming updates mentioned in the official blog post, and you can read my overview as well
The Visual Outfits Browser (VOB) viewer is another of the forthcoming updates mentioned in the official blog post, and you can read my overview of the project viewer version of VOB

Other updates which are mentioned comprise the use of Experience Keys in the new user Social Islands, which I blogged about in April; the recent TLS 1.2 update, which affects using the viewer’s built-in web browsers for web cashier interaction – see my post here on the subject; the improvements to group bans to eliminate the problem of people banned / removed from a group still being able to use an active chat session; of the ongoing work with Marketplace search, the recent core HTTP updates, viewer and server bug-fixes and the ongoing work to improve server robustness.

The new Social Island, which I covered in April, also get a mention in the official blog post
The new Social Islands, which I covered in April, also get a mention in the official blog post

However, the two items most likely to be of interest are the new e-mail verification (all new users must new verify their e-mail address with the Lab in order to receive updates, etc), and the new Gaming Islands.

The latter are designed to introduce users to Skill Gaming in Second Life by providing demonstration games to play, information on Skill Gaming – what it is, who can play, who cannot play and why, how to get your account set to play Skill Games – and finally, a set of portal providing access to regions providing Skill Games in SL, which will be the subject of an upcoming article.

The new Gaming Islands - designed to introduce Second life users to Skill Gaming
The new Gaming Islands – designed to introduce Second life users to Skill Gaming