As many of us are aware, long-time Second Life resident Ladyslipper Constantine passed away on Saturday, September 17th, 2016.
Having joined Second Life in May 2008 and deaf, Ladyslipper (or L.S., as she liked to be known, having taken her name from the flower of the US state she lived in for many year: Minnesota) quickly became involved with Virtual Ability (you can read more about her on the VAI website), and also joined Burn 2, becoming a leading member of DRUM, as well as being a Burn2 Ranger.
In addition to these activities, Ladyslipper was very involved in Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education events, many Second Life Birthday celebrations, and more recently, with One Billion Rising.
Ladyslipper lost her life to cancer, passing away peacefully on the 17th, surrounded by loved ones. For all those who knew her, I’ve received notice from Gentle Heron of Virtual Ability that, VAI will be hosting a Celebration of Ladyslipper’s life on Saturday, October 1st, starting at 11:00am SLT on the north-east lawn of Virtual Ability island.
“The celebration will begin with some of her friends offering memories in text and voice,” Gentle says of the event, “because LS was part of the deaf community in SL. There will be a slide show of the many events LS participated in. And there will be music and dancing. LS loved a good party.”
To help with the celebration of Ladyslipper’s life, VAI are asking that if anyone does have images of Ladyslipper at SL events which might be included in the slide show, to please consider passing them to iSkye Silverweb.
Further details can be obtained in-world from Gentle Heron, Eme Capalini, or Treasure Ballinger.
My condolences to Ladyslipper’s loved ones, and all who knew and worked with her.
On Thursday, September 15th, the Lab promoted the Visual Outfits Browser (VOB) as the de facto release viewer, version: 4.0.8.319463.
For those who missed my coverage of this viewer when it reached RC status, and simply put, the VOB 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.
The new Outfits Gallery tab (right-click your avatar > select My Appearance > Outfits Gallery) displays all of your created outfits as a series of folder icons, each one displaying the name of the outfit beneath it. You can replace these icons with an image of the outfit quickly and easily in one of three ways:
You can wear the outfit, then right-click on its associated folder icon and select Take a Snapshot (shown above left). This will open the snapshot floater with save to inventory selected by default, allowing you to photograph yourself wearing the outfit and upload the image to SL, where it automatically replaces the folder icon for the outfit
You can use Upload Photo to upload an image of the outfit your previously saved to your hard drive, and have it replace the folder icon
You can use Select Photo to select any image previously saved to your inventory (including any image supplied with the outfit in question, if appropriate), and use that to replace the folder icon for the outfit.
The new Outfit Gallery tab in the Visual Outfit Browser allows you to create photos of any outfits saved to My Outfits as thumbnails. You can then use the Appearance floater to scan your outfits to decide what to wear, and use the context menu to wear the one you want
When using the capability there are a number of points to keep in mind:
Both the Take a Snapshot and the Upload Photo options will incur the L$10 upload fee, with the images themselves saved in your Textures folder
In all three cases, link to the original images are placed in the outfit folder
This approach only works for outfits you’ve created using the Appearance floater / the Outfits tab. It doesn’t work for any other folders where you might have outfits – such is the Clothing folder.
Overall, it would seem that the VOB viewer has received favourable feedback by many of those who have used it during its time as a release candidate viewer. I confess, I cannot offer any real feedback, as I actually don’t used the Outfits folder that much. However, with its arrival as the de facto release viewer, expect to be seeing it in more TPVs (those which haven’t already adopted the code) as they continue to update.
OK, I admit I wasn’t expect this until next week, but on Wednesday, September 14th, the Lab announced that Project Bento is now officially available as a release candidate viewer – version 5.0.0.319688 – which can be obtained through the Alternate Viewers wiki page.
And just in case anyone has missed all the Project Bento news, the best way is to catch-up through the official video. In short, Bento adds a wealth of new bones to the basic avatar skeleton (30+ to heads / faces and to hands alone!), making a wealth of new avatars (humans and non-human) and mesh wearables possible.
The reason I wasn’t expecting the viewer to get promoted just year is that the Lab also has a proof-of-concept viewer being tested, so I assumed any push to RC would come after a decision had been made on incorporating those changes (if they are to be adopted). So, not for the first time, I’m been wrong 🙂 .
The move to release candidate status doesn’t mean the project is at an end. There is still further work to be done as remaining bugs are fixed, etc (so updates such as the slider locking in the proof-of-concept might yet arrive in the viewer). What it does do is three things:
Makes the viewer available to a wider audience through the Lab’s RC distribution mechanism, thus allowing any unforeseen issues in merging the Bento code into the current release viewer code (and which may be outside of direct Bento testing) to be identified and fixed
Potentially makes the viewer more widely available to content creators who may not have so far tried the viewer
Means that TPVs can now officially start incorporating the Bento code into their viewers (in fact, Cool VL Viewer has had Bento in its Experimental branch from some time, and Firestorm have also been working to merge the Bento code as well – but this shouldn’t be taken to mean there will be a new release of the latter in the near future).
In keeping with the status of the Bento code, the Lab do ask people – particularly avatar content creators – to give the viewer a go, and to file a JIRA against any issues found.
As noted above, Bento offers a range of opportunities for mesh wearable and avatar creators – you can see a couple of video exploring the AK and Catwa preview Bento mesh heads in my SL project update. Also, back in August, Vista Animations produced a video illustrating the potential of finger animations:
Then, of course, there is a huge range of non-human avatars: centaurs, “rideables”, winged creatures – all of which can be achieved a lot more efficiently through Bento than has previously been the case.
Updated, 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.
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
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:
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).
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.
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.
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.
As many of us are aware, long-time Second Life resident Ladyslipper Constantine passed away on Saturday, September 17th, 2016.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 