Category: Second Life

An everglades autumn at Tilheyra in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Tilheyra, September 2023 – click any image for full size

In May 2022, I visited Tilheyra, a Full region leveraging the private region land capacity bonus and designed by Teagan Lefevre as a means to showcase her TL Designs brand. It’s a place blogged about here – but that was spring 16 months ago; time has marched on, and those of us in the northern hemisphere are watching autumn stride towards us, and Second Life being what it is, Tilheyra has also marched forward.

I was recently made aware of this by Teagan herself, who invited me to re-visit the region and view its latest redressing. In particular, the estate has been extended with the additional of a Homestead region, which Teagan and her team have called Kuulua. It has been combined with Tilheyra to form a continuous landscape modelled after US swamplands.

Tilheyra, September 2023
Fall unfurls its colours in such splendour, we are but forced to take notice of it. Tilheyra, welcomes you to wade through the everglades, tour the swamps by foot or by boat, and taste the delicious flavours that autumn in the bayou brings.

– Tilheyra About Land

Given this description, and as one would expect, both of the regions present a low-lying landscape rich in trees and cut through with water as it forms natural channels and pools. Some of the latter are open, others increasingly choked by reeds and wetlands grasses, the greenery providing – if any were needed – perfect cover for local alligators as they prowl the shallows.

Tilheyra, September 2023

Sitting solidly towards the centre of this setting is a town. It is a place of indeterminate age; some of the buildings within it have the appearance of belonging to a grander setting whilst others – well, perhaps not so much; however all are showing signs of being past their prime. Roads, tracks and trails spread outward from the town, some of them crossing the water by means of bridges, all of variable designs and solidity – including one which started life as railway carriage! It a network of trails and paths which might be seen as a web spreading out through the swamplands, the town being the spider so often at the heart of a web; only rather than waiting for prey, the town awaits visitors to get caught in the unusual beauty of the landscape and itself.

During my May 2022 visit to Tilheyra I noted that while most of the region was open to the public, it also presented a number of rental properties. This is still the case with this latest iteration, with houseboats and cabins available for rent. All are clearly signed as private, so the risk of trespass should be minimised.

Tilheyra, September 2023

Those wanting to explore will find a lot to see, from places to eat to hangouts for passing the time – there’s even a corner memorial to pets that have passed on, tucked away in a corner. For the more adventurous, there’s a small dock on the shoreline of Kuulua, offering rowing boats and little Culprit speed boats for those who wish to explore the waterways.

Caught under the reds, greens and golds of autumn and framed by a sky in which both the Sun and the Moon might be found, the Tilheyra wetlands avoids the clichés often found within swamp-themed regions (such as an over-abundance of alligators or a “haunted” cabin or two), and instead presents an engaging and very natural setting, available for those seeking a home, and a destination for explorers and photographers.

Tilheyra, September 2023

My thanks to Teagan for the invite!

SLurl Details

2023 SL viewer release summaries week #36

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week through to Sunday, September 10th, 2023

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 6.6.13.580918, formerly the Maintenance U(pdate) RC viewer, version 6.6.14.581101, promoted August 23.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • The glTF / PBR Materials viewer, updated to version 7.0.0.581684 on September 8.
    • The Inventory Extensions RC viewer, updated to version 6.6.15.581692, September 8.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

Note: The Alternative Viewers page appears to have suffered a hiccup, listing version 6.6.12.579987 as the “Win32+MacOS<10.13” RC viewer.  However, the Win 32  + Pre-MAC OS 10.3 viewer was actually version 6.6.13.580794, promoted to release status on July 5; 6.6.12.579987  was the version number assigned to the Maintenance S RC viewer promoted to release status on May 16th.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V6-style

  • No updates.

V1-style

  • Cool Viewer Stable release updated to version 1.30.2.27 and Experimental Branch updated to version 1.31.0.5, both on September 9 – release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2023 week #36: SL CCUG meeting summary: glTF PBR

Posted on by Inara Pey
Viper Heaven, July 2023 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday,  September 7th, 2023.

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work.
  • As a rule, these meetings are:
    • Held in-world and chaired by Vir Linden.
    • Conducted in a mix of voice and text.
    • Held at 13:00 SLT on their respective days.
    • Are subject to the schedule set within the SL Public Calendar, which includes the location for the meetings.
    • Open to all with an interest in content creation.
  • The notes herein are drawn from a mix of my own chat log and audio recording of the meeting, and are not intended to be a full transcript.

glTF Materials and Reflection Probes

Project Summary

  • To provide support for PBR materials using the core glTF 2.0 specification Section 3.9 and using mikkTSpace tangents, including the ability to have PBR Materials assets which can be applied to surfaces and also traded / sold.
  • The overall goal for glTF as a whole is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
  • Up to four texture maps are supported for PBR Materials: the base colour (which includes the alpha); normal; metallic / roughness; and emissive, each with independent scaling.
  • In the near-term, glTF materials assets are materials scenes that don’t have any nodes / geometry, they only have the materials array, and there is only one material in that array.
  • As a part of this work, PBR Materials will see the introduction of reflection probes which can be used to generate reflections (via cubemaps) on in-world surfaces. These will be a mix of automatically-place and manually place probes (with the ability to move either).
  • The viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page.

Further Resources

General Status

  • An update for the PBR viewer – version 7.0.0.581684 was issued following the meeting, on Friday, September 8th.
  • Work is continuing on the communications bloat issue. This will utilise a new message type – GenericStreamingMessage.
  • Bug fixing continues.

Ambient Lighting / Sky Brightness

  • Also noted in previous summaries, there are some issues around ambient lighting where the PBR viewer is concerned. In particular, it tends to render a lot of EEP settings darker than users are used to (in part because the ambient environment lighting in SL has tended to always be over-saturated and bright), and the PBR viewer effectively reverses this to render environments more realistically.
  • This has been an area of work for some time, with none of the results particularly satisfactory, so there is going to be a further round of changes. with the aim of making existing EEP sky settings render more closely to how the author may have intended, rather than remaining overly dark.
  • In addition, the tone mapper in the PBR renderer is going to be adjusted to help reduce undue darkening of older EEP settings.
  • These changes will not impact EEP settings which are created specifically using the PBR settings and capabilities.
  • This work will mean there will likely be a couple more viewer passes as things are tested and adjusted.

Mirrors

  • Mirrors are a part of the glTF / PBR materials project, but something of a separate tranche of work.
  • The idea is provide the means to have via high resolution reflections (i.e. mirrors) within a scene.
  • Initially only one active mirror surface per scene will be active for any viewer.
  • The process will use the PBR reflection probes mechanism, combined with a automated “Hero Probe” mechanism which with generate high resolution (512×512) “reflections” for the mirror.
  • The system will operate on the basis of avatar / camera proximity to a mirror surface triggering the closest reflection probe to become a “Hero Probe” for that avatar / camera. This means that if there are multiple mirrors placed within an environment, only the one closest to a given avatar / camera will be active and display the “reflections” generated by the reflection probe.
  • Depending on testing and performance, the number of mirrors might be expanded to two – one for mirror surfaces and one for Linden Water to generate high resolution water reflections where appropriate.

Status

  • The promised initial build of a PBR viewer supporting mirrors should be made available in week #37. Caveats for this build include:
    • It is not functionally complete and will not render as fully as LL would like.
    • It is not intended for primary use will likely look like it is breaking things.
    • There are already some known crash issues for Mac OS X which will not be fixed when the viewer is initially made available, but will be fixed in due course.
  • The viewer will be made available via the CCUG Discord Channel, and an LSL script will be provided to allow for easy toggling through mirror options.

In Brief

  • Senra:
    • Requests continue to be made to surface the new web-bases avatar creation / customisation tool through the viewer – even it is is just hooking it to the internal browser and providing an easy and obvious means of accessing it. The major reason this is being requested is to to help new users who may have become “lost” or confused in trying to customise their avatar view the viewer – which is clearly a very different experience to the web capability – to get back to something they understand and can readily re-use.
    • It was pointed out that Senra has yet to be featured in the Choose Your Avatar option in the viewer.
    • It was also pointed out that unlike the older “starter avatars” Sentra does not inherently have any form of outfit structure, so if items are worn directly from the Library, anything worn will be copied to the item type folder (shoes to shoes, hair to hair, etc.), rather than being placed within any form of “outfit folder”, making it harder for new users to understand what is happening with their avatar + the items they are using from the Library may end up getting copied multiple times into various folders in their inventory – potentially leasing to more confusion / frustration down the line.
    • This lead to a lengthy discourse through the greater part of the meeting, further demonstrating the need for a New User Experience User Group (or similar) where those actually responsible for projects like Senra could actually engage with users, address questions, etc., rather than cherry-picking if / what they want to respond to via the forums.
  • The above spun-out into a broader discussion on the development of a Sansar-esque dressing room element in the local viewer of outfit / appearance changes (leaving an “untouched” version of the avatar within a region until the change / update is complete) and the complications of doing so (attachments require simulator rezzing, for example), and an general discussion on outfit changes, etc., without firm conclusions drawn.
  • The question was asked about SL supporting vertex animation textures (VAT). This is seen by the Lab as something that might be investigated further down the glTF implementation road, alongside the likes of blend shapes.

Next Meeting

† 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.

Elvion’s ode to Nature in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Elvion, September 2023 – click any image for full size

It’s been a good few months since my last visit to Elvion, so when Cube Republic sent me a link to an image showing the region’s current iteration, I realised it was high time I dropped in again.

The work of region holders Bo Zano (BoZanoNL) and his SL/RL partner, Una Zano (UnaMayLi), Elvion has tended to shift between Homestead and Full regions, but whichever it has occupied, it has never failed to offer settings of intrinsic natural beauty rich in detail and thoroughly photogenic.

Most often the builds are focus on very pastoral settings, rich in flora and fauna, and sometimes with a lean towards fantasy environments. Some iterations, however, have at times touch on more rural environments – such as with the design the couple presented back towards the start of 2023 (see: Elvion’s coastal retreat in Second Life). With the September iteration, Bo and Una take the region in another direction, offering a setting reflecting the ecological threat of climate change / global warming and the effect it is set to have on the likes of coastal cities and towns.

Elvion, September 2023
With rising global temperatures cities become less habitable. Nature is taking back and people are migrating to the country. Except some, who find peace and see the beauty.

– Elvion About Land

However, this shouldn’t be taken to mean this current iteration of Elvion is in any way a treatise on the threat of climate change and rising sea levels. Rather it is a visual ode to the fact that nature has a way of taking care of her own and redressing the balance when it comes to humanity’s claims on the land, even after those claims may have resulted in the land being ravaged beyond hope.

Elvion, September 2023The core of the build suggests the outskirts of a city or town, probably coastal in nature, and where an elevated freeway once provided rapid access to the heart of the conurbation without a lot of tedious mucking about navigating the gridwork of edge-of-town streets or dealing with locals, the broad lanes of the road instead being raised away from all that to run alongside the rail tracks which once carried goods trains on their backs.

However, the traffic carrying days of both rail and road have long passed; the freeway is in almost total collapse, the rail lines similarly broken and incapable of carrying. Even the buildings rising above or visible from the elevated roadway have clearly been long deserted, with some showing signs of being close to joining some of their brethren in collapse. At ground level, streets have largely vanished, becoming overgrown with weeds and grasses or lost under pools and channels where water has naturally taken command.

Elvion, September 2023

Exactly what has happened here is open to interpretation. Did the sea levels rise sufficiently to start drowning the town, resulting in its abandonment? Did it suffer the battering force of one or more hurricanes or typhoons so severe, abandonment rather than recovery was seen to be the only sensible option? was it broken by the force of a tsunami which originated across the seas but spent its fury here? The story is yours to decide.

What does appear to be clear is that whatever happened, it occurred long enough ago for Nature engage in the long, slow process of reclamation, and is now a good way along that path. The hardtop of roads and parking lots is being taken over by weeds and grass; vines hang from the sides of shops and the barriers guarding the edge of elevated road sections; a children’s play area is now little more than a rusted hulk, its tone matching the majority of the remaining vehicles scattered throughout – some of which are sprinkled across the freeway as if they were, for whatever reason, deserted in a rush by owners and passengers alike.

Elvion, September 2023

Elsewhere the presence of water along some of the depressions caused by former roads is such that little island have had time to be established and freshwater ponds form, offering homes for a range of waterfowl and wildlife. Even the wrecks of vehicles have become so accepted that they are now little more than perches from which heron can watch for signs of passing fish in the waters around them. Bear and beaver are equally at home here now, as are deer, whilst geese find the setting more than acceptable as a stop-over during their long migration flights.

Also scattered throughout the setting are signs that not everyone has fled this place; to the south, for example, someone has created a little homestead for themselves. A wind turbine provides lighting for the simple shack, chickens and goats are being reared, horses looked after (including one that will rez rideable copies of itself, and a canoe is kept in good order, presumably for fishing trips.

Elvion, September 2023

This is not the only sign of human habitation. Elsewhere, someone has built a raft while boardwalks and decks and scattered around on and over the waters, and at least one tree appears to have been felled to create a makeshift bridge over a water channel.  But whether this is all the work of those living at the homestead, or whether it speaks to a little community of people holding-out among the ruins is for you to decide. And given there are these signs of habitation, so too can be found places to sit and pass the time, and appreciate the beauty of the setting.

As always with Elvion, there is a tremendous amount to see and appreciate with this build; far more than either my wittering here or meagre images herein can convey. As such, and as always, a visit is highly recommended.

Elvion, September 2023

SLurl Details

September 2023 SL Web User Group (WUG) meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday September 6th, 2023. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), the forums.
  • As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
    • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
    • In both Voice and text.
    • At this location.
  • They are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Marketplace Updates

Since the August meeting:

  • Best selling items ordering has been deployed. When used within a specific MP store, this orders items according to how well they have been selling in comparison to the rest of the items in the store over the past 30 days, to better reflect current sales.
    • Within a store on the MP, click on the Sort By drop-down and select Best Selling from near the bottom of the list of items.
  • The Wishlist and Favourite Stores options on user’s Marketplace dashboards have been updated:
    • The Favourite Stores listing can now be set to list the displayed items for store in the list by Newest Listings, so the thumbnails displayed alongside each store will always be for the most recent releases by the store.
    • Wishlists have been updated so that items can be listed with the most recent at the top, proceeding down to those which have been on the list the longest (or vice-versa, if you prefer).
  • Fixes:
    • The MP pagination function has been revised in an attempt to eliminate a range of bugs (e.g. some sort options refusing to paginate beyond a certain point, merchant’s listing views not paginating correctly, etc.
    • A function scoring bug which impacted relevance searches has been fixed, so non-relevant items should no longer be appearing in searches defined by a specific relevance.
    • A bug which slowed the loading of peoples Favourites lists has been addressed.
    • A hotfix was implemented toto address the issue of some MP pages generating 504 errors as the MP appeared to “go down” for around 60 seconds or so when in use.
  • Further updates will be coming out in September, but these were presented as “keep yours eyes out for..”, rather than specifics.

Marketplace Variants / Styles

  • Once again the subject of “variants”  (e.g. different colours of an item in a single listing) was raised. This has been a topic across around three meetings, and seems to entirely miss the point that LL had – according to comments made in meetings during 2022 – actually developed a project – called Styles to address this request to a point where by:
    • August 2022: the back-end work for Styles was said to be complete , and it was being lined-up for deployment.
    • November 2022 and December 2022, the project was being earmarked for deployment in “early 2023” as a result of the project to overhaul MP search to match Web search.
    • January 2023, the project was being “re-prioritised” following the project to overhaul MP Search, and has never since been mentioned.
  • As circumstances (again) prevented me from raising the status of this project at the meeting, I have dropped a note to meeting chair Sntax Linden to enquire after this work, in the hopes of a possible update at the next meeting.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for more on these items, and other points raised in the meeting.

  • There appears to be an issue where items from Marketplace stores which have closed are appearing in Search results (although when clicked on, they result in the Marketplace home page being displayed). This issue was consistent reproduced during the meeting for one brand, and will be investigated.
  • A general discussion on the effectiveness of Wishlists compared to simply piling up items in the shopping cart for a sometimes / maybe later purchase.
  • Repeated requests for the MP to allow broader search capabilities in terms of content age, e.g.
    • Defining a search in terms of excluding content first listed beyond a certain date, or including only content listed after a certain date, etc.
    • Automatically making older (and potentially more outdated as a result) content less relevant in search results – so they appear at the end of search returns, rather than scattered throughout.
    • Including an automated “Last Updated” field for listing, which displays the last time a creator updated the actual item associated with a listing (rather than just revising the listing itself) even though creators can, if they choose, include version nots in the item’s description.
    • Adding a “Date First Listed” field to item listings – seen within the meeting as the most popular request, followed by / along with the automated “Last Updated” field, and then the potential to make the options search filters (e.g. search by date range, 2023-2016).
  • Aligned to, but separate from, the above, were requests for more involved inspection of items on the MP so they can be more completely (and automatically) determined in terms of being full or partial mesh, prim, or sculpty, etc., and then filters added to exclude the unwanted types (e.g. excluding any and all sculpties from a search).
  • Requests for improved editing capabilities when creating listings – to change font size / colour / emphasis, hyperlinks, etc., and for an API so that lists could be created / updated via scripted means (with an option to undo changes / bulk updates).
  • A request has been made to once again increase the frequency of the WUG meetings – possibly back to fortnightly, as was originally the case.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, October 4th, 2023.

Melu’s Horizons and AI ladies in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Melusina Parkin, September 2023: Horizons

Melusina Parkin has been expanding both her main gallery spaces and her exhibitions of late, with the former now presenting two individual gallery spaces above her main store, which she is using to host a total of four new collections of her work, three of which see Melusina dip her fingers into the world of AI art.

Both of the gallery spaces can be reached via Melu’s landing point, which also provides access to her art deco store and annex, or can be reached via the individual SLurls provided below, with galleries and store locations also being linked via teleport disks as well.

As an entirely arbitrary decision on my part, I’m starting with the Black Gallery. This is in fact split into two independent levels, also linked by the teleport disks, allowing it  to host two separate exhibitions. The first is Horizons, located in the Black Gallery 2. Taken from within Second Life, it presents a collection of 20 images captured in Melu’s familiar minimalist style.

Melusina Parkin, September 2023: Horizons

As the title of the collection suggests, each of these 20 images offers a unique view out towards a horizon. From deserts to views out over open waters, from fields of ripening crops stretching out into the far distance to looking across coastal sands to where the water takes over (or conversely from the shallows of the water back across the costal sands, these are all expressive pieces suggestive of a vast openness – even the one showing the sand/grass dappled flatness of a region awaiting the touch of terraforming tools.

True, some include evidence of life – a fence separating land from sea; a bench awaiting tired legs to lighten their load for a while; a train line cutting a horizontal divide beteen observer and distant horizon. But these only serve to heighten the sense of vastness inherent within these images. But “vastness” does not necessarily equate to “emptiness” – and to think otherwise would be a mistake.

With her photography, Melu is a storyteller. Or perhaps a better term might be story prompter; within all of her photography it is what isn’t seen that captivates; the suggestions of stories hovering just at the edge of the frame as each picture prods us to see beyond the literal. For example:  what might come thundering down that train track, shattering the peace, and who or what might it be carrying a to where? What is the promise of the far side of the sea, or what new adventure await beyond the broken horizon presented by the approaching foreshore? What might yet be raised from the flat evenness of an untouched region, and who might one day explore its wonders? The opportunities to create stories and tales is as vast as the spaces Melu presents within these 20 pieces.

Melusina Parkin, September 2023: 100 Retro Ladies

On the level below, is the first of the three AI related collections Melusina is currently presenting. Entitled 100 Retro Ladies, it comprises four sets of 25 images apiece. Each set is framed by a colour, and all are built around a theme of fashion at the height of the Art Deco era in Europe (early 1920s through early 1930s) – a time when women started to embody a new boldness and drive towards self-recognition, greater expression and more social freedom.

Each set of images – each named for the tint which largely defines them: Red, Teal, Black and Ivory – presents itself five pictures as a time around the gallery walls (so a total of only 20 images is displayed at any given time. To see the remaining images within each colour set, click on the white panels on which each group of pictures is mounted.

Sitting between the Black Gallery and Melu’s shop is the Minimum Gallery, home to two further exhibitions of AI-based art: Broken Mirrors and Kisses. both again present women who, in terms of look and style, might be seen as being draw from the 1920s.

Melusina Parkin, September 2023: Kisses

As noted above, and thanks to movements such as the drive for emancipation in the early 20th century, coupled with (in Europe at least) the need for women to take up functions and work normally the preserve of men as a result of the Great War, the 1920s was a period where women in the western world were starting to spread their wings and seek greater and more open freedoms from the strictures imposed by society. Kisses is a direct reflection of this, depicting and reflecting a period when a part of that greater expressiveness took the former of more open displays of affection / love / sexuality, be it in the form of a simple chaste kiss on the lips through to something deeper and indicative of desires beyond friendship / affection.

On the upper level of the gallery, Melu presents the most  – for me – compelling of the three AI-related collections, Broken Mirrors. I say this not to diminish Kisses or 100 Retro Ladies is any way, but because within this collect is a rich narrative depth which naturally attracts  whilst also giving out something of a challenge. Within them, we are encouraged not not to just see images of women before broken mirrors, but to contemplate how we might better understand the myriad facets of personality and self, and how we might find a more integrated life by doing so, as Melu notes in the introduction to this collection:

Mirrors are fragile and it’s very easy that they get broken. Nonetheless, even a broken mirror can be helpful. Try to look at your image on a broken mirror. You could be frightened or intrigued:  you can think that the fragmented image you see says that you are overwhelmed, destroyed, cut in pieces by your problems, trauma issues. Or you can see those fragments as different parts of yourself, and seeing them can be helpful in knowing each of them better, and trying to make them live and interact together successfully.

– Melusina Parkin, Broken Mirrors

Melusina Parkin, September 2023: Broken Mirrors

All individually engaging, the AI collections presented within Broken Mirrors, Kisses  and 100 Retro Ladies are a new an interesting extension to Melusina’s art, one which offers something of a unique approach in using AI toolsets compared to some other artists experimenting with the medium. Meanwhile, and for those who prefer, Horizons demonstrates Melu is not abandoning her flair for presenting equally engaging Second Life focused photographic art.

 SLurl Details