Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, December 4th, 2022
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 6.6.7.576223 – MFA and TOS hotfix viewer – November 1 – No change.
Release channel cohorts::
Performance Floater / Auto-FPS RC viewer, version 6.6.8.576737, November 28
Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer, version 6.6.8.576863, December 5 (updated as this summary was being prepped).
Project viewers:
glTF / PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.576966, December 3 – this viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
So I’m sweet sixteen! Or at least my avatar is – would that it applied to me once more…
When I reached 15 continuous years in SL I really had little to say (although I managed to say it in around 900 words!), as not that much had changed with me personally over the course of 2021 – and SL itself had remained fairly well balanced.
2022 has been slightly different – there have been new features and capabilities deployed to Second Life, with LL working to try to increase the platform’s appeal and engaging with users in the development of new features. True, some of the planned work hasn’t quite come to fruition and so won’t be popping up until 2023 – but one project in particular should over time very much change how SL looks for the better.
On the “personal” SL front, things have changed a little. While blogging takes up a lot of my time – thank you to everyone who follows and supports and helps me along that journey – the second half of the year has allowed me to spend a lot more time enjoying the company of those closest to me (notably Imp, who has given me endless reasons to smile and laugh – there’s a reason I’ve given her that nickname!). That said, things in the physical world have been turned upside down on a number of occasions through the year, resulting in blogging efforts taking a back seat here and there.
But that said, I’m still nicely settled within Second Norway (and still recommend it to anyone looking for land they’ve like to rent and establish a home within), although I’ve not actually done as much sailing, boating or flying as I’d like. Regulars may have noticed (and been breathing a sigh of relief at the fact) that I’ve not been boring people with write-ups of the latest changes in house and / or island design. Not that I’ve stopped; I’ve simply reverted to building things from scratch, rather than using any rebuilds as an opportunity to review a particular commercially available house designs – although admittedly, the current house was heavily inspired by Cory Edo’s Jura Waterfront Cottage, a genuinely stunning design which (unfortunately) didn’t quite marry up to my kitbashing needs, so I opted to build from scratch whilst keeping the look of that design in mind.
One thing I had considered doing this year was to take time out to look at some of the other worlds I’ve visited in the past. However, the truth of the matter is, there is nothing out there (outside of OpenSim) which offers the broad creative richness and freedoms as Second Life; not just in terms of content creation, but in how we expression our personalities, how we interact, how we have fun, what we can do to encourage and support others (in-world and out-world), and so on. Thus, I just haven’t felt the incentive to do so. As I said on occasion of my 15th rezday, I really don’t see anything like Second Life emerging from the haze of verbiage people call “the metaverse” any time soon.
In this regard, I am far more excited – even as a comparative lay person – by the new features and capabilities Linden Lab is working on to further enhance SL. I’ve particularly appreciated the performance boosts we’ve seen in the viewer thanks to the Performance improvements work, and have appreciated the efforts to bring users directly into the fold in developing things like support for glTF 2.0-compliant PBR materials / reflections probes (which lays the foundations for even greater glTF compliance in the future, making content creation for Second Life a lot more predictable when using external tools and workflows), and the Puppetry Project work, both for the capabilities it can bring to a range of SL activities and for the foundations it lays for potential future enhancements to the platform.
Other than that, I really don’t have too much to say on the occasion of my rezday – other than maybe one day I’ll get a card / cake from Linden Lab like others do on their rezday *sigh* – but for now I’ll shut up and return this blog to its usual schedule! 🙂 .
On Sunday, December 4th, 2022, Bay City will once again be hosting their annual Christmas Tree Lighting and fund-raising event. With it comes an opportunity to support Child’s Play Charity, a 501c3 non-profit organisation offering on-line communities such as the Bay City Alliance the ability to help seriously ill children around the globe during their hospital stays with the purchase of games and gaming equipment.
Activities will commence at 13:00 SLT and run through until 16:00 SLT, taking place at the Bay City fairgrounds. On offer will be:
Live entertainment by performers Evee Blackstar and FrankLee Anatra, and music by DJ GoSpeed Racer.
A skating party around the base of the tree.
The tree lighting itself.
Refreshments and fun.
Funds will be raised via a silent auction that will run through until the close of the event. On offer is an impressive range of items kindly donated by designers and creators from across Second Life. Bids are made via vendor, and should your bid be exceeded by another, your Linden dollars will be automatically refunded. You can, of course, increase your bid if you wish. Items will be awarded to the highest bid when the auction closes.
In addition, donation kiosks are be provided in the Fairgrounds for those who would like to support Child’s Play without participating in the auction.
Bay City Tree Lighting 2022
About Bay City and the Bay City Alliance
Bay City is a mainland community, developed by Linden Lab™ and home to the Bay City Alliance. The Bay City Alliance was founded in 2008 to promote the Bay City regions of Second Life and provide a venue for Bay City Residents and other interested parties to socialize and network. It is now the largest Bay city group, and home to most Residents of Bay City. To find out more, contact Marianne McCann in-world.
Bay City and the Bay City Alliance and Child’s Play
Bay City and the Bay City Alliance have a long history of fund-raising for Child’s Play, and in 2016, they received special recognition by the charity, being awarded Silver Level sponsor on the Child’s Play’s website.
Subcutan Art Gallery: Sophie de Saint Phalle – Cyborgs
Currently open through December 2022 is Cyborgs, an installation by Austrian artist Sophie de Saint Phalle (Perpetua1010) located within her Subcutan Art region At its heart Copper plate etchings and lithographs, although they are framed in a much broader story.
Leave the security and assurance of your spoiled civilization and immerse yourself in the fantastic and futuristic world of Cyborgs and dangerous creatures.
– Cyborgs by Sophie de Saint Phalle
The full story behind the exhibition can be obtained from the information giver board at the landing point. In short, it is the far future and humanity is now an interstellar civilisation. However, it has also faced numerous wars with other civilisations, some of them possibly biological / genetic in nature, so humans have been left weakened and in need of cybernetic enhancement in order to survive, eventually reaching a point where children are conceived in vivo and assigned to full cyborg bodies which define their role in their civilisation.
Subcutan Art Gallery: Sophie de Saint Phalle – Cyborgs
Within the exhibition, the images represent a group of these human-cyborgs now forced to live bound to a single planet, where limited genetic materials are of ever increasing importance, as does the need for these human constructs to express their humanity.
Set within an environment representing the landscape of the planet to which they are confined, the installation comprises two parts: the landing point and events area – the installation opened with 6 hours of music – with the second containing the art itself. when visiting, it is essential you have Advanced Lighting Model enabled (Preferences → Graphics → make sure Advanced Lighting is checked), and preferably use the local environment (World → Environment → make sure Used Shared Environment is checked).
Subcutan Art Gallery: Sophie de Saint Phalle – Cyborgs
Within the art area, the etchings and lithograph are presented mounted on a series of granite-like blocks. At least two copies of each etching is presented, generally on the same block (or a neighbouring block), with each version of an etching given a different finish. They form expressive and very human aspects of life – people at work, people resting from exhaustion, male and female alike. None of them looks particularly “cyborg-like”; rather, but for the title given each piece, these could be studies of fully flesh-and-blood humans.
And it is in this that the power of the art lies: the rich suggestion of largely artificial beings trying to express (or recapture?) their essential humanness through art and carvings; seeking to reconnect with their species heritage and origins.
As well as the images, the landscape includes figurines intended to represent the races which may have forced humanity down this evolutionary path, the creatures they have had to tame – and the artificial bodies into which they have been forced based not on will or desire, but as a result of genetic make-up and algorithms about which they had no knowledge even as the life-forming decisions were being made about their futures.
Subcutan Art Gallery: Sophie de Saint Phalle – Cyborgs
Sophie’s work is always evocative and captivating, and Cyborgs offers a further dimension to her work displayed in Second Life, whether you opt to view the pieces as etchings in their own right or within the framework of the installation’s wider narrative. When visiting, do also consider using the teleport disk to visit the other exhibition spaces Sophie has created within her Subcutan arts region (about which you can read about in my January 2022 review).
SLurl Details
Cyborgs, Subcutan Art Gallery (Ocean Island, rated Adult)
Village de Roqueblanche, October 2022 – blog post
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, December 1st 2022 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and their dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.
This is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting and is not intended to be a full transcript.
Note: unfortunately, my recording software failed at the 50 minute mark of the meeting, so the end of the meeting and the after-meeting discussion were not recorded, so some discussion points are missing from this summary.
Official Viewers Status
Available Viewers
On Friday, December 2nd, the PBR Materials project viewer updated to version 7.0.0.576966 on Friday December 2nd. This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
The following reflect the rest of the current official viewers available through Linden Lab.
Release viewer: version 6.6.7.576223 – MFA and TOS hotfix viewer – November 1 – No change.
Performance Floater / Auto-FPS project viewer, version 6.6.8.576737, November 28.
Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.8.576812 on Monday, November 28.
VS 2022 RC viewer, version 6.6.8.576310, issued November 4 – utilises Visual Studio 2022 in the Windows build tool chain.
Project viewers:
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.575529, issued on October 12.
Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.
General Viewer Notes
The Lab is aiming to get the Maintenance P RC viewer promoted to release status before year-end.
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.
To provide support for reflection probes and cubemap reflections.
The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
The project viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page, but will only work on the following regions on Aditi (the Beta grid): Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
Bugs and regressions continue to be reported via the project viewer on Aditi, and it is now unlikely the project will advance to a release state before early 2023 (end of 2022 always seemed ambitious).
Despite hopes to the contrary, a lot of legacy content is impacted when rendered via the glTF PBR path, largely as a result of using linear alpha blending.
As a result, LL are working on turning to smooth around some of the edge cases without having to introduce a code fork in the viewer between “legacy” alpha handling and PBR alpha handling.
The aim remains to preserve as much of the appearance of legacy content under PBR rendering and reflection probes, without necessarily being slaved to preserving its looks over time. The major exception to this is would be situations where PBR rendering reveals seams between layers.
However, if it proves necessary, an “opt out” button will be provided to switch out of linear alpha blending.
mikkTSpace tangents affect all objects rendered in the PBR viewer. Unfortunately, due to the way mesh data has been stored prior to the PBR viewer, this means that creators wishing to get exactly the same results in their mesh models as they saw in their tool of choice (e.g. blender, etc.) when building their models, they will need to re-upload those models. This might result in a slight increase in the object’s Land Impact, if done.
This does mean, however that all tangents on uploaded meshes will be correctly handled going forward.
Capabilities will change with the PBR viewer: for example, there will be a basic glTF materials editor within the viewer; texture will rotate from a corner, rather than the centre (per the glTF specification extension for texture transforms); the upload will allow for the upload of individual materials from a glTF file.
Bakes on Mesh and Materials
Providing materials support to Bakes on Mesh has been a long-standing request which has been thus far resisted by the Lab on the grounds of the impact it would have on the Bake Service – both in terms of code updates and the potential number of servers used.
However, at the CCUG, Runitai and Vir floated the idea of materials on Bakes on Mesh being added – but only for the PBR rendering path. This would “drastically” cut down on the amount of back-end work required to make materials on BOM possible, and would mean that all avatar wearables would be Materials-capable.
This is not something that has been currently road mapped for implementation at any time by LL, and it would require time and effort to determine a mechanism to manage it, but the support were there for it, it is something that might be considered.
If this work was carried out, it might also pave the way for terrain painting – another popular request.
As PBR Materials is released, it will become the focus for SL going forward; whilst efforts will be made to ensure “pre-PBR” contact continues to look right, whether or not work is put into trying to “pull” legacy materials content into PBR is questionable, simply because the layered complexity of the underpinning code =, the updating / altering of which can result in content breakage.
In Brief
As noted in the summary of the last meeting, there are reports that the PBR project viewer generating some 10% more CPU temperature and 17% more GPU temperature.
LL are working on updates they hope will see any GPU increases return to the levels of the current release viewer.
Issues with CPU temperature are not believed to be related to PBR, but more to general texture rendering, where a couple of errors have crept in and are being actively corrected.
LODs and Land Impact:
Lower value LODs on models. Some creators attempt to “game” Land Impact by having extremely low values as their low-end models, thinking they are “never seen”; unfortunately, these are seen by people running SL on very low-end machines and thus can account for new users feeling SL “looks rubbish due to the official viewer defaulting to a RenderVolumeLODFactor of 1.25.
The RenderVoumeLODFactor setting will be more dynamic be default in the upcoming Performance Floater / Auto FPS viewer, although extremely lower LODs on models should still be avoided.
More broadly, LL is still considering how to better adjust the Land Impact system and the mesh uploader so that creators are not penalised for creating accurate LODs on their models (one of the goals originally stated for project ARCTan).
Linden Lab will be closed over the holiday period from end of business on Friday, December 23rd, 2022 through until start of business on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023 (except for urgent support cases).
WQNC, December 2022 – click any image for full size
At the start of the year I made a return visit to WQNC, an iteration of the Wo Qui Non Coin region design by Maasya I first visited in September 2021. With the end of 2022 approaching, Shawn Shakespeare suggested I make a return and witness the current version of the setting, which has relocated since my January 2022 visit, and downsized to a Homestead region.
Not that the downsizing makes a difference; Maasya has a talent for creating captivating settings, and whilst this one may well be within a Homestead, that certainly remains true. In fact, I would suggest that it is perhaps a design that speaks closely to her self-described isolationist nature.
WQNC, December 2022
The setting takes the form of an east-west oriented island, a slender finger of rock rising from the surrounding seas, cut almost all the way through by a canyon, the western end of which blocked by a high table of rock, and what would otherwise by the open eastern end partially enclosed by a high-rise apartment building of indeterminate age.
It is at the foot of this high-rise that visitors initially find themselves, standing knee-deep in tidal waters lapping a small beach. This gives the impression of literally having just arrived – whether by boat or by swimming or simple luck on having survived some event, is hard to tell. However, the overall design of the location does suggest some form of apocalyptic upheaval may have taken place.
WQNC, December 2022
A tunnel passes under the foot of the apartment building to provide access to the canyon beyond. A teleport sign is mounted on one wall of this tunnel; at the time of my first visit, this provided access to the skybox, but on my return visit it appeared to have restricted access, as attempting to use it left me floating in the air within the tunnel.
Beyond the tunnel, a path winds through the canyon – a street winding through tall buildings backed against the rock walls of the natural canyon, such that they form their own man-made gorge. Neon and LED lights glow from street lamps and signs on the buildings and signs, some of which are mounted on metal poles to span the width of the road like latter-day Torii gates – much of the signage suggests this island street lies somewhere amidst the string of islands which make up the nation of Japan.
WQNC, December 2022
Follow the path to its western end, and the rock walls close to a narrow stair leading upwards, the bottom end marked by a traditional Torii gate. Ancient-looking lamps (fitted with LED or neon illumination) light the steps as they climb to the western table of rock to where a shrine is guarded by a pair of stone kitsune.
Quite where the power for the lights is coming from is a mystery as this is hardly a bustling thoroughfare; the buildings are heavy in vines, shrubs have claimed ledges and windowsills and also the rooftops – together with the odd tree have claimed. Thus, there is a sense of this strange location having been deserted a long time ago – although quite why is for your own imagination to determine; to me, there is a hint of a global catastrophe having overtaken a city (or the world), leaving this enclosed alley with its cliffs of buildings as the sole survivor of a drowned township.
WQNC, December 2022
The sense of mystery prevalent throughout the setting is added to by the ambient sound system; a distant sound of electronic drumming reverberates through the air, mixing here and there with echoes of music coming from somewhere – including one decidedly season tune. Also mixed in with the hissing crackle of electrical shorts from fallen power lines. Alongside of this is a sense of isolation and separation, as if this might be the last remnant of civilisation.
In this, and as noted above, the setting might be seen as a reflection of Maasya’s nature; her Profile defines her as someone preferring her own company, and perhaps not overly friendly towards strangers. This is something I can actually attest to, having been summarily banned from the region (without much of a prior warning) as a result of standing still for too long whilst taking photos during my visit; so I would advise visitors to keep on the move, just in case!
WQNC, December 2022
Outside of this (while at the same time keeping it in mind), the region is as photogenic and eye-catching as Maasya’s previous builds and well worth witnessing.
