Category: Second Life

Appreciating Bluebird Blues in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
IMAGOLand Galleries, June 2025: Ciambi Bluebird – Bluebird Blues

I’ll be honest, I’d been totally unaware of the photographic art of Ciambi Bluebird, so I was highly appreciative of Mareea Farrasco’s invitation to view his exhibition at her IMAGOLand galleries, which opened at the end of May 2025.

Bluebird Blues is an engaging collection of 24 large-format pieces displayed within a gallery space utilising PBR (the art can still be appreciated if you are not running a PBR viewer), which are totally captivating in in their depth and realism. The majority are landscape pieces taken from around Second Life, with four more avatar-centric pieces, and one abstract geometry.

IMAGOLand Galleries, June 2025: Ciambi Bluebird – Bluebird Blues

The latter are all contemplative pieces: the lone figure standing or seated, not looking at the camera, but staring into the distance or with their back to the lens. They are presented with names designed to provoke, in the most natural and subtle ways, an emotional reaction in the part of the observer. All four engage, but I did find myself drawn to You Are What You Is for its sheer brilliance of setting, framing, and pose. It is stunningly beautiful and richly emotive.

The artistry evidence in the landscape pieces is equally as striking. Ciambi’s use of focus, depth of field, angle, EEP selection and post-processing is all simply attention-grabbing, resulting on pictures of incredible beauty and sense of vitality. Each has its own story to tell, given in part by its title, but far more by the manner in which its composition draws the eye in to it, again sometimes in quite a subtle manner – as with Fly, where the subject of the piece might be so easily missed on a first glance but once seen, causes the pictures beauty to literally explode.

IMAGOLand Galleries, June 2025: Ciambi Bluebird – Bluebird Blues

Offered for sale and with Modify permissions for resizing, these are pieces capable of gracing anyone’s SL home. An exhibition not to be missed.

SLurl Details

June 2025 SL Mobile UG meeting summary: latest releases

Posted on by Inara Pey
Campwich Forest grounds: location for the Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG)
The following notes were taken from the Thursday, June 5th 2025 Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG) meeting. These notes should not be taken as a full transcript of the meeting, which was largely held in Voice, but rather a summary of the key topics discussed. The meeting was recorded by Pantera, and her video is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks, as always to her in providing it.
Table of Contents

Meeting Purpose

  • The Mobile User Group provides a platform to share insights on recent mobile updates and upcoming features, and to receive feedback directly from users.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
    • The last Thursday of every month at 12:00 noon SLT.
    • In Voice and text.
    • At Campwich Forest.
  • Meetings 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.

Resources

Release Updates

[Video: 3:34-7:59]

Latest Releases

Version: 2025.5.550 (Android) – June 4; 0.1.548 (iOS) – June 5, 2025.

  • Avatar rendering:
    • A further fix to rotational movement on attachment bones. This will fix some avatars and attachments on avatars.
    • “Pivot” offsets as well as “pos” offsets are now handled when considering when to ignore a deformer. This should fix a few more cases of avatars rendering incorrectly.
  • Improvements to the v-stick controller – size, position and visibility.
  • Addition of a new water shader along with a new setting “Use New Water” that defaults to enabled.
  • A new setting so you can choose to enable or disable automatic log-in.
The new Settings options for automatic log-in (Settings → General) and to use the improved water rendering (Settings → Developer Tools)
  • iOS Specific:
    • SL Mobile now requires iOS 13 or newer
    • A fix for an intermittent crash when opening Second Life Maps links (release 0.1.548).

Comments on the Updates

  • The avatar appearance fixes were the result of issues around deformers identified too late to make the previous update release. These were related to:
    • Meshes having embedded deformers which weren’t being handled correctly.
    • Some of the default deformers which should ignore bone positions being “incorrectly” handled, mainly as a result of “some confusion” within the desktop viewer over which value to read when ignoring deformers, and this had to be replicated in the Mobile app to get it to handle those deformers as expected when compared to the desktop viewer.
  • With the exception one one possible bug fix, there will now be a pause in avatar fixes and updates while the focus of work switches back towards rendering and merging-in / testing a number of changes and improvements, including how long avatars remain in silhouette (transparent), amount of content displayed, etc.
  • Water improvements: the water shader has been updated to more closely match the desktop viewer, notably in low-lighting conditions.

Purchasing Linden Dollars

[Video: 8:16-10:11]

  • A release to iOS in May 2025 added the ability to make Linden Dollar purchases through the App. This includes support for all payment methods supported by Apple.
  • iOS has received this capability first, as Apple required LL to add it within a certain time frame.
  • In-app purchases of Linden Dollars is on the roadmap for Android, but LL would rather focus on feature development, particularly given the limited ways in which L$ can be spent through the app at present.

Chat History and Synching with the Desktop

[Video: 10:42-15:05]

  • LL acknowledge that in order to be a useful companion app, SL Mobile needs to be able to access all of a user’s conversations (chat), IMs, group messages etc., regardless of receipt when using the app, offline or using the desktop viewer.
  • As all of the above are currently locally stored by the viewer on the client computer. In order to be available across both desktop and Mobile, some form of cloud storage needs to be considered, which requires he building of an API and the provisioning of security to ensure only the designated user can access their chat and IM logs, etc.
    • Some cloud storage has been created to handle the same for Mobile, but it is limited.
  • A further complication is the desire to have users be able to log-in to the Lobby on Mobile without and in-world presence, thus potentially allowing for simultaneous access via the desktop viewer, which would require sharing of chat and histories, etc., between the two in order for them to remain in synch.
  • As such, the capability is not easy to implement and requires careful consideration, utilising multiple resources at LL (Mobile team, Server team, the teams that own the chat and IM, etc., services). Given this, while it will be coming in the future, there is currently no time-line as to when.

Tip and Tricks

[Video: 29:36-31:35]

  • The Go To Lobby button is now available from the Mobile menu when users are in-world, allowing for a quick return to the Lobby.
  • Wearing Group tags:
    • Group tags are off by default.
    • To enable: Menu → Settings → General →  set Show Group Titles slider to On (√).
    • To change a Group tag: Menu →  People →  select Groups from the drop down →  select the required Group to display its information tap Wear Group Tag.
Left: The Go to Lobby Button, available from the menu when in-world on Mobile. Centre and right: enabling Group tags and setting a tag.
  • Share Security Data: can be enabled / disabled via Menu Settings Privacy toggle the slider.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for details on the following and other questions which may have had a simple “yes” or “in progress” reply.

  • [Video: 15:10-20:42] Map support:
    • There have been numerous requests for SL Mobile to support maps – both the World map and the Mini-Map.
    • As both the Mini-Map and the World map serve different functions, both were seen by those at the meeting as being useful to have.
    • It was also noted that the major reasons given: finding locations and teleporting (World) and seeing who is nearby (Mini), are use cases that do not necessarily require a map in order to be solved, if alternate mechanisms could be provided (e.g. a “nearby people” list).
    • For provisioning a World map style of solution, one option might be to use the web map system (although, as noted at recent Web User Group meetings, this does need some TLC in its own right), which would avoid the need for in-app map rendering.
      • Web maps already work with Mobile: use them via the browser on your device and TP links will open in Mobile.
  • [Video: 21:51-26:25] Continuous log-in – the ability to have a avatar logged-in Mobile all the time, without necessarily appearing as on-line, and able to receive and respond to messages etc.
    • Seen as positive by those at the meeting, with the caveat that there is the ability to maintain a full chat history, etc., between both Mobile and desktop.
    • This also included the suggestion of allowing users to save their chat logs, etc., to their own cloud storage and access it from both desktop and Mobile.
  • [Video: 26:30-28:23] Switching accounts: there have apparently been requests to make switching between accounts on Mobile “easier”.
    • General consensus was that switching accounts on Mobile is no worse than on the desktop viewer.
    • A suggestion of having multiple account be able to use Mobile and access the Lobby for messaging purposes would be useful.
  • [Video: 28:34-29:25] Clarification was given that the Mobile Team are looking at chat/message histories, continuous log-in and switching accounts as a set of deliverables that could be made together in some form, and were looking for indicators that they would be well-received by users.
  • [Video 33:50-34:55] The Mobile app can (at least for some, myself included) hang when loading the Lobby. The screen will simply freeze for multiple seconds (sometimes into double-digits). There is no clear cause for this, but might be related to network connectivity issues, which are due to be looked at, with those experiencing the problem asked to submit feedback through the app.
  • [Video: 35:44-37:04] PBR support – this is pending the rendering work, which should help optimise memory use to allow PBR support + one other piece of work. When done should be close to the desktop implementation.
  • Via chat: Scripted Rotation Broken on Mobile – to be looked at.

Date of Next Meeting

A Diamond Moon Village in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Diamond Moon Village, June 2025 – click any image for full size

Vita Camino is a region design whose work I’ve covered numerous times in these pages, as she always creates something richly detailed, photogenic and fun to explore.  During the time I’ve been covering it, Vita’s work has expanded from Homestead designs to Full region settings – notably Lost Gardens of Pompeii, which I covered back in June 2023. As such, I thought it was time I took a time to her latest region design, which she opened in March 2025.

Diamond Moon Village is again located on a Full region, and offers a mix of locations and environments split between two land masses separated by an east-west channel of water, offering two very different, but equally engaging settings.

Diamond Moon Village, June 2025

However, before I go any further, I will note that if you have most of your viewer settings dialled-up, you might encounter performance issues. To this end, I’d recommend cutting back on things like Draw Distance – you won’t lose anything from view; the nature of the region is such that you don’t need a DD high enough to see right across it.

I’d also note that as the region doesn’t have a defined Landing Point, so for this article I’ve arbitrarily set the one in this article to the north end of the main bridge crossing the region’s channel.

Diamond Moon Village, June 2025

As noted above, the two halves of the setting are very different in look and tone, making for an interesting exploration – although the also flow together into a whole.

From woodland at its eastern extent, through what appears to be a little grouping of homestead farms, the landscape proceeds through a small town of mixed European architecture before reaching its western extreme with an almost Caribbean feel courtesy of the gaily-coloured vendor vans, the local beach huts and the palm trees as it reaches the sandy shore (where it appeared further construction was underway at the time of my visit).

Diamond Moon Village, June 2025

A lot of detail is to be found here: furnished houses, places of business, indoors and out – including a charming al fresco café with something of an Oriental lean. There are neat little courtyards furnished balconies (including one with an upright piano which has lost some of its sheet music to the cobbles below, courtesy of a passing breeze.

Through the village, cats prowl (and play with a motorised mouse!), dogs prance, flowers grow in pots, and all the bric-a-brac and might be found along the cobbles of streets and alleys, breathing a measure of life to the setting.

Diamond Moon Village, June 2025

Across the water to the south, the land has a very different feel; one I admit to finding more enigmatic and engaging. This is a place that has a sense of mystery, of strange magic to it. Ruins of various ages set to the eastern end, gathered around a large, clear pool of water. Part of these have been converted into a house (using one of my favourite buildings, Marcthur Goosson’s  No Cottage Bizar).

Further cosy residences can be found in moving westward, each one homely but still carrying an edge of mystery, up to and including the manor-style house at the western end of the setting. This air of mystery is added to as the EEP settings change as one advances, moving from day to night and back, offering additional depth to courtyards and alleyways – and opportunities for photography casting parts of the setting in a different light compared to standing within it. Again the level of detail is excellent and fully deserving of careful exploration.

Diamond Moon Village, June 2025

Also waiting to be found within the southern extent of the region is Vita’s texture store – but I’ll leave you to find it!

 SLurl Details

June 2025 SL Web User Group MP, Zero and a general discussion

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 June 4th, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript.

A video of the meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy, is embedded at the end of this summary, with sections of this summary times stamped to the relevant points in the video for those wishing to refer to the audio. My thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

 Table of Contents

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), and 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.
  • Meetings 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.

General Work in Progress

[Video: 1:51-7:18]

  • Marketplace: work is continuing on making the Marketplace more responsive, both with product listings and with using Marketplace search options & the category responses.
  • Downloads page:
    • Work is being put into adding further language translations.
    • The current drop-down for viewer system requirements is going to be updated to point to the main system requirements page, rather than being a separate listing.
    • The addition of Firestorm buttons to the page, and there are no plans at presents to do the same for other TPVs.
      • The reason given for this the volume of users running Firestorm compared to other TPVs.
      • The flipside to this is that including Firestorm on the official download page both gives the impression of “official endorsement” of Firestorm & further funnels users towards that TPV over others.
  • Project Zero: updates are being made to make it easier for people who still have time available on their Project Zero use to get back to their session (also see below).
  • Work that had been going into the back-end infrastructure is now nearing completion, and should free-up resources.
  • SL Wiki:
    • As noted at the SUG meeting, LL are planning to move away from using the mediawiki platform for the SL Wiki to a new service.
    • Some SL Wiki pages have been ported to Readme.com as a test, but no formal decision as to which platform will be used has been made.

Project Zero (SL  in a Browser) Update

[Video: 8:26-10:44]

  • The URL for Zero will be changing to web.secondlife.com.
  • The current page link for Project Zero at the top of the secondlife.com dashboard page is to be replaced by an actual button.
  • The link to Firestorm Zero has been removed.
  • General web page design improvements.
  • Largely non-visible changes to the join flow for incoming users.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video for details on the following.

  • [Video: 12:11-17:09] A discussion on the CasperVend Sales and Coupons options – who uses them and how.
    • Those at the meeting indicated they tend to use both in several ways (e.g. as a means of providing a discount; as a means include a shared item that is bundled across multiple products;  for event sales; for individual item sales in-store, etc.).
    • It was suggested that LL contact the Mainstore Release Discord group to gain broader feedback.
  • [Video 17:36-28:15 – text] Marketplace unavailability: a comments was made about the Marketplace reporting to be “under heavy load” and thus inaccessible to users.
    • This appears to have been the result of the same kind of DDOS / aggressive and improper crawler bots issue has has been affecting the SL Wiki, and steps are being put in place to prevent it recurring.
  • [Video: 28:24-32:10] SL Wiki: syntax highlight is broken (see: [⚠️ URGENT] SL Wiki: syntax highlight is broken *and* in-world access via viewer is down…). This impacts most pages with function pages with example code.
    • This was apparently the result of an update to the version of MediaWiki LL are running, and fixes are in progress.
  • [Video: 32:17-39:51] A questions was asked on why the main image on a Marketplace listing no longer “zooms” when clicked , and why is there are large amount of whitespace between the image and the options on the right side of the listing page.
    • Juniper Linden indicated that previously, the main image was a modal view of the original image uploaded by the merchant, and the “zoom” was simply displaying it at its original size; now the image is displayed directly within it listing at its original size.
    • The image upload size limitation is still, but the hope is to eventually remove it, and simply have a zoom for very large images.
  • General comments on:
  • [Video:54:51-end] A general question: if people had a single poker chip per year to get something in SL fixed, what would they place it on? Responses included: Secondlife.com dashboard refresh; conversations floater overhaul; shape keys; a complete fix for animation constraints.
  • Overlapping with the above were comments on the state of the Events listings (particularly people posting one event multiple times and how to report them), with and agreement from Kali Linden that it is a mess, and could really do with a ground-up rebuild (resources allowing); in terms of reporting, that is to be referred back internally for feedback on the best way to do so.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025.

Second Life Hair Fair 2025

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Hair Fair

The 2025 Second Life Hair Fair is opened on Saturday, May 31st and runs through until Sunday, June 15th, 2025. As with previous years, it is being run to raise money for Wigs for Kids, with every purchase seeing a percentage donated to the cause while the Bandana booths and Donation kiosks donating 100% of all proceeds received.

As with recent years, the event takes place across six regions, appropriately called Blonde, Brunette, Foils, Noirette, Redhead and Streaks,  all laid out in a loop around a central boulevard. So, no matter where you arrive or whether you head left or right, you can easily pass through all of the regions and pass all of the stores. The landing zones for the regions are located at either end of the the loop (Blonde & Streaks; Foils & Niorette), and towards the middle of the boulevard for Brunette and Redhead, where the Hair Fair Bandana Booths can be found.

If walking isn’t your thing, signs along the boulevard allow you to rez and ride a “prim bus”: just click to rez, sit to ride and hop off when you see something of interest.

Hair Fair 2025

As is usual for Hair Fair, the shopping regions are lightly decorated in order to minimise viewer-side lag that might otherwise be created by having a significant amount of extra object and texture rendering. The list of participating merchants can be found on the Hair Fair website, while for those who may not find something they wish to purchase, donation kiosks are available to help support Wigs for Kids, or there are the Bandana Booths mentioned above.

Important Note to Those on Non-PBR Viewers

All of the stores within Hair Fair utilise PBR reflection probes. If you are using a non-PBR viewer, you will be unable to click through the reflection probe to touch a vendor board from outside of a store (e.g. when cam-shopping from the landing points). To make a purchase, please make sure your enter the store first.

Hair Fair 2025

About Wigs for Kids

For more than forty years Wigs for Kids has been providing hair replacement systems and support for children who have lost their hair due to chemotherapy, radiation therapy, Alopecia, Trichotillomania, burns and other medical issues at no cost to children or their families. The effects of hair loss go deeper than just a change in a child’s outward appearance. Hair loss can erode a child’s self-confidence and limit them from experiencing life the way children should. With an injured self-image, a child’s attitude toward treatment and their physical response to it can be negatively affected also.

Wigs for Kids helps children suffering with hair loss look themselves and live their lives. Families are never charged for the hair replacements provided for their children; Wigs for Kids rely completely on both the donation of hair and / or money to help meet their goals.

Read more about Wigs for Kids mission, and discover how hair can be donated.

URLs and SURLs

2025 week #23: SL SUG meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
Soul Deep, March 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. The notes were taken from my chat log of the meeting. No video this week.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Meetings 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.

Simulator Deployments

  • There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts.

SL Viewer Updates

In Brief

  • As noted in the previous update, the WebRTC “switch on” has been on hold, in part due bugs, performance optimisations, and infrastructure updates.
    • A new version of the code is due to be deployed, aimed at addressing some of the first two of these requirements.
    • There is also the issue of around 21% of Firestorm users not running a WebRTC capable version of that viewer, which is also a potential impact on the switch-over.).
    • In the WebRTC prototype the audio mixing/relaying happens on the same host as the region; there is a project to move that compute onto dedicated server stacks.
  • Given the on-going issues with the SL wiki (the latest being a sustained DDOS-type impact, thought to be caused by “aggressive and improper crawler bots”), it was indicated that LL are planning to move away from using the mediawiki platform to a new service. No details were given on what service this might be,  and the statement was followed by numerous appeals for all existing SL wiki data to be ported and/or not lost.
  • SLua:
    • There is something of a performance bottleneck with SLua in that SLua scripts run so much faster = people want to make content that thrashes prim params quickly = the server struggles to send the updates fast enough, causing the bottleneck.
      • Leviathan Linden had been looking at this and is hoping to get back to it soon, noting that he should be able to offer some gains in the speed with which the server sends the updates.
      • However, he doubts the Lab will “be able to fully unlock the SLua potential for thrashing object properties” without a “major overhaul of the communication protocol”.
    • It has been noted that  some ll.List functions produce SLua run-time errors when working with lists (tables) that contain nil values. This is a known issue at the Lab, and discussion on how to address it are in progress.
  • General, user-led discussions on:
    • Bots (e.g. better account verification).
    • The potential to improve / replace Media on a Prim (MOAP) – such as replacing it with SVG rendering on a prim (seen as handy for use in HUDs and well), or reducing the requirement for every object using MOAP to call its own browser instance. LL do not appear to have any work on the roadmap for either of these, although feature requests for SVG support were noted as having been “seen”.

† 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 rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.