Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week ending Sunday, July 4th
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: Project UI RC viewer, version 6.4.20.560520, dated June 14th, promoted June 23rd – No change.
Neverending: The Dark Tower, July 2021- click any image for full size
I was off back to Neverending, the Homestead designed by Jayden Mercury and Valarie (Zalindah), to see it in its latest iteration: The Dark Tower.
I’ve no idea if the region’s name is a reference to Stephen King’s series of of eight novels genre-crossing (dark fantasy, science fantasy, horror, and westerns) series of novels regarded as his magnum opus (or indeed the 2017 film they in turn inspired, or the 1952 narrative poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came by Robert Browning said to have been King’s inspiration). Nor do I know if the likes of Tolkien’s Barad-dûr may also have influenced the naming of the region in this iteration; however, there are faint echoes towards both King and Tolkien writings to be found within the setting.
Neverending: The Dark Tower
The focus of the setting is a high tower towards which we are encouraged to travel just as King’s protagonist, Roland Deschain, is also drawn (essentially following in the footsteps – metaphorically speaking – of Browning’s Childe Roland); although in his case, the Dark Tower is both physical and metaphorical, whereas here the tower is very much physical.
Rising from a domed island, the tower within the region may not be the centre of the universe, as per the tower of the film, but it does sit as the hub around which most of the rest of the setting has been built. It is ringed by a series of stone and wood bridges that sit wheel-like around it, with stone causeways connecting them both to it like the spokes of a wheel, and which extend outward to reach other points of interest.
Neverending: The Dark Tower
One of the latter offers the Tolkien reference: a tall volcano that issues forth lava and billowing smoke just as Orodruin did as it stood apart from Mordor’s Barad-dûr. A second outlier tops a pinnacle of rock to provide a lover’s hideaway within the hollowed trunk of an aged tree, whilst a third presents a walk through rain and dancing leaves that pirouette around frozen umbrellas periodically lit by lightning, to where a grand piano sits. Beyond this, across the water and within a curtain ring of stone and trees, sits a house on its own, a private residence.
From the low-lying landing point with its warning about AFKing whilst there, its Torii gate and off-shore orca that play in the shallows, it is possible to climb to the first of the high causeways as it leads to the tower. From either side of this causeway, the ring of stone and wooden / rope bridges spans outward from either side for those who wish to follow it (but be warned; some of these may not be as stable as they might first appear to be!).
Neverending: The Dark Tower
In keeping with King’s novels and the film they spawned, the tower appears to be a place of mystery and power for those who dare explore (there is even a “door” that will return visitors to their beginning – or at least in this case, the landing point). A dragon guards the entrance to the tower, although it appears willing to allow visitors passage through the great gate and doors and explore within. It is not the only such creature standing guard – a point to which I will return in a moment.
While the great hall to the rear of the tower might at first appear to be little more than a place nature is attempting to reclaim, careful eyes and hands might find a secret route by which the tower might be further explored, from top of highest tower through hidden room, and more as noted above. Others might simply content themselves with finding their way to the upper room, where sits the Book of Magic.
Neverending: The Dark Tower
Not all of the regions secrets await discovery above ground, either. Those who explore carefully enough should find their way to a garden where creatures of the sea swim and play, and tunnels lead to where a water dragon awaits those wishing to sit and converse with it.
Like the iteration before it, Sakura Tales (see here for more), this version of Neverending continues a narrative that first started with Jayden Mad Wonderland build (see here): the tale of an artist, with chapters of the story awaiting discovery throughout the setting as they lie as pages waiting to be found. When discovered an clicked upon, these pages will present their part of the story to you on a private channel, and (perhaps) offer a clue as to what is to come next.
Neverending: The Dark Tower
Rich in detail (although the default EEP settings can make this difficult to appreciate – I actually opted for Bryn Oh’s Bluniverse, which comes as standard with EEP, so that I could appreciate the setting better without going too far from the intended environment), with lots of opportunities for photography, discovery and simply appreciating the creativity of Jayden and Valarie whilst following the third instalment of Jayden’s tale, The Dark Tower is an atmospheric and engaging visit.
Second Life’s 18th anniversary is, at the time of writing, almost over. The celebrations have come to an end and the regions themselves will be closing to public access on July 6th, 2021.
I mention this because the SL18B regions are part of the broad-ranging work that comes under the remit of the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW), and the contractors – the Moles – who are employed by the Lab through it.
As well as the SLB regions (this year put together with the assistance of residents like Walton F. Wainwright (Faust Steamer)), the Moles are also responsible for – as we all doubtless know – the likes of the Mainland infrastructure, Bellissera, the Linden Portal Park and associated experiences / games, and more. All of this is in part celebrated with the annual Meet the Moles session at each year’s SLB celebrations, when we get the opportunity to see many of the Moles all gathered together as the answer questions and talk about their work.
Beckridge Gallery – Diamond Marchant: Work Look
However, for her summer exhibition at her Beckridge Gallery in Bellisseria, Diamond Marchant presents another opportunity for us to see the Moles. Work Look, her new exhibition, presents a series of portraits of many of the Moles (and some of the Lindens) as they go about their work in-world preparing the SL18B regions for the 2021 celebrations.
Mounted on the walls of the gallery and the attached greenhouse are around 27 portraits of the Moles (Dion gets to appear twice, to make the total number of images 28), together with portraits of Grumpity, Strawberry, Brett and Patch Linden with a surprise appearance by Philip Linden, who looks to have dropped in on the celebrations as well.
Beckridge Gallery – Diamond Marchant: Work Look
So, if you fancy taking another look at the Moles and celebrating / recalling SL18B, the Beckridge Gallery might be the place to visit!
He has visited your home. Have you visited his? Come and experience the Very NICE & Very EVIL home and art gallery of the Bellisseria Slenderman. If you can find it, take a ride on “Slender: The Eight Pages” THRILL RIDE!
– From the Destination Guide
For those who may not be aware (are there any?) the Slender Man is a fictional supernatural character created by Eric Knudsen (aka “Victor Surge”) in 2009 on the Something Awful forum. It has gone on to become an Internet “folk legend” spanning multiple narratives – as well as becoming a focus of controversy when fiction connected to the character was connected to a number of physical world acts of violence in 2014, including the Slender Man Stabbing.
The Slender Man in the skies of Bellisseria
The character also became the inspiration for an independent first-person survival horror video game now called Slender: The Eight Pages.
It is this game that in turn forms the inspiration for this new Second Life experience, located within the Log Homes regions of Bellisseria, and which forms a further chapter in the Slender Man’s involvement with Bellisseria, something that commenced in February 2020.
Centred on a gallery images that record the character’s visitations / appearances within Bellisseria that is spread across the three floors of the house, the Bellisseria Slenderman Gallery includes a number of interactive elements, as indicated in the information note card available at the landing point:
A roller coater ride, reached via a “hidden” teleport.
A “hidden” basement awaiting visitors.
A hunt based on the eight pages that are at the heart of the the game – except there’s no trying to avoid the Slender Man (unless he happens to pop-up!), but instead offers various prizes.
For those with a Bellisseria passport, the opportunity to have it stamped (or maybe “unstamped!”) by the Slender Man.
In addition, the experience makes uses of the parcel as a whole, with various elements indoors and out to make it more a atmospheric setting. These include a dedicated EEP setting that is well worth seeing if you don’t have your viewer set to use shared environments by default (World → Environment → Use Shared Environment).
To be honest, locating the teleports for the roller coaster and basement isn’t that hard, but be aware that not all teleports are referenced in the introductory notes, so careful mousing is recommended.
However, locating the eight pages in the hunt will take a certain amount of patience and careful camming / exploring (unless you’re using a viewer with Area Search and opt to cheat!). The prizes they offer are varied and clearly designed to appeal to a wide range of recipients. I admit to liking the Segway (and its instructions: “Say yes to any animation requests and turn your AO off so you don’t look like a big goof”!), even if it looks as if it has been designed for someone around 10 or 11 foot tall, rather than scaled more towards the “average” avatar heights commonly used nowadays.
Bellisseria Slenderman Gallery
My attempts to summon the Slender Man via the HUD failed miserably whilst initially exploring and working through the hunt. However, when returning to the setting to take photos, he surprised me by popping up unexpectedly, and we ended up playing “let’s photograph one another”, as can be seen here and here on the Slender Man forum thread.
Meanwhile, the roller coaster makes for a smooth ride, and is best enjoyed in Mouselook. Taking it will provide hints on what to look for with the hunt’s eight pages for those who haven’t started / completed it; while those not so enamoured of hunts, etc., can wander around the back of the house and either climb to the seating platform on the roof or avail themselves of the bumper boats rezzer and mess around on the lake behind the house.
Bellisseria Slenderman Gallery
I admit, I’m not a great one for horror, and the idea of embracing a character that has in the past been controversial in inspiring acts of violence does cause a frisson of discomfort. However, what I do find fascinating about Bellisseria Slenderman Gallery is actually not so much the experience itself, but the fact it has allegedly been built by “Mouse Mysterious”.
This is a character who uses a Profile image / logo that has a certain similarity to that of a nonagenarian mouse logo used by a certain studio. I’m not aware of any link between said studio and the makers of the game from which the experience takes its inspiration, so no idea if this is purely coincidental or a possible hint of something in and of itself. Perhaps time will tell on this – or not!
Anyway, the experience is there to be discovered, and I’ll leave you to do so as the mood takes you.
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, July 1st, 2021. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar and the venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.
SL Viewer
There have been no updates for the any of the official viewer versions, leaving the pipelines as follows:
Fernet Maintenance RC, version 6.4.20.560398, dated June 22.
Project viewers:
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.
General Viewer Notes
The Fernet Maintenance RC viewer is next in line for promotion.
LMR-6 continues to be developed.
Voice update: this wasn’t an update the SLplugin.exe API, but was a change to the automatic voice level detector. This was causing a lot of the cut-out issues with voice, as it is overly sensitive to voice cadence when speaking, causing the temporary drop-outs, so by default the viewer no longer uses it at all.
ARCTan
Summary: An attempt to re-evaluate both avatar rendering costs and the cost of in-world scene rendering, with the current focus on avatar rendering cost / impact, and in-world scene rendering / LI to be tackled at some point in the future.
Work is continuing on the new performance floater. This pulls together information from various menus / debugs to display useable information on avatars / attachments that are heavy in rendering cost, and what can be done.
This work is currently separate to the work on revising that actual formulas used for calculating avatar complexity. As the viewer has yet to appear, it’s not clear if the updated avatar complexity calculations will be folded-in to the viewer before it reaches eventual release status, or if they will follow after. Currently, Vir hopes to get back to working on the calculations “some time in the new few weeks”.
Graphics Update Discussion
There have been numerous questions about LL switching the viewer’s renderer to a commercial engine such as Unreal Engine or Unity.
As Grumpity Linden indicated during her SL18B Meet the Lindens session, there are currently no plans to do so. This is not to say it would never happen – although doing so would be a very significant project.
One major argument against turning to a commercial engine is that users have very strong views on existing content and how it should be rendered, and can get very upset when things change – and they would change significantly were the viewer to be re-built around a new rendering engine.
Other factors weighing against commercial engines include:
They are not currently considered as being particularly good at dealing with dynamic content.
They could be restrictive in terms of the hardware people can use to access SL.
The basic work to make a switch-over would likely require around 18-24 months of development, which would curtail other viewer work, simply because it would be a significant viewer re-build.
Currently, the major areas of performance impact are said to be:
The sheer volume of draw calls the viewer has to make under OpenGL, which have a large processing overhead.
Avatar rendering, due to that volume of unoptimised content avatars can be loaded with – hi-poly meshes, excessively heavy unique texture use, etc.
Poorly considered in-world content (undue reliance on high LOD models, texture use, etc.).
The processing required for rendering shadow, etc, (when people run them).
The draw calls issue could be largely significantly reduced via a switch to more recent graphics APIs – such as Vulkan (PC) and Metal (Apple), which process things differently. Such a switch also yields benefits in other areas – such as the potential to use graphics libraries based on the capability of the user’s computer.
As such, the preferred route is to make incremental changes, such as a switch to a more modern set of APIs and libraries, rather than a total replacement of the rendering engine, simply because this will yield some degree of benefit and improvement without a substantial impact on the Lab / SL / users.
Another aspect of performance improvement (which has also been subject to recent questions) is improving the viewer code to better leverage multi-core processors.
General Improvements / Education
It’s acknowledged that better LOD models for objects would help improve performance where “new” content is concerned, and work is being put into a mesh optimiser,, although more could be done.
The Lab also acknowledges that much of the documentation produced through the wiki for content creation is increasingly out-of-date. There is also much that simply isn’t documented.
A problem with a lack of proper documentation / education is that creators – especially those new to the platform – can pick up incorrect ideas / approaches, and end up contributing to issues such as poor performance (e.g. the idea that everything must be high poly in order to be high quality).
However, the flip side of the argument is, even if effort is put into better documentation, etc., there is a) no guarantee it would be read be newer creators; b) it is unlikely that those already set in their ways (bad habits and all) will actually decide to take notes and change their ways
While somewhat valid this above point doesn’t excuse ensuring the information that is provided is at least relevant / accurate and again becoming a resource that can be actively used / pointed to.
In Brief
A clarification was given on the upcoming resumption of work on the 360º Snapshot viewer (see: 2021 TPV Developer Meeting Week #25 Summary), stating that this viewer remains for snapshots only – there are no plans at present to extend it to 360º video capture.
There are still no plans to re-implement official support for VR headsets at this time, as it is generally felt at LL that while it would be nice to offer it, overall viewer frame rates cannot be maintained (e.g. at least 60 fps per eye) to make for a comfortable experience.
BUG-229908 “[EEP] Build floater shows incorrect light colour values/incorrect colour set for light” (also BUG-230549 “Colour picker for Light (PRIM_POINT_LIGHT) shows and sets incorrect values”, noted as a duplicate to BUG-229908), has been accepted by the Lab, but no ETA on any possible fix – and it is not currently being looked at as a part of the LMR-6 work.
Akim Alonzo, owner and creator of The Itakos Project, is also an excellent photographer artist in his own right, as I’ve noted in a number of pieces in this blog where I’ve covered his exhibitions (see Water and a Matrix: Reflections on Life by Akim Alonzo, for example).
The latest selection of Akim’s work is now on display at the Main Gallery of the Kondor Art Centre, curated by Hermes Kondor. It presents a mix of works that offer a choice of themes within it, and which also echo past exhibition themes Akim has produced, making for another eye-catching and thought-provoking display of art from a man who is a master of frame, tone and composition.
Kondor Main Gallery: Akim Alonzo
The images presented are offered under the title of Anima and comprise 27 individual images and 2 slide shows. One of the latter pages through a selection of the images on display, the other displays a collection of additional portraits. Between them, these two slide shows present the core themes to be found within this collection – both of which intertwine into a single, larger perspective.
One of these themes is that of the avatar-as-a-person. Avatar studies are a common theme with Second Life art – although more often than not, such studies tend to focus on presenting an emotional story / emotive response utilising the entire image – expression, pose, surroundings, etc., – that together form a single frame narrative. Akim, however, is one of the few Second Life artists who takes a very deliberate path in his studies: one that focuses on the emotions that may exist within an avatar.
Kondor Main Gallery: Akim Alonzo
Whether these emotions are real, or a projection of our own, or a reflection of the emotions Akim felt in composing each image, really doesn’t matter; although I would suggest that there is combination of all of these aspects involved. What is important is that each piece is a marvellously layered composition, the focus always on the subject, the background and lighting a means to project / capture the emotions that we see as coming from within the avatar. This are pieces that make extraordinary use of chiaroscuro to imbue the subject of each image with a depth of life and feeling that is bewitching.
The second theme to be found within this collection is that of life itself – real or virtual – and the questions we can harbour about it; in this, some of the pieces are drawn from or reflect his 2019 exhibition The Matrix. There is a wealth of metaphor within these particular pieces – the majority of which can be found on the gallery’s upper floor – and also question: what is real? Is the digital realm any less “real” than the physical? Might we all in fact be unwittingly operating within a virtual realm, our need to project ourselves into a digital realm a reflection of this?
Kondor Main Gallery: Akim Alonzo
Both of these thematic strands come together to offer a broader set of ideas / questions related to the identity, self and who we are as individuals; to questions of – dare I say it – soul.
Beautifully composed, perfectly executed and presented, Anima is an extraordinary exhibition by an extraordinary artist.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 