Category: Second Life

2026 week #3: SL CCUG and Open Source (TPVD) meetings summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hippotropolis Campsite: venue for CCUG meetings
The following notes were taken from:

  • My chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, January 15th, 2026 and my chat log of that meeting
  • Pantera’s video (embedded at the end of this article) and my chat log of the Open-Source Developer meeting held on Friday, January 16th, 2026.
Table of Contents

Please note that this is not a full transcript of either meeting but a summary of key topics.

Meeting Purpose

  • 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 related viewer development work.
    • This meeting is generally held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis and is held in a mix of Voice and text chat.
  • The OSUG meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meetings. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
    • This meeting is generally held twice a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre and is generally text chat only.
  • Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.

Official Viewer Status

  • Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2 – No Change.
    • Notable addition: new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha version 7.2.3.19911032641, December 5 –  No Change.
  • Second Life Project Voice Moderation viewer 26.1.0.20139269477, December 12 – No Change.
    • Introduces the ability to moderate spatial voice chat in regions configured to use webRTC voice.

Upcoming Viewers

Viewer 2026.01 – One-click Installer / Updater

Viewer 2026.01 is in progress. This will include:

  • Improved bugsplat support (we want better reporting for freezes, and just generally better crash reporting). This work builds on the successes of 2025 in detailing with viewer crashes and reducing overall causes for crashes.
  • A new one-click installer, which in brief:
    • Will be powered by a new dependency called velopack, and will allow a single-click installation of the viewer (with a brief pop-up message), with the viewer launching once the install process is complete.
    • Will default to installing under Apps/Local on windows; will remain as a drag-and-drop process on Mac OS, while Linux is currently TBD. It will still be possible to install the viewer to a custom location, initially via a command line argument.
    • Will not change the install location of config files, or anything that counts as user data.
  • Development work on this did hit a delay, which has now been cleared, the hope remaining to get an Alpha (previously known as Project) viewer out with the update code in place sooner rather than later.
  • As an added benefit to the switch to velopack for TPVs, LL will be providing a solution to add auto-update functionality to TPV projects, if TPVs wish to leverage it. More information on this is due to be made available in the next week or so.

Viewer 2026.02 – “Flat” UI, Font Changes

  • This viewer is to be part of the Lab’s “first impressions” push to make SL resonate more with incoming new users and hopefully encourage them to keep logging in.
  • This first impression work is on multiple fronts, and for the 2026.02 viewer will be a switch to the “flat” UI seen in the Project Zero (viewer in a browser) version which comprises things like a font change, a colour scheme change,  and generally giving the viewer a more “modern” look and feel.
  • The font update:
      • Should not impact people’s use of unicode.
    • Will require XUI updates which will likely require updates for TPVs using their own custom XUI – TPVs are advised to keep an eye on Discord and Github for more information on these changes as they develop, and to particularly track this github issue.

General Viewer Notes

  • Linux support will likely ship as a part of the in-progress SLua beta viewer.
  • The viewer development roadmap is still being worked on in terms of fixes and updates and actioning feature requests, the focus being to work these into the viewer without disrupting major initiatives the Lab is looking to develop (such as the “first impressions” drive).
  • 2026.02 might include some screen space reflections (SSR) updates to help improve the appearance of Linden Water under PDR/HDR.
  • The avatar appearance fixes contributed by Kitty Barnett and intended to make the current outfit folder more reliable when changing outfits, messing with outfits, etc., may get to see the light of day in viewer 2026.03 – but this had yet to be confirmed.

Grid-Wide WebRTC Deployment – Initial Announcement (OSD Meeting)

  • The Lab is currently looking at a March deployment of WebRTC voice across the grid.
  • The schedule is not firmly set as yet, but will follow the usual server-side deployment routine: first to one (or more) simulator RC channels, then to all simulator RC channels (if not all rolled at once), and then a week after this, deployment to the Main simulator channel.
  • The important point in this is that once grid-wide, WebRTC will completely supplant Vivox Voice, and those who use Voice by who are not running a WebRTC voice capable viewer (which generally means anyone not on a non-PBR supporting viewer) will be unable to use Voice.
    • This does not mean that the Vivox service will be immediately shut-down. It will remain an option for the Lab to re-enable until such time as LL is confident in the WebRTC service and no surprises have come to light.
  • There is one remaining WebRTC critical issue in the viewer that makes the experience not great for a small body of users:
    • People with certain network characteristics may see a dropout because the WebRTC provider is not properly handling renegotiation.
    • LL has a fix which should be deployed with viewer 2026.01. However, TPVs wishing to merge it now can do so via Pull Request 5126.
  • In the meantime, the beta for WebRTC has expanded – see this official blog post for details.
  • Roxie Linden also indicated that LL is experimenting with speech-to-text using WebRTC, but does not as yet have anything available for public demonstrations.
  • The issue of Linux builds not using Pulseaudio but with the WebRTC code crashing on start-up was reiterated at the meeting. Whilst this might not be a widespread issue, the feeling was that it should be looked at; however, if the pool of impacted users is liable to be very small, it will not be seen as a reason to block / delay WebRTC deployment as a whole and any fix is liable to be prioritised in terms of resources / impact of the issue, post-deployment.

General Discussion – Both Meetings

  • Avatar support related:
    • Shape key support and / or custom bone hierarchies – seen as complex area of work, and not being looked at.
    • While the current avatar does technically use shape keys, it is very different to how modern blend shapes are used.
    • SL’s internal format also doesn’t store bones.
  • Questions were raised on the status of game_control. This is more a subject for the Simulator User Group meetings, where Leviathan Linden indicated he was trying to resume work on the code. However, it was also indicated during this meeting that Leviathan had again been “borrowed” to work on other code.
  • Despite rumour to the contrary, Puppetry is not currently set for revival or on the current 2026 roadmap.
  • Geenz noted that while work on things like new tools, updates to the GLTF uploader, etc., are not “done”, the focus for the time being in more on dealing with technical debt together with the aforementioned “first impressions” initiative, etc.
  • Questions were asked on auto / planar-aligning PBR materials  – see: Aligning Faces when using PBR and Planar face alignment with PBR GLTF materials. This is something the Lab has yet to resolve, and has offered a contribution bounty for any developer who is able to provide a solution. Geenz also indicated he would try to get bugs like this better prioritised.
  • A general discussion on ideas for improvements to chat, including: ability to have a “last unread” indicator in chat when logging-on; having the chat rings on the mini-Map on by default, some idea about a special chat tab that would allow region-wide chat (presumably at the region owner’s discretion to enable), ability to correct text in chat / IM after sending(!), etc.
  • The You Tube embedding issues was again raised (see here for more), with a possible (if hacky) workaround. LL are looking to You tube to address the problem, as they created it.
  • There was a general discussion on the complexities of Land Impact, particularly – but not restricted to – mesh objects. In short, LI is a complicated subject, and not easily addressed; hence why the Lab backed away from the subject recently. This also strayed into the equally complicated realm of LOD generation.
    • On the subject of LOD generation, it was suggested that the Lab should look to implement a LOD generator and then inform creators LODs have to be generated  to fit a defined set of criteria – or defaults will be forced.
  • A discussion on the choice of VHACD over HACD as a replacement for Havok in mesh decomposition. The latter is seen as more mature, but LL opted for VHACD is a “middle ground” solution as it is more regularly maintained, it is also apparently more reliable when dealing with the “weirder meshes” some SL creators produce, when compared to something like CoACD. However, Geenz indicated it would be “nice” to have “swappable”  convex decomposition solutions at runtime.
  • A further request for Error creating thumbnail” message on SL wiki, breaking images  to be addressed.

Next Meetings

January 2026 SL Web User Group

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 January 14th, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article, my thanks to her for providing 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), 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.

Updates

  • The past month hasn’t been very active for the web team due to the holiday season. There has been a focus on internal updates, security patching, and clean up.
  • Some of the above include:
    • Additional security features around marketplace to increase security and add resilience.
    • Version upgrades to LL’s internal services for security upgrades.
    • Upcoming security feature to nudge residents to update and verify their email address on file.
  • There is also something of a focus on trying to clear-up outstanding Canny issues (so maybe this and this will get addressed?).
  • There is a hope that the focus on back-end services, whilst not necessarily visible to users will this help to see the overall experience of using the Marketplace, etc., become far smoother with fewer outages, issues with people being overcharged for product listing enhancements (PLEs), etc.
  • A significant push for 2026 will be “first impressions” / the new user experience -trying to further improve things so that incoming users have a generally positive experience which encourages them to keep logging-in.

In Brief

  • Kali Linden departed the Lab around the end of November / beginning of December to become VP of system security at a new start-up. Many thanks to her in absentia for all her work a LL.
    • As a result of this, the Lab’s web engineering are operating on a “shared ownership” basis until someone can be hired-in to fill Kali’s role.
    • Kali’s departure also means that some of the planned roadmap for web properties (e.g. the Marketplace UI overhaul) are being reassessed in terms of what can / should be achieved, etc.
  • There have been reports of the SL forums running “slowly” for people in the UK (and Europe?). The Forums are operated by a third-party supplier, and somewhat outside of LL’s direct control. This has been escalated to the forum vendor, but not other updates at present.
  • A request was made to be able to transfer L$ amounts between accounts / to others via a user’s secondlife.com Dashboard – with suitable security in place.
    • This was seen as an “interesting” idea, but would likely require some additional security – such as being tied-into MFA.
    • No commitment was made towards implementing the idea at this time, because further investigation on requirements, etc., would be required.
    • A suggestion was made to set a limit on how much a user directly transfer – or allowing a user to set a limit on the amount (e.g. account-to-account, rather than via a vendor or similar system) at any one time, in order to safeguard accounts against being emptied if successfully hacked. This was also seen as potentially interesting, but could be a  dynamic / fluid set of rules.
  • LindeX use, transaction fees, etc., came up for discussion (although perhaps better placed at the content Creation meeting, where people who routinely cash-out from SL are liable to be in attendance).
    • A loose consensus at the Web meeting was that greater clarification should be given as to what can be paid for directly using L$ / the USD wallet &without incurring additional processing fees (e.g. some users apparently think they have to convert L$ to dollars in order to pay their tier, etc.).
    • A clearer break down of the current transaction fees in a single place (buy for L$, credit processing for cashing-out, cost for subscribers, etc.) could perhaps be given within the Dashboard.
  • A discussion on SL maps – including searching by region name, improving World Map tile resolution, enhancing the map capabilities in general, etc.
    • A fair point was made that the maps are a core way of expressing the size and persistence of SL – yet the capability and the functions around it are perceived as being of little interest to LL management when it comes to prioritising updates, etc., with the focus appearing to be only on areas that directly affect commence in SL.
    • Maps are a vital component in the “first impression” aspect of Second Life – if incoming users can be encouraged to understand the SL is bigger than the welcome hubs and the selected destinations beyond them – and that they can, using the maps – explore on their own / in conjunction with the Destination Guide, then there is a motivation for them to keep logging-in and to start exploring.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, February 4th, 2026.

Of Whithermere’s ancient beauty in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Whithermere, January 2026 – click any image for full size

Landscaping creator and friend Cube Republic pointed me in the direction of Whithermere, a Homestead region designed by Dargason L’Ardente (rlhaydenfield) as both her home and a public space. Incorporating multiple settings within it, the region also forms a showcase for Dargason’s own landscaping skills.

Whithermere’s Dryad Sanctuary, and the home of Dargason L’Ardente, Dryad of Sedany Wood.  Enjoy the myriad winding paths through dappled wood & glade, uphill & over stream. The sharp of eye may spot some of the lovely dryads hidden throughout the woods.

– Whithermere  About Land description

Whithermere, January 2026

No Landing Point is set within the region, so the SLurl I’m giving here is quite arbitrary on my part. It will deliver you to a stone gazebo on the southern side of the region, sitting on a rocky shoulder of tall hills rising behind it, and overlooking the setting’s lake.

I selected the gazebo as it offers both a view across the setting to its northward extent, and the distinctive curl of land there almost forming an island in its own right rising from the waters on either side; and because it offers multiple routes of exploration.

Whithermere, January 2026

For example, step out of the gazebo and follow the grassy trail downhill to the left, and there is a choice of stepping down to a little wharf at the lake’s edge or following the trail along the step bank of the lake about 5 metres above the water, as it leads the way eastwards to where another path passes by way of a little bridge into Sedany Woods, passing by way of hither moors.

Alongside of the trail leading down to the lake, a paved path also sets out from the gazebo, rising and turning gently to also follow the curve of the lake below. A stone dragon – one of many sculptures in stone or wood to be found throughout the region – marks a branch of the path, where steps climb up to a cliff-edge walk leading to what I’ll call dragon’s hill (if reasons which are pretty self-explanatory!).

Whithermere, January 2026

Passing this, the paved footpath passes into the misty peace of Thither Wood, where visitors might dance around a fire to the woodland’s sounds and under the eyes of silent sentinels in a shaded clearing where plants glow with bioluminescence. Beyond the glade, the path continues on, turning towards the north and dropping down to become the route to the little bridge crossing to Sedany Woods, passing the grassy trail as it does so. Or, for those turning right as the path clears the trees of Thither Wood, it drops down to the region’s southern coast.

Head west from the gazebo, and another cliff-edge trail runs below the shoulder of “dragon’s hill”, passing steps cut into the rock to lead up to its promontory before dropping sharply down to a rock slab as it offers passage over a narrow channel to the sands at the edge of Mistwold, the island-like formation on the region’s north side.

Whithermere, January 2026

Here there are multiple paths of exploration up and around this rocky swirl as it exudes a sense of ancient history and mystery, crowned as it is by standing stones and tall pines. Goats graze here, watched over by eagles overhead whilst water tumbles by way of falls and channel to reach the lake.

Two paths from Mistwold point the way east to where Sedany Woods may once again be reached, and explorations can thus continue, completely circling the region.

Whithermere, January 2026

To call this region peaceful and mystical would e an understatement; the entire setting mix natural beauty with a sense of mystery and fable, that latter helped in part by the presence of dragons and the glowing plants and growths.

At the same time there is a the undeniable feel of magic and ancient (I will not say “pagan”, as that does not do justice to the depth of the feeling that might be evoked here) mystery. So much so, that in wandering the land and passing through the mist and trees, I would not have been surprised had I encountered the likes of Herne the Hunter. Indeed, and while the show itself dramatically relocated Herne’s place of residence, I did find myself listening to Clannad’s Legend, the soundtrack for the very excellent TV series Robin of Sherwood and its reimagining of the legend of Robin Hood.

Whithermere, January 2026

With dryads to be found throughout and plenty of opportunities for appreciating the beauty of the region and for photography, Whithermere is well worth visiting, and my thanks to Cube for recommending it to me.

SLurl Details

Whithermere (rated Moderate)

Cica’s Woodland in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Cica Ghost, January 2026 – Woodland

January 2026 is here and with it, a visit to Cica Ghost’s Mysterious Isle to visit her latest installation there, Woodland. The setting comes with a quote oft attributed to the Master of the Imagination, Walt Disney:

If you can dream it, you can do it.

The reality of the world is that there is no evidence Disney ever uttered these words. Rather, the first public attribution of the quote to anything related to Disney appears to have come in 1983, seventeen years after his passing. They appeared in a script used in Horizons (1983-1994), an animatronic attraction at the EPCOT Centre (as it was then) at Walt Disney World, Florida.

Cica Ghost, January 2026 – Woodland

Exactly who coined the phrase – script writer Tom Fitzgerald or copywriter Sheralyn Silverstein – remains a topic of debate; it only became associated with Disney himself much later – in 2007, when it was used in a DVD series on the Disney phenomena and the marketing machine at Disney wasted no time in acquiring the idea the words were Walt’s – and started marketing them at every turn.

However, all this be as it may, the idea the words convey is totally applicable to Cica’s work. Month after month she presents us with installations grown from her dreams and made into living experiences for us to enjoy. Some of her works have carried subtle messages; some have offered new takes on various folk tales and fables; many have been twists of whimsy and lightness, speaking to  Cica’s spirit of positivity; some have been perhaps pensive and forward-looking. All have have had deep roots in the dreams of a creative imagination – and such is the case here.

Cica Ghost, January 2026 – Woodland

The term “woodland” probably conjures images of trees heavy in leaf, grassy trials meandering between their trucks, sprinkled with bursts of flowers, light and shadow rippling and playing over them as a breeze moves the boughs overhead. A place where creatures, possibly stranger or exotic, and insects reside, all going about their business.

The flowers and the creatures and insects are all within Cica’s Woodland, and many of them are exotic – a chameleon-like lizard, stick insects and more. However, in a twist of imagination they all appear to be carved or grown from wood, and the majority of “trees” of this woodland are all houses and buildings, many of them rising slender and tall, like tree trunks with the unblinking eyes of windows cut into them, others offering a unique take on the windmill. All stand four-square on stout legs as if ready to set out across the surrounding hills.

Cica Ghost, January 2026 – Woodland
Actual trees do also grow here, but the entire installation speaks to a place that is literally wood land. Even the brown and greying soil carries a woodgrain, the hills exhibiting a gridwork against which the grain laps, as if attempting to rise up and cover them.

All of this – creatures, houses, flowers, trees, is being watched over by a satisfied King (or Prince?) Frog. Is he responsible for this wonderland? If so, why? That’s a dream for your imagination to create, perhaps as you try the dances scattered across the setting and wander among the land’s friendly inhabitants.

Cica Ghost, January 2026 – Woodland

SLurl Details

  • Woodland (Mysterious Isle, rated Moderate)

2026 week #1: SUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Natthimmel: The Keepers of Twin Lights, St. Castoris, December 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 6th, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. They were taken from the video recording by Pantera, embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to Pantera for providing it.

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 is held every other Tuesday at 12:00 noon, SLT (holidays, etc., allowing), per the Second Life Public Calendar.
  • The “SUG Leviathan Hour” meetings are held on the Tuesdays which do not have a formal SUG meeting, and are chaired by Leviathan Linden. They are more brainstorming / general discussion sessions.
  • Meetings are held in text in-world, at this location.

Simulator Deployments

  • All simhosts appear to be undergoing restarts this week, with no deployments.

Game Control

  • Leviathan Linden had planned to try to port game_control back into the develop-Linux branch, but was beaten to the line bye Rye of the Alchemy viewer, show has submitted a Pull Request.  Rye’s submission looks good, but has yet to be built.
  • This means that if the Linux build passes muster, it can join with the Windows and Mac builds and be passed into the main develop branch.
    • However, it has been a report of issues with Rye’s build on systems not using Pulseaudio, which tend to crash on start, so this will have to be investigated, although the overall impact on Linux users was the subject of debate.

SLua Work

  • No indication on when the SLua viewer will be promoted to release status – but that is a question more for viewer meetings.
  • Harold Linden noted his personal “to do” list for SLua is mostly around improving testing / allocation strategy in general, and noted that it is currently growing as LL find usability issues they think are worth pushing the viewer release back for, in order to get them included.
    • One of the things Harold would particularly like to see working is setting link primitive parameters “in a sane way to be less-bad by the time we go general availability for sure”.
    • He also noted he’d like a `require()` function that works correctly with the built-in editor as well.
  • Harold further noted that there is some rearchitecting that needs to go on behind the scenes, and the viewer definitely needs to be in a better state prior to promotion.
  • This led to a further conversation of possible SLua inclusions / updates, and on things like script scheduling – LSL vs. SLua (should be no difference), and script execution.
    • Harold further noted he is refactoring the script scheduler is he goes to try to improve things but in terms of scheduling and execution, and so the simulator isn’t spending “a lot of time figuring out that it has nothing to do”.
    • Multi-threading isn’t seen as an answer for this, because some scripts may be waiting on work being carried out by scripts currently running, and multi-threading could being this dependency.

SLua Resources

  • The nine beta test regions are centred on SLua Beta Void (mind the water!).
  • Official scripting portal (this is a work in progress and open to contributions – Github for the latter here).
  • The Second Life official Discord server / channels.
  •  Suzanna’s SLua Guide (Suzanna  Linn).
  • Official VScode plugin notes:
    • It is not yet available on the VScode marketplace.
    • Issues and PRs for code submissions can be made here, and the plugin downloaded.
  • VSCode plugin + documentation (Wolfgang Senizen – likely be discontinued and contributions shifted to support the official documentation).

In Brief

  • As well as working on Game Control (documentation here), Leviathan Linden has been trying to track a crash/corruption bug he accidentally introduced into the development simulator branch. The impact of this should be very limited – has only thus far shown up on the SLua test regions.
  • Leviathan also noted that there are been no progress on:
    • Experimenting with adjusting avatar bounding box size.
    • Enabling avatars to turn to face the direction of travel of travel when walking backwards (on the official viewer).
    • No progress on fixing the mesh mismatch issue.
  • Monty Linden warned that the Lab is coming up on the “annual simhost certification dance”, and will be part of the 2026.01 “Kiwi” release.
    • This should be invisible to everyone with one weird exception: The ‘TLS Web Client Authentication’ in the EKU is now *strongly* deprecated at all certification authorities. Monty noted that “No one should care unless they extended/ported the SL viewer’s fussy cert code that checks the server part of this”.
  • Henri Beauchamp (Cool VL Viewer) put forward a lengthy outline for solving the issues of avatars already in a region appearing as clouds to those newly arriving – which appears to be a largely server-side issue. He has developed a viewer-side workaround, and proposed a server-side messaging fix which would negate any need for viewer-side workarounds.
    • Both Leviathan and Monty Linden have an interest in trying to eliminate cloud avatars, and Leviathan indicated he would look at Henri’s proposed fix.
    • This extended into a discussion on solving the issues of missing attachments on visible avatars when people TP into a region, etc.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, January 13th, 2026.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, January 20th, 2026.

† 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.

A New Year’s Reality Escape in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Reality Escape, January 2026 – click any image for full size

With the start of a new year, I thought I’d take a trip to one of my favourite SL settings: Reality Escape, the Full private region held by Tripty (triptychlysl).

It’s a place I’ve appreciated over the years both for the way each iteration presents something new to appreciate whilst each carries forward motifs from Tripty’s original Books, Coffee and Chairs, Oh My! which I’d visited in 2023. I’ve been back some four times since then, and Reality Escape have never failed to feel like a safe and welcoming retreat.

Reality Escape, January 2026
For this iteration, the Landing Point sits in the south-western corner of the setting’s main island, where Tripty’s familiar greetings are etched into the boards of the Landing Point decking and can be seen on the sign facing the deck. The latter is a greeting I always find raises a smile – You Are About to Enter Someone Else’s Dream -, and which is joined by another: Blame it on My Gipsy Soul, a sentiment I can fully appreciate for the wanderlust it evokes.

From here, three routes of exploration present themselves to new arrivals. Two take the form of raised wooden walkways and the third a hop over a very narrow channel to a flat, grassy island, home to a bench “borrowed” from a waiting room. The first of the two walkways runs along the southern shore of the the island to the Reality Escape Coffee Shop, whilst the second winds northwards and turns a little inland to arrive at the Reality Escape reading nook.

Reality Escape, January 2026

The Coffee Shop is an open-air affair marked by Tripty’s familiar chair sculptures, the place made cosy by the ivy-hung trelliswork extending out from the cliff and ancient wall adjoining it at a right angle.

Another walkway here offers a route to the shingles close to the island’s edge and offering a further route onwards, watched over by the island’s Siamese ruler, sitting in his rather novel throne. Beyond the shingle, under an archway of chairs, the walkway continues up the island’s east coast. As it does so, it passes a summer house of unusual design offering a place of retreat.

Reality Escape, January 2026

For those who prefer to stay on the shingle path, this points the way – with the aid of stepping stones – to the crooked finger of another island as it points south and east, wooden decking running over the grass and around a firepit, offering another place for friends to gather.

The walk to the island’s bookshop also offers a way to a raised deck built out over the water, and guarded to one side by a further trellis line of Ivy, whilst below it sits something of a damp orchard. Up the hill, the reading nook is really more of an old tram repurposed as a place to enjoy books, perhaps in the Lewis Carroll-esque garden sitting behind the tram.

Reality Escape, January 2026

Beyond this, the walkway loops around westward to link-up with the route running on from the summer house. As it does so, steps lead down to a grass trail, a little muddy and wet in places, running out to north-pointing, low-lying headland. beyond an arch formed by an aged tree trunk, the path is bordered by candle-lit snowdrops as they form a candle-lit fairy spiral. Beyond these, another raised deck awaits, two pontoon rafts tethered to it. The latter perhaps invite people to take a dip in the water as they are watched over by a rather large goldfish enjoying the shade of a bunta tree which adds its own little sci-fi twist to the setting.

Tripty’s Reality Escape designs always presents setting rich in detail, and this version is no exception. There is much to be found and appreciated throughout – more than I’ve covered here (such as a little island hithertofore unmentioned in this piece and the various animals and wildfowl waiting to be found).

Reality Escape, January 2026

When exploring, I would recommend sticking with the region’s shared environment – although, as again is the case with Tripty’s work, the region does work very well with many other environment settings. Also, do make sure you have local sounds enabled for the fullest experience.

SLurl Details