Category: Second Life

Mapping Second Life’s mainland railways

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab

The Second Life Railroad network is one of the major features of Second Life mainland – notably Heterocera – with lines also to be found on south and east Sansar and on Bellisseria, with number smaller (and private) lines also to be found across Second Life (such as the system in Second Norway).

Much as anyone can operate a car on the roads in Second Life, any Resident may use this public facility for any purpose consistent with the Second Life Community Standards/TOS (and at times the Lab has provided automated rail services). However, finding your way around the network can be a tad confusing, so enter 由里子 (Rydia Lacombe).

Not only is Rydia the creator of the sci-fi themed Aoshima, a homestead region Caitlyn and I enjoyed visiting in February (see: Beaming in to Aoshima in Second Life), she is a SLRR enthusiast, and something of a cartographer. She recently sent me her most recent map charting the major Linden-supplied train routes across and around Heterocera, Sansar and Bellisseria – and it is an impressive piece.

Rydia is a keen SL rail-roader, something she noted to me as we chatted about the map.

It’s what keeps me exploring! Mostly it stems from the time the WARR started building in front of the Burns freebie warehouse. I made my first SLRR railway maps in 2013 / 2014. I don’t have a formal means of distributing the maps, except through the various groups. The Virtual Railway Consortium [VRC] distributed my previous maps, but they don’t appear to be quite as active now.

– Rydia talking about her SLRR map work

WARR is the West Atoll Railroad, an electric railway line founded by Hilto Meridoc in 2010 and operating in southern Heterocera Mainland. The line opened in stages, first from Neumoegen to Electra, then east to Hera and west to Elpenor, before eventually closing in 2013, although I understand a part of it reopened in 2019.

Click the map above to go to the full-size version which you can examine on-line or right-click and download.

Despite its age and need of upgrade or overhaul, the SLRR has remained popular over the years and can offer a unique way of seeing Second Life mainland. Such are the number of lines and routes in Heterocera alone, that having a map makes a lot of sense, and the version Rydia has produced is an extensive, impressive,  polished, professional, and informative piece of work.

As with a physical world railway map, the various lines are colour-coded, and the map includes all the major routes associated with the SLRR, form the SLRR Main Line through to the likes of the old WARR line,  the the Okemo, Nakiska, and Southern Railway (ONSR), the Great Second Life Railway (GSLR), as well as the smaller and the more metropolitan routes such as the Northern Branch or the East River City Metro, the Bay City Trolleys and the current routes available in Bellisseria. Stops for the likes of airports are provided, together with crossover stations.

Rydia’s 2014 map of the Second Norway system

Unsurprisingly, Rydia’s work has been positively received in the past, with her approach to maps being adopted in a number of mainland regions.

As well as the 2013/2014 maps and this new iteration that would add grace to any SLRR station, Rydia  has also produced maps for some private region transport network, such as the Second Norway system (also perhaps in need of a little TLC, depending on what eventually happens to that estate – see here and here for news).

There is a wealth of information available in the SL wiki about the SLRR – although I cannot vouch for how up to date it is – starting with the official page, and also covering the likes of the VRC, and from these, it’s possible to find out more about various lines and routes. Links from these pages also point to more technical discussions of the SLRR and Second Life vehicles. There are also various private estate lines (as with Second Norway), but these are currently outside the scope of the current map.

Despite some of the issues that can be encountered on the SLRR, if you’ve not tried it before, it’s certain worth exploring – even if only be reading about it initially. For my part, it’s something I’ve never actually blogged about per se in these pages, although I’ve ridden various trains and tracks.

Hmmm… so perhaps it might be time for an occasional series in these pages, something perhaps called From the Footplate or similar.

My thanks to Rydia for contacting me and for our chat.

April 2020 Web User Group: Name Changes et al

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

The following notes are taken from my recording of the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, April 1st, 2020. These meetings are held monthly, generally on the first Wednesdays of the month, with dates and details of the meetings available via the Web User Group wiki page.

When reading these notes, please keep in mind:

  • This is not intended as a chronological transcript of the meeting. Items are drawn together by topic, although they may have been discussed at different points in the meeting.
  • Similarly, and if included, any audio extracts appearing in these summaries are presented by topic heading, rather than any chronological order in which they may have been raised during the meeting (e.g. if “topic X” is mentioned early in a meeting and then again half-way through a meeting, any audio comments related to that topic that might be included in these reports will be concatenated into a single audio extract).

Name Changes

  • Deployment of the Name Changes capability is now “really, really close”.
  • As of the meeting, all of the major elements for Name Changes are with the Lab’s QA team for testing.
  • IF no significant issues / showstoppers or the like are uncovered by QA, it is probable that Name Changes will launch before the end of April.

Premium Plus

  • All of the required / update workflows for managing Premium Plus are in place, and the various web pages that will need to be refreshed with updated information have been prepared ready for the eventual Premium Plus launch.
  • All of the back-end work is in place.
  • LL are still “sitting on” all of the various values (fee, benefits, etc.), that are associated with Premium Plus.
  • No release date but said to be be “closer” – however, as I’ve previously noted, it will not come until some time after Name Changes have been made available.

Marketplace

  • Keywords and unlisting: if an item is unlisted from the MP for keyword use issues, the merchant will now get an automated e-mail notification.
  • Further improvements to the keyword system will be made over time.
  • There have been multiple fixes to the Marketplace, including:
    • Corrections for translations for non-English languages and alternate language descriptions on listings being incorrect or not displaying correctly.
    • Fixes for issues with the transaction e-mail settings.
    • Correcting the issue of some listings failing to appear in search results on Merchant’s Manage Listings pages.
    • Cleaned up the behaviour of received items.
    • Single sign-on session handling between the viewer and the Marketplace has been improved to prevent the system getting confused between which account a user was using to make a MP purchase if they were logged-in and using the MP from two accounts.

SL Marketing

  • Work has been put into refreshing a lot of the Second Life landing pages as a part of promoting Second Life.
  • This work includes the development of the enterprise / business micro-site, including the new explore page for the (at present) seven turnkey solutions.
    • I’m currently discussing with LL a possible article on this aspect of Second Life that will present a walk-through of the micro site and how interested parties can use it to engage with LL and progress through to using one of the region types.
    • The global MuseWeb 2020 conference is in progress at the time of writing, and has moved to an entirely on-line status as a result of the current pandemic. Portions of this event are being presented in or relayed through Second Life, using one of the enterprise turnkey solutions – see: MuseWeb: utilising Second Life in support of a global conference).
  • Internally to the Lab, one of the new consumer campaigns (yet to launch at the time of writing) is called the Comfort Campaign, promoting Second Life as a virtual social environment where people can meet, share times, enjoy the company of others (pretty much in keeping with the ideal of “stay safe, stay virtual”) during the current crisis, whilst at the same time avoiding the appearance of being in any way exploitative.

Two-Factor Authentication

  • Still being worked on.
  • First step will likely be sending out an e-mail notification when an attempt to log-in to a Second Life service is made from an unrecognised device.
  • More robust 2FA controls will be added, and will initially be opt-in before eventually becoming required.

It’s a very serious topic that we are working on in parallel to AWS work. Which means it made the cut of “what can we stop working on to make AWS go faster.

– Ekim Linden

In Brief

  • Website polls. People visiting Second Life web properties such as secondlife.com and the Marketplace may have noticed a pop-up poll appearing when they do so, asking if they would recommend SL to others.
    • Apparently, those responding at largely indicating they would (although obviously saying and doing aren’t the same).
    • At the same time, the poll also received a lot of negative feedback due to the annoyance factor (it would keep popping up on a user logging into any Second Life web property until responded to), and so has been turned off.
    • However, there are more such polls being planned, although how they are being presented might be reconsidered.
  • Web profiles and legacy profiles viewer: there are further fixes awaiting before this profile can roll forward, and these are queued behind other work at present.
  • Forum spamming. There has been an upturn in new accounts spamming the forums. It is possible that if this continues and gets worse, LL may consider some form of throttling / limits on the volume of posts that can be made by an individual account at a given time.

MuseWeb: utilising Second Life in support of a global conference

Posted on by Inara Pey
MuseWeb 2020 in Second Life.

MuseWeb is a global organisation offering members a range of professional learning opportunities – plenary sessions, conference sessions, informal networking, debates, how-to sessions, lightning talks, etc., – together with multiple practical activities such as demonstrations, exhibitions, and so on, which can be applicable across a range of professional sectors and disciplines.

The organisation has, since 1997, held an annual conference in North America or Asia, featuring speakers, workshops, demonstrations, social events and more. Theses conferences have produced 1,350 papers and videos which are made available to MuseWeb members on-line, offering “an unparalleled resource” for museum workers, technologists, students and researchers that grows every year. Attendees at the conference / conference sessions include educators, curators, librarians, designers, senior staff (CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CMOs, directors, etc.) of businesses an organisations, scholars, consultants, IT programmers and analysts, publishers and developers from museums, galleries, libraries, science centres, etc.

This year, the MuseWeb 2020 conference – MW20 – had been scheduled to take place in Los Angeles, California, between March 31st and April 4th, with the core programme of presentations and keynotes taking place between Thursday, April 2nd and Saturday, April 4th 2020.

However, due to the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, the conference has shifted entirely on-line – and thanks to Linden Lab and Virtual Ability Inc, both of whom are acting as conference partners, the MuseWeb organisers are utilising Second Life for the social aspects of the conference, as well as several sessions.

MuseWeb 2020 Auditorium.

To achieve this, MuseWeb has been provisioned with a 4-region location in-world that is based on one of the seven turnkey region solutions Linden Lab has developed for businesses and conferences. The auditorium can cater for up to 350 avatars – although the core of the conference sessions are being presented on-line through Microsoft Teams – Microsoft being the conference’s global sponsor, with Google Arts and Culture also a notable sponsor – although I have been given to understand some sessions from Thursday through Saturday will also be shown in the in-world auditorium.

Aspects that have, and will, involve Second Life include:

  • In-world tours of Virtual Ability, Health Info Island and a range of SL museums, coordinated and hosted by Virtual Ability Inc.
  • “Linden Lunches” with representatives from the Lab, Virtual Ability, etc.
  • Closing plenary session.

The MuseWeb regions are publicly accessible to Second Life users, although sessions that are not relayed in-world require a log-in through the conference web pages. You can view the full schedule here, and the web pages include membership fees for interested professionals.

Dr Nettrice Gaskins: algorithmic art using Deep Dream, on display at MuseWeb 2020 in Second Life.

An important aspect of the conference’s in-world presence is an exhibition of art by Dr. Nettrice Gaskins, who is also presenting the conference’s keynote address alongside of Cory Doctorow.

Dr. Gaskins has taught multimedia, computational media, visual art, and advanced placement computer science principles, and has earned a BFA in Computer Graphics with Honours and an MFA in Art and Technology, and she received a doctorate in Digital Media from Georgia Tech in 2014. As an artist, she explore the use of technology in art, and the pieces offered for display at the MuseWeb auditorium is a unique exploration in using the Deep Dream neural network AI, a convolutional neural network to find and enhance patterns in images to produce over-processed, dream-like (almost hallucinogenic) finished images that are utterly startling in their complexity and depth.

Dr Nettrice Gaskins: algorithmic art using Deep Dream, on display at MuseWeb 2020 in Second Life.

Just how stunning these images are can be seen on the inner walls of the auditorium, where a total of 12 of her pieces are offered for appreciation – marking the first time Dr. Gaskins has exhibited in Second Life since 2010. Certainly, they make a visit a visit to the MuseWeb island.

More to the point, shifting the conference – apparently at short notice –  to leverage on-line communications and presentation means and o make use of Second Life to help maintain the more social aspects of such an event, potentially demonstrates the benefits of 3D and virtual environments to a global audience. Kudos to Linden Lab and Virtual Ability Inc., – who are also fielding greeters and conference assistance in–world, as well as helping with the facilities – for enabling the conference to have a presence in Second Life.

2020 Simulator User Group week #14 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Villa Eirini, Calas Galadhon, February 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken at the Simulator User Group meeting held on Tuesday, March 31st.

Simulator Deployments

Please refer to the simulator deployment thread for updates.

llTargetedEmail() Concerns

The llTargetedEmail() function has caused concern among users, partially due to a lack of any forewarning to users.  Specific concerns that have been raised since the deployment thread was published, with concerns such as the following being raised:

Example then. If someone make 10 alts, then get an item created by me that is modifiable (from Marketplace for example) and drop a script with TARGETED_EMAIL_ROOT_CREATOR in it that sends mails in loop… Even with 20 seconds delay that’s 3 emails per minute. 180 emails per hour. Per user. With 10 alts it’s almost 2000 messages per hour on my mailbox. Because owner of said alts can spam my mailbox via Lab’s servers without even knowing my SL-only email address for getting emails from grid.

In response to seeing these issues, Oz Linden stated at the SUG meeting:

That function was added as part of an ongoing effort to clean up how we send emails from SL… we wanted a way to send some of the emails that creators might want without having to have people put email addresses into scripts. It sends to whatever address you’ve verified. The concerns about the ROOT_CREATOR version are being discussed; exactly what we’ll do about that remains to be seen, but we’ll try hard to make it difficult to abuse.

In Brief

  • BUG-228399 “Script deletion disables vehicle controls until re-rez” appears to be an issue arising from a recent simulator update. The cause for the problem isn’t currently known, but the report has been imported by the Lab to their internal Jira for investigation.
  • BUG-228405 “Residents attempting to log into any region which use an SL Experience for access (Key Experience) get sent to welcome hub despite having allowed the SL Experience”. This appears to be the result of a region /parcel with access control via an experience removing an avatar that is being logged-in prior to all of the avatar’s data (including its permission to be in the region / parcel) having loaded – thus causing the region to assume avatar is not supposed to be there. It is an issue known to the Lab.

Previewing Lab Gab 20: cloud uplift and engineering

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab

The 20th edition of Lab Gab will be live streamed on Friday, April 3rd at 10:00 SLT (18:00 UK; 19:00 CET). For those who have not seen the official blog post about it, the segment will feature members of the Second Life Engineering team: Oz Linden, April Linden and Ekim Linden.

Oz Linden is the Lab’s Vice President of Engineering and a member of the company’s management team. Together with Grumpity Linden and Patch Linden, he is responsible for SL’s technical and operational directions. He specifically overseas the Lab’s engineering teams to manage all aspects of the Lab’s server environment (hardware and software) and the teams engaged in all aspects of viewer development and testing.

April Linden has become familiar to many SL residents for her honest and informative blog posts explaining what happened and how things were fixed when Second Life suffers a significant system upset and / or outage. As the Lab’s Systems Engineering Manager, she particularly coordinates and manages all aspects of the Lab’s server operations, including dealing with the third-party teams who physically care for the Lab’s hardware at its data co-location centre.

Ekim Linden is the Lab’s Director of Web Engineering, as manages the engineering team directly responsible for the Lab’s web properties (such as the Marketplace, the secondlife.com website, etc).

Ekim Linden (l), Oz Linden and April Linden (r) on the Lab Gab set. Credit: Linden Lab

All three are responsible for managing and coordinating the extensive work in transitioning all of the Lab’s services from their dedicated hardware and infrastructure and to recognised cloud services operated by Amazon (AWS) and Google. As such, they are appearing on Lab Gab to talk about this work – which the Lab refers to as the Cloud Uplift – although doubtless, other subjects will come up for discussion.

If you have a question you’d like to put to Oz, April or Ekim (or all of them), particularly on the uplift, make sure you submit it via the Lab Gab Google form.

As usual, the programme will be streamed via YouTube, Facebook, Mixer, or Periscope, and if all goes according to plan, I’ll have a summary of the video (and the video itself) available soon after the the broadcast, for those unable to watch live.

Men in Focus: April 2020 edition in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey

 

Men In Focus, April 2020

Men in Focus, the gallery owned and sponsored by Men in Motion in support of the Movember Foundation (donations to which are accepted at the entrance to the gallery) and curated by JMB Balogh, will launch its latest ensemble exhibition on April 1st, 2020.

As I’ve previously noted in writing about Men in Focus, it is something of a unique location in that it focuses solely on male avatar studies and art my male artists in Second life, featuring art from invited artists and by members of the Men in Motion group. For this exhibition, the gallery features as 2D guest artists AlCyan, BanagherLinks, Patrick Ireland and Hobbit Zenfold; and 3D artists Reycharles, Harry Cover (ImpossibleIsNotFrench), Mistero Hifeng and Luc Lameth.

Men In Focus: Patrick Ireland

The range of art offered is once again impressive, each of the 2D artists utilising rich styles and approaches. On the ground floor, Patrick Ireland offers a fabulous series of images that run from self-portraits through social commentary and historical settings to provocative pokes at our imaginations, and reflections of popular culture, all wrapped within pieces that carry their own stories.

On the floor above, Hobbit Zenfold – an artist I’ve not previously encountered – offers a range of pieces that might be more closely focused as self-portraits, but which are equally rich in narrative, with several offering a fantasy or fashion element to them. A link in the form of face paint from both Hobbit and Patrick coincidentally flows between their individual exhibit spaces, the pieces containing it also offering an echo of cinematic wickedness.

Men in Focus, April 2020: Hobbit Zenfold

Above Hobbit, on the next two floors, AlCyan and BanagherLinks offer expressions of their Second Lives as avatars and photographers, each constraining his display to colour images that have depth and narrative before they in turn give way to pieces by members of Men in Motion on the upper floors of the gallery.

Spread between the floors are the 3D pieces by Harry, Mistero, Reycharles and Luc Lameth – the latter of whom I’ve also not previously encountered, and I found his Autumn Fairies selection a unique and charming turn in presenting fae folk (whom are so often presented in the female form), while his Shaolin Buddy (a play on Buddha) figurines are utterly charming – as is Harry Cover’s Nuts and Bolts Band.

Men in Focus, April 2020: Luc Lameth

April is Testicular Cancer Awareness Month, and Men in Focus is raising awareness of the disease, including how to self-test for possible signs of the disease through s series of information boards at the gallery’s landing space. Given that testicular cancer tends to be very prevalent among men of younger age ranges than we perhaps tend to associated with cancer (15-49 being the common age range), these boards are very much worth taking time to read if you are male.

Another excellent exhibition at Men in Focus, carrying with it a focused aim. The formal opening will be held between 18:00-20:00 SLT on April 1st, 2020, although the exhibition is already open for preview.

Men in Focus, April 2020: AlCyan an BanagherLinks

SLurl Details