Category: Second Life

More hopping through Bellisseria

Posted on by Inara Pey
Everfaire Coffee Shop, Bellisseria

Back in May 2019, I produced a piece called On the Road in Bellisseria. At the time, it was intended to be the first in a series of “road tours” around the continent to various public places that form a part of the continent, and also a look at some of the public facilities – pubs, cafés, galleries, show homes, etc., that have been opened by Bellisseria residents.

For a variety of reasons, that idea didn’t go as planned, and given Bellisseria is a dynamic place, constantly growing in terms of physical size and population, offering a road tour isn’t easy. So instead, here’s a short list of places I’ve dropped into of late that might be of interest to those wanting to take a hop around the continent.

Many of the public places provided as a part of Bellisseria  – the Fairgrounds, for example,or Campwich Lodge, added with the arrival of the Trailers and Campers and the Bellisseria railway lines (see: Bellisseria: of Trailers, Campers and trains in Second Life) and original airstrip, together with the various bars, pool, beaches and undersea spots – are all reasonably well-known, so I’m again focusing on a handful of resident-provided spots.

Picards Wharf contains one of several undersea sites around Bellisseria, this one comprising the ruins of a sunken lighthouse in two parts, with accompanying undersea caverns (seen in the background)

These are perhaps a little harder to keep track of, simply because people have the freedom of choice with their Linden Home styles, that they can easily swap designs and purposes – so a house that might be a café for a time might later be switched back to being a cosy home, whilst a houseboat might switch from home to gallery and back again, depending on the owner’s desires. Nevertheless, the following were all current at the time of writing.

For art, two places in particular come into mind. There is Diamond Marchant’s Beckridge Gallery, and Ladmilla’s Gallery, which might be regarded as a “branch” of her much larger gallery, THE EDGE.

Ladmilla’s Gallery

Both galleries offer slightly different approaches to displaying art, with Beckridge offering a more “gallery” style environment at the time of my original visit (see: Celebrating Apollo 11 in Second Life and Sansar), where the focus is on the art, with minimal emphasis on furnishings. Ladmilla’s offers a more studio style of gallery, where her own work – including some of her images-with-poems, produced in collaboration with her SL partner, Eli Medier – is displayed in comfy settings with sofas and armchairs. Other galleries within the continent include The Little Gallery (RuffertasAlt), and Bellisseria Squirrel (Halo Rain).

Those seeking café or pub-style environments might be interested in Cain Wycliffe’s Bellis Blues Café. Taking full advantage of Chic Aeon’s add-on elements specifically for Linden Homes, Bellis Blues is presented as the continent’s only Blue-oriented café / club, and features regular events on Tuesdays (10:00 – noon SLT), Fridays (14:00-16:00 SLT) and Saturdays (20:00-22:00 SLT).

Bellis Blues Café

Staying with the café theme, those exploring the Trailer and Campers regions by train, truck or (most enjoyably) horseback might want to drop-in to Mitchel Torok’s Mitch’s Hideaway, a place that demonstrates just how versatile the trailer homes can be. An added attraction at the hideaway is the inclusion of a Teaglepet Animesh horse rezzer, allowing visitors to take a horseback ride on a choice of mounts – just remember to turn off your own AO!

Other cafés and pubs I’ve enjoyed dropping into are Soulgoodie’s Everfaire Coffee Shop and the Queen’s Head pub, run by North Crannock, one of the driving forces in the Bellisseria Citizen’s group, and which is modelled on an English country pub. A point to note when visiting resident created public places is that some may also include bicycle rezzers, giving visitors the opportunity to take a ride through the streets and along the paths of Bellisseria.

Mitch’s Hideaway

Further places of interest within Bellisseria include the The Drowned Mouse Arcade for video games, Jupiter Projects, promising “a series of limited engagement interactive environments” and the Pearl Dreams Business Compound, offering a “Surf Shack Café & Bakery, with Chopper Tours” and other elements. I can’t really vouch for any of these or how active they might, be as I’ve only paid them very brief visits courtesy of a landmark list provided by PrudenceAnton.

As with my previous piece on places to visit in Bellisseria, this article is hardly complete – and as noted, places may change purposes over time. However, whether you have property in Bellisseria and want to explore more or are simply curious about paying the continent a visit and looking around, hopefully what is listed here might help you. Those interested in events in Bellisseria might want to take a poke at the Bellisseria Citizen’s Group, which is free to join.

Drune: a further visit in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Drune: East of Eden, November 2019 – click any image for full size

For the third time in 2019, I dropped into Drune, this time on the recommendation of reader Robin Lobo, although it is a place that has been getting a lot of attention of late due to a photographic competition that is running through until November 27th, 2019.

Designed by Zee9, we visited the region at the start of 2019 and then during the summer (see: Time at 2019-XS in Second Life, January 2019 and Drune IV: an Aftermath in Second Life, August, 2019), although Zee9’s designs go back beyond either of these dates. Throughout all of their iterations, Zee9’s builds have focused on a sci-fi / cyberpunk feel that incorporates certain key motifs drawn  – as the About Land description notes  – from the likes of Blade Runner and The Fifth Element, Neuromancer, and Altered Carbon.

Drune: East of Eden, November 2019

This latest iteration of the design is called Drune: East of Eden. Whether or not the title is a reflection of Steinbeck and the underpinning themes of his novel I’ve no idea, but given the dystopian state of human civilisation seen particularly within Blade Runner, and the novel’s examination of humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, the link would seem to perhaps be apparent.

Focused on a single, neon-lit street, complete with Spinner-style police cars buzzing and hovering around, the build perhaps leans more towards Blade Runner than the past two builds offered – although equally, there is less of a feel of the multi-level nature in the setting than previous builds that also move it a little away from that film. However, there are numerous nods and touches to a range of influences beyond the films named in the region description (one of the more obvious being Sulaco Corporation – a name that would seem to draw on the Alien franchise).

Drune: East of Eden, November 2019

There are familiar elements from earlier builds to be found as well – notably the subway that serves as the landing point, some of the vehicles, the little hovering robots, the night club and the bar. These help to give a sense of continuity to the setting that eases those familiar with some of Drune’s past iterations (such as 2019-XS) into this one, such that the feeling is not so much that this is not so much a new build, but another part of that city.

For me, the enclosing region surround give this iteration of Drune a depth perhaps lacking in some previous versions – and it is clear that Zee9 has taken a huge amount of care to ensure the the edges of the region break up the surround such that the high-rise buildings of the latter feel like a genuine continuance of the setting, adding to that feeling of depth noted above. It is as if one could walk through one of the road tunnels, the canyons between those skyscrapers would indeed lead to some of those past Drune designs, sitting as further outliers of the city.

Drune: East of Eden, November 2019

Always evocative, wonderfully thematic and rich in colour, Drune always offers a setting worth visiting and appreciating – and for photographers, the photo contest mentioned above gives an added incentive for visiting. Details can be found on an ad board in the landing point subway.

Recommended – and thanks to Zee9 for the chat.

Drune: East of Eden, November 2019

SLurl Details

November 2019 Web User Group: Premium Plus & Events

Posted on by Inara Pey
© and ™ Linden Lab

The following notes are taken from my recording of the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, November 13th, 2019. These meetings are held monthly, 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 when 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, the audio comments will be concatenated into a single audio extract for that topic).

Premium Plus

  • Premium Plus is now to be the official name for the upcoming new Premium subscription level, this having changed from “Elite” following feedback from users.
  • It will not be ready for deployment until after Name Changes has been deployed, and the Lab is currently aiming for “early 2020”.
  • Full benefits for Premium Plus subscriptions have not been disclosed, however it has been indicated that:
    • “A lot” of the current Premium benefits are going to be “even better” for Premium Plus.
    • There will also be benefits that are obviously exclusive to Premium Plus.
    • There will be Marketplace benefits available to merchants upgrading to Premium Plus – but again, what these are has not been disclosed.
  • Despite a rumour being dropped into a public meeting that the new subscription will be “three times” the current Premium subscription, no official word on the pricing for Premium Plus has been given, other than it will be available on a monthly or annual subscription basis (see: 2019 Web User Group week #40: Name Changes and new Premium option).

Events

  • The Second Life Events service is being overhauled.
  • The first pass of this work is to clean-up the service to prevent event spamming.
    • This will involve levying a fee for events to be listed.
    • The fee will be in Linden Dollars. However, it will not be “prohibitive”, but rather enough to “incentivise better event content”.
    • The fee will be lower for Premium accounts compared to Basic accounts.
  • The follow-on work will include providing the means for Premium account holders to set recurring events.
  • Beyond this, there is a much larger tranche of work to overhaul what events look like and the events functionality, which is targeted for an early 2020 deployment.

Marketplace

  • A range of fixes and general code clean-up.
  • New notifications options now available via Marketplace → Account → Notification Options.
    • The options displayed are split between Shopping and Merchant notifications, with the latter obviously only available to those actually selling through the Marketplace.
The new notifications (shown side-by-side for convenience). Note the Merchant options will only be displayed for those selling through the MP. Click for larger size, if required.
  • The Place Order button has been moved to the top of the advert listing page when ordering L$0 items, to make completing the order quicker.
  • Filters for removing demo and / or limited items / gachas from Marketplace searches are very close to being ready for deployment.
    • This work is part of an overall refactoring of the Marketplace search that will continue to see incremental changes and improvements to the search functionality.

In Brief

User-to-User Land Auctions

  • User-to-user land auctions have been suspended due to instances of “abuse” (no specifics provided) that require the Lab to make changes to the system.
  • There is no indication as to when user-to-user auctions will be re-opened, as the Lab has to consider how best to change the system to prevent similar misuse in the future.

Other Notes

  • There has been a general clean-up of the secondlife.com pages.
    • For example: the Account → Contact page has been removed from users’ dashboards as it provided redundant information (your own user name and e-mail address) – this does not impact the Change Password option.
  • Recent general work on all SL web properties has included updating the servers to a new operating system and installing a new site defender that can respond faster to attacks.
  • Release notes for updates to the web services (similar to those for simulator and viewer release notes) are in the works, and could be ready for deploy before year-end.
  • The official viewer log-in splash screen now includes a section for the SL Blogger Network, as well as now displaying the current Second Life time.

In the clouds in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
In the Clouds, Nils Urqhart

Currently open at his Rill’Arts Gallery is In the Clouds, a series of stunning physical world images by Nils Urqhart of the French Alps either caught within, or against the backdrop of, cloud-laden skies.

Across just shy of thirty images, Nils paints a stunning portrait of the Alps – which forms one of the world’s stunning mountain ranging – that fully captures their intensely rugged, almost romantic, looks, and does so in a completely beguiling manner.

In the Clouds, Nils Urqhart

By presenting the Alps – slopes and peaks, capped by snow or naked – Nils has created a series of images that not only suggest the mountains are almost living, breathing entities, but that they are entirely otherworldly in their nature.

In the Clouds, Nils Urqhart

For example, in some, they seem to float as islands in the sky, breakers of clouds rolling against their flanks as they seem to float on a sea of white and grey. In others we are offered small glimpses of what life among mountains like this – to look out over forest coated rocky slopes whilst also overlooked in turn by the towering, stern presence of these huge rugged faces.

One of the fascinating elements of this exhibition from my perspective is the aforementioned sense of life given to the Alps through the sometimes rolling, roiling set of the clouds around them. In numerous shots, this play of cloud caught on turbulent winds colliding against the sides of the mountains not only looks like that vast ocean breaking upon the flanks of an island, but also the longs exhales of breath from the mountains themselves.

As always with Nils’ photography, this is a marvellous collection of images that are perfectly presented. Those taken by Nils’ work can also find it available for sale in the physical world through American Fine Arts.

SLurl Details

Future Shock: season 3 of the Second Life machinima series

Posted on by Inara Pey
Future Shock: sci-fi machinima

I first wrote about Future Shock, an ambitious Second Life Machinima series produced by Pryda Parx, in September 2016, when the first part in the series was released, and then revisited the project at the start of 2017.

Since then, the series has grown through a second season, and Pryda has edited the episodes on both together into two special Director’s Cut versions, the first running to just over 23 minutes and the second to a touch over 32 minutes (see Future Shock: the machinima continues, for more on both the Director’s Cuts and the second season).

Now, through November and December 2019, the third and final season of the series is being made available for viewing through Pryda’s You Tube channel.

Future Shock is perhaps one of the most ambitious machinima activities to be attempted in Second Life, a 25-episode story arc split across three seasons of episodes (8, 9 and 8 per season). Set at some point in the future, the story presents a somewhat dystopian / semi-cyberpunk world where technology infiltrates every part of people’s lives, a seemingly protective blanket for all whilst also offering the means for personal gratification and escapism through the intertwining of their physical and virtual lives.

Future Shock protagonist Tracy Grayling

The latter can take the form of immersion into user-defined virtual worlds where dreams and desires are made a reality, and in the physical world, the ability for people to physically augment / redefine / rebuild their own bodies to suit their desires, in a world where everything is defined by a person’s net worth, or IP Credit (draw your own conclusions from the use of “IP”). This IP Credit can be enhanced through a variety of ways – agreeing to complete tasks that are assigned an IP value, for example.

So long as a person’s IP remains positive, then all is well. But should it decline continuously, then things can become hard; and should it zero-out completely, they can find themselves clinically and harshly dealt with. And this latter point is also the case for any who question the apparent benevolence and societal rules of the overseeing technology.

A particular point of uniqueness is the non-linear storytelling technique Pryda has used. The first season, for example, tells the story from the perspective of Tracy Grayling, dropping us into the middle of her life which appears – like the lives of so many – to be self-centred, living in this world of morally questionable ethics, in which people view their time in terms of raising themselves to the next line in a balance sheet, simply to be able to make themselves “better” physically or virtually than their peers. However, is this really so, or is she – wittingly or otherwise – an agent provocateur?

This makes the first season something of a mystery thriller: much is going on, but it’s hard to determine where it is leading. At the same time, we are drawn into the the story via Pryda’s visual technique of contrasting the “real” world, filmed in flat grey and minimal, hard colour (blue, red, white), with the promise of a virtual nirvana rich in colour. In the second season, the events witnessed by Tracy are seen from an entirely different perspective: that of those apparently fighting the controlling technology. This both adds to the depth of the underpinning mystery whilst also given greater context to the first season, making the primary arc of the core storyline clearer.

Tracy Grayling – in avatar form (r) – meets with the leader of the rebels in virtual space

With the third season, the story threads revealed in the first two seasons intertwine and draw us through a further eight episodes to the series climax.

The first part of the third season (and episode 17 overall), Brotherly Assistant is now available on You Tube. While on Thursday, November 14th, there will be a special in-world showing of episode 17 and the premier of episode 18, A Proposition, at the Grand Ballroom, Embrace Aphrodite Island (rated Adult), and the two episodes will be followed by a showing of the Director’s cut of the first season. All who are interested are invited to attend.

I don’t want to say too much about the third season – having been fortunate enough to be offered the chance to view it in advance – simply because I do not want to spoil it for others who have followed the first two seasons, or who wish to catch up with things by watching them now. What I will say is that throughout all three seasons, Pryda has woven a layered story that is worth watching throughout and – considering her own admission that season one was a case of “learn as you go” for her in terms of machinima making – one that demonstrates her growth as filmographer and storyteller.

Should you wish to catch up with the story, please follow the links below.

2019 Simulator User Group week #46 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hazardous, September 2019 – blog post

Simulator Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for news and updates:

  • The SLS (main) channel on Tuesday, November 12th, leaving it on server release 2019-11-01T18:02:37.532376, previously deployed to an RC and comprising: internal script improvements. internal logging changes and improvements to simulator state saves, which should make rolls smoother.
  • On Wednesday, November 13th, there will be two RC deployments

SL Viewer

The Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, version 6.3.4.532299 and dated Monday, November 4th, has been promoted to the de facto release viewer.

The Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.3.5.532631 on Tuesday, November 12th.

The rest of the current viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.531949, October 28.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.3.531844, October 21.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16.

In Brief

  • There is a relatively new member of the Lab’s QA team for Second Life: Johngalt Linden.