Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates for the week ending Sunday, November 17th
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
Current Release version 6.3.4.532299, formerly the Ordered Shutdown RC viewer, dated November 4th, – NEW.
Release channel cohorts:
Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.5.532739, November 15th.
Project viewers:
Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.532780, November 15th.
It’s time to highlight another week of storytelling in Voice by the staff and volunteers at the Seanchai Library. As always, all times SLT, and events are held at the Library’s home at Holly Kai Park, unless otherwise indicated.
Monday, November 18th 19:00: Teacher’s Pet / War and Peace
Gyro Muggins returns to Larry Niven’s Known Space universe and the Man-Kzin Wars series to bring us two short stories from that series written by Matthew Joseph Harrington, and which appeared in the Man-Kzin volume 11 (edited by Niven), first published in 2005.
Set after the end of the war, the stories within Man-Kzin XI are predominantly set during a period where the Kzin are down (but not necessarily out) and having to adapt to no longer being the masters of all races they encounter, and are in roughly chronological order.
The two stories by Harrington follow the trio by established writer Hal Colebatch, and marked his début as a published author at the age of 35. They are regarded by many as being strong studies in the Man-Kzin lore, whilst also drawing on other literary sci-fi sources. The stories are also noted for Harrington’s ability to round-out a number of “loose ends” within the Man-Kin wars as well as offering new slants on the broader carves of Niven’s Known Space universe.
Both stories use a play on words in their titles, with War and Peace doing so both in the manner it reflects the period of peace following war, and also for the way it focuses on the life and work of Peace Corben, a human female Protector, who returns in Harrington’s sequel story, Peace and Freedom, published in the 2009 volume Man Kzin Wars XII.
Tuesday, November 19th 19:00: What’s Cookin’?
A favourite food stories and recipe exchange with Caledonia Skytower and friends. This week Cale shares the P.G. Wodehouse story “Best Sauce.” All are welcomed to bring some of their favourite recipes to share, on note card.
Wednesday, November 20th 19:00 Spirit of Steamboat
Kayden Oconnell returns to the tales of sheriff Walt Longmire, reading the ninth volume of Craig Johnson’s tales about his laconic US Marine-turned-lawman protagonist.
It’s Christmas Eve, and Longmire is reading A Christmas Carol in his office when he is visited by a ghost of Christmas past: a young woman with a scar across her forehead. He doesn’t recognise her, but she clearly knows him and his predecessor, sheriff Lucian Connally, under whom Longmire started his career as a deputy sheriff in 1972.
His interest aroused, Longmire takes the the young woman to see Connally, now a resident at an Assisted Living Home. But Connally, a former US Army Air Force pilot who flew B-25 Mitchell bombers in the Second World War, fails to recognise her. This is in some ways hardly surprising, given Connally’s frequently inebriated state.
Disappointed at the two men’s reaction, the young woman whispers a single word, “Steamboat”. In doing so, she embarks on a tale that tales Longmire and Connally back to Christmas Eve 1988, when Longmire had been a deputy sheriff just two months. The holiday season had brought with it a record-breaking blizzard – and a road accident that left Longmire and the (again inebriated) Connally with no choice but to pull a B-25 out of mothballs and make a dangerous flight through the blizzard to Denver, Colorado, in order to save a life.
Thursday, November 21st 19:00 An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving
Louisa May Alcott is best known for her novel Little Women (1868), a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood years with her sisters in Concord, Massachusetts. However, she also penned numerous short stories, particularly for children, and an Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving is one of them.
It’s Thanksgiving Day, and the Bassett family’s kitchen is in the midsts of preparations for a traditional dinner. But things go awry when news comes that Mrs. Bassett’s mother is ill, so Mrs Bassett and Mr. Bassett are forced to take the sleigh and attend to her. This leaves the children, led by Tilly, to complete the preparations for the dinner, and Tilly is determined to have everything ready for her parents’ return.
However, cooking a major meal unsupervised is more of a challenge than the children imaged, and soon the kitchen is filled with an assortment of smells, some of them a little odd. And then Mr. and Mrs. Bassett return – bringing with them grandma and several other guests they have invited to dinner…
With Shandon Loring. Also in Kitely – find teleport from the main Seanchai World grid.kitely.com:8002:SEANCHAI.
The 13th annual Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education (VWBPE) conference was recently announced, together with a call for proposals, which combines calls for presentation proposals, proposals for exhibits, and proposals for and immersive experiences.
The conference will take place between Thursday, March 26th through Saturday 28th, 2020 inclusive, and has the theme Stellar, with the organisers noting:
When we look up into the night sky, almost every one of us is filled with awe as to the immense possibilities of what could be out there. New stars, galaxies, planets … even the very real possibility of life. There are a billion, billion opportunities, so rich in ways in which it can influence our understanding of everything around us.
Education is no different. We are surrounded by hundreds of millions of people teaching and learning from each other, all filled with possibilities … Instructors hold a special place in that cosmos. They are the guiding stars that help fuel the imagination to create, to build, to communicate, to partner. It is little wonder that instructors are innovators themselves, seeking out new worlds, new frontiers, and new opportunities for learning, as well as teaching.
On November 13th, 2019, VWBPE opened its call for proposals for the 2020 conference. This year the conference will include four conference presentation formats: in addition to the Spotlight Presentations, Hands on Technology Workshops, and Compass Points Round Table Discussions, the 2020 conference will include an additional track, Micro Burst Clusters for presentations no longer than 15 minutes.
Full details on the tracks and formats can be found on the VWBPE 2020 Call for Proposals page. In addition, those considering participating in the conference as presenters are asked to read the Presentation Paper Submission Guidelines for additional and supporting information.
The closing dates for submissions are as follows:
Presentations: Monday, January 13th, 2020.
Immersive Experiences: Monday, February 10th, 2020.
Exhibits: Sunday, February 16th, 2020.
VWBPE 2019: Lecture Area B
Sponsorship Opportunities
The VWBPE organiser are currently seeking sponsors for this year’s conference to help to keep this open source conference free for all to participate and to help with the conference’s informational systems, live streams, and archives active.
Your generous support will help raise your organization’s profile to gain the attention of over 1000 conference participants, including K-12 instructors, post-secondary instructors, researchers, non-profits, creative designers, education business leaders, and social media influencers in the field of education.
VWBPE is a global grass-roots community event focusing on education in immersive virtual environments which attracts over 2,000 educational professionals from around the world each year, who participate in 150-200 online presentations including theoretical research, application of best practices, virtual world tours, hands-on workshops, discussion panels, machinima presentations, and poster exhibits.
In the context of the conference, a “virtual world” is an on-line community through which users can interact with one another and use and create ideas irrespective of time and space. As such, typical examples include Second Life, OpenSimulator, Unity, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and so on, as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest or any virtual environments characterised by an open social presence and in which the direction of the platform’s evolution is manifest in the community.
A year after his last return to DiXmiX Gallery, Kimeu Korg currently has an exhibition there – at least for a while longer, as it opened at the start of November.
Osmosis De Un Sueño (Osmosis of the dream”) is something of a “continuing” theme with Kimeu’s work exhibited at DiXimX, the “first part” of which appeared in June 2018 (see Colour, whimsy and monochrome in Second Life, June 2018), with the second part appearing in the aforementioned November 2018 exhibition (see: Kimeu Korg: a return to DiXmiX in Second Life).
I’ve always found Kimeu’s work to be be among the most visually expressive and often surreal art to be found in Second Life – and this is very much on display in this exhibition, which features a wonderful mix of Kimeu’s Second Life art and physical world paintings, all of which have a delightful twist of humour within them.
DiXmiX Gallery: Kimeu Korg
As I’ve previously noted in writing about Kimeu’s work, he often warns those visiting his work not to “burn your mind thinking about the meaning of this or that in my works,” before continuing, “but if you think there are symbols and hidden messages, feel free to imagine. Go any way the wind blows!”
In the case of this exhibition, the humour within the dozen pieces offered here very much speaks for itself. Take Mug of Coffee for example – who can honestly say that they haven’t felt like that first thing in the morning, or after a long day at work? However, at least one does speak to something deeper: The Border, has imagery that would appear to comment on the controversy of the United States’ southern border and the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
DiXmiX Gallery: Kimeu Korg
This is another series of images worth taking the time to see. When viewing it, visitors might like to avail themselves to the two other exhibits currently on offer at the gallery at the time of writing this piece. By Mrs. S and Natsumi Xenga, these are altogether more adult / NSFW in nature, touching as they do on themes of sexuality, eroticism and BDSM. They can be found in the gallery’s Grey hall (with the main entrance) and the upper White Gallery.
Also, those going to The Womb,, directly below the gallery’s main halls can find Theda Tamas’ 3D piece utilising Animesh, Dancing In Between.
Alia Baroque is one of Second Life’s foremost fantasy designers. His avatars, clothing, and accessories for fantasy role-play in SL are legendary – as are his region builds for each year’s Fantasy Faire. His base of operations in-world has been – and remains- a set of regions focused on his in-world store at Selidor, which had additionally been places for exploration and photography.
I mention this because Annie Brightstar brought to my attention the fact that Alia has decided to retire Annon, one of his regions and a well-known setting in Second Life, and will be doing so at the end of Sunday, November, 17th 2019; so I decided to hop across to take a last look.
Annon, a homestead region, is the home of The Tower Gate of Annon and Flowing Monastery. It’s a place I’ve visited on numerous occasions – although I’ve only actually blogged about once, far back in 2012. It’s also a place with a long history, dating back to 2010.
Annon, November 2019
The Tower Gate originated as a build for the 2010 RFL of SL weekend, and was constructed in just 7 days. A prim build, it is has been standing guard over the Fallen Gods regions largely unchanged since being relocated. Alongside of it, just across the water, sit the Flowing Monastery, another prim build sitting atop a rugged knuckle of and island. But for a single blossoming tree in the cloister, the monastery is an empty building, lending a haunting beauty to it and the island on which it sits. The Tower Gate, however, offers multiple points of interest for those exploring its halls.
As Alia notes, both builds have stood for almost a decade, almost unchanged through the years – and certainly untouched by Alia for around half of that time. Thus, while they are in some ways monuments to Second Life’s history, they are also something that now sit outside of his Second Life vision. So, he plans to retire the builds to inventory before returning the regions to Linden Lab on November 20th, 2019.
Annon, November 2019
In retiring the region, Alia has emphasised hie is doing so not because of issues with tier or anything like it, nor does he wish to have donations made towards their possible upkeep or enquiries about purchasing them, noting:
They need to go to allow Selidor and Athan to flourish and be reborn …I am not interested in selling them or any contribution for their extended existence, the tip jar was always there so it won’t make a difference as I take this choice happily and without regrets. So please, if anyone has a sudden moment of making a fund-raiser thinking I am doing this because of a dire need, don’t.
I hope you enjoyed it until now and will remember the region with fondness, happy memories and longing, but I also hope you will be excited to see the new rebuild and update of the rest of the Archipelagos of Fallen Gods that I plan, hopefully soon.
– Alia Baroque, November 13th, 2019
Annon, November 2019
Those who wish to pay a last visit to Annon are encouraged to do so before the end of November 17th, 2019 (SLT). In addition, those who can are invited to join a Fantasy Faire LitFest tour of the region that will start at 14:00 SLT on Sunday.
The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on November 15th, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks to Pantera for recording and providing it. As always:
Time stamps are given with links that will open the video at the appropriate point in a separate browser tab for reference.
Core points of the meeting are listed below. Other subjects of lesser import may have been discussed, please refer to the video.
These continue to be deployed across the grid, with the Lab believe the results have been “mostly good”, but noting that there may still be some scripts that may be affected by the changes (and some have been reported – such as BUG-227864).
Those that are experiencing issues are asked to file a bug report, as the Lab is willing to offer assistance. Note that example scripts may be requested as a well.
Love Me Render RC viewer, version 6.3.4.532273, October 31.
Project viewers:
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.530473, September 11th.
360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th.
General Viewer Notes
A further update to the Legacy Profiles viewer is close to being made available. If the comments from the Web User Group are correct, this will see Profile Feeds appearing in the Profile floater, presumably in a new tab on that floater.
The first of the viewer builds using the updated Visual Studio 2017 / Xcode 10.3 (?) that had been anticipated as appearing “soon” at the last RPVD meeting apparently did not pass QA testing, and is now subject to debugging code changes that were made to some of the coroutines in the viewer.
It appears that work has resumed on the contribution towards viewer camera presets (STORM-2145), with “good progress” being made, but no indication on when a project viewer will surface.
The Lab is trying to generate bandwidth to implement mesh uploader improvements (these are most likely based on the Firestorm improvements to the uploader, the code for which has been contributed to LL).
Two-factor authentication for log-in has been s subject of comment and requests from some time. Linden Lab is actively working on it, noting it is “firmly on the roadmap”. However:
There is no time frame at present on possible deployment.
The work is dependent / linked to other work, requiring things are approached in order and care is taken to ensure that in making all the collective changes, nothing is broken.
SL Share, the capability for sharing SL snapshots to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter via LL server-side support, is to be discontinued.
The Facebook upload capability was removed some time ago after Facebook made changes to their API that broke the ability for the viewer to share to their platform, and did not implement any fix.
More recently, the Flickr and Twitter uploads have suffered issues (the Flickr upload is currently broken in viewers using the Lab’s upload back-end).
The reason for discontinuing SL Share is due to Flickr and Twitter making frequent changes to their connecting APIs without any notice that require LL to update their back-end support, which is regarded as a “big distraction” from other server-side work.
TPVs are free to continue to offer their own viewer-side means of uploading to the likes of Flickr that do not require LL’s back-end support, if they so wish. Firestorm has already done this.
In Brief
Singularity is apparently “very close” to a formal release to bring it up-to-date with current viewers.
[7:22-15:15] There is a discussion on region issues that are specific to the London City regions. Whilst somewhat outside the normal remit for TPVD meetings, it might be worth listening to by region / estate owners who may have experienced recent restart issues.
Emojis are coming to the viewer, courtesy of a code contribution that’s heading to Linden Lab.
The emoji capability is being contributed by the Catznip viewer team
Next TPV Developer meeting: Friday, December 13th, 2019.
