The annual Blake Sea raft-up will be taking place on Sunday, June 30th, and SL residents are invited to go along and help raise money for Relay for Life of Second Life.
Now in it is 7th year, the event will take place on a special floating stage at Blake Sea – Haggerty, beneath the iconic floating racing grandstand. It will run from 09:00 through until around 15:00 SLT, and feature a host of activities, including music, a demonstration and spectacular raffle prizes.
The full schedule of events is as follows – all times SLT.
09:00-11:00 – DJ Joy Canadeo
11:00-13:00 – DJ Luke Flywalker
13:00-14:00 – DJ Benny the Boozehound.
During his set, Luke Flywalker will narrate a special rescue demonstration by the Second Life Coast Guard (SLCG).
In addition, the event will feature raffles – all proceeds to RFL of SL – with a range of stunning prizes:
ANY bandit of the winners choosing.
ANY Mesh shop boat of the winners choosing.
1 Endeavour barracuda.
1 Endeavour Trident boat.
Paint of their choosing.
The 2018 Raft Up SLCG demonstration
This is always a popular event, and the advice is for those wishing to join the fun is, “Come early!” You can catch a video of the 2018 event via Flickr.
The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, June 28th, 2019. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks as always to North for recording and providing it. The key points of discussion are provided below with time stamps to the relevant points in the video, which will open in a separate tab when clicked.
There are assorted text chat discussions scattered throughout the video covering various topics (e.g. Firestorm code that exposed a viewer setting to show the physics shapes of mesh objects, general discussion of LL hiring, avatar dot colours on the map, and opinions on a “lite” version of the viewer (remember the Basic viewer?), the technicalities of multi-threading, etc). These are not necessarily referenced in the notes below – please refer to the video.
Current Release version 6.2.3.527758, formerly the Rainbow RC viewer dated June 5th, promoted June 18th.
Release channel cohorts:
EEP RC viewer, version 6.4.0.527723, dated June 6th.
Project viewers:
Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.2.3.527749, dated June 5th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17th, 2017 and promoted to release status November 29th, 2017 – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, dated May 8th, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.
Additional Viewer Notes
Currently the BOM and EEP viewers appear vying for promotion to de facto release status. A new EEP RC is anticipated in early week #27 (commencing Monday, July 1st). It is hoped that both viewers are now functionally ready for release, and that both will go through promotion to release status by the end of July. Of the two, the more likely for promotion first is BOM – but this is not an absolute.
[9:40] The potential closeness of BOM and EEP going to release status relative to one another may raise questions within some TPV groups as to how to best handle them (.e.g. individual release or a combined release with both).
It is hoped that other projects – notably the texture fetching / texture caching re-write project – can start to be carried forward once more, with project viewers surfacing as a result at some point.
If the texture fetching can be improved, the Lab might also look at inventory fetching, although the two are somewhat different. There is already some work going on with the inventory back-end, which could also lead to opportunities to work on the viewer side of inventory handling.
[10:55-11:50 and 46:00-47:25] The 360 Snapshot project viewer has been brought up to parity with the current release viewer, and is currently awaiting QA. It should hopefully be returning to the viewer list soon™, and work should resume on the 360 snapshot function itself in the near future.
[12:52-14:26] Apple OpenGL deprecation: the Lab is working on a strategy to deal with this, but it is “too soon” for detailed discussion, however, part of it is dependent on the Lab getting an additional graphics engineer hired to work on SL.
Viewer Build Process
An issue with the new viewer build process using Visual Studio 2017 / the latest Xcode has been identified and hopefully rectified. The process will therefore be going to QA. Providing all goes well, the build process will then be deployed to the viewer build farm.
The simulator updates that will hopefully improve script run time issues (see BUG-226851 and BUG-227099) mentioned in my Content Creation summary, are unlikely to be deployed until at least week #28 (week commencing Monday, July 8th).
Other Topics
[7:01-8:00 and 28:22-29:00] There will be no viewer releases at the end of week #27, nor will there be any simulator RC channel deploys on Wednesday, July 3rd, due to the July 4th break. Similarly, there will be a period at the end of July / start of August with no releases / updates, as the SL team will be having their summer planning summit.
{21:15-25:15] iOS companion app: work has started on trying to get the initial test versions through Apple’s test process. It’s not clear how long this will take.
As per my summary and audio of Oz and April Linden’s Meet the Lindens session, this will initially be a basic communications app, allowing users to chat to others (users won’t even have an in-world location, per se).
Obviously, it is planned to evolve the app over time.
It’s not clear if users in-world will be able to discern if a user is on the iOS client.
Once the test version is available, iPhone users will require TestFlight on their ‘phones to play with it (hopefully, it should also run on iPads as well, although there may be some configuration differences).
Some of the back-end infrastructure the Lab is building is support of the app might be applicable to use with a web application, but that is not on the current plans.
[26:53-27:50] The Lab believe they have identified one of the causes of performance collapse when avatars teleport into a region. This is being queued up to be worked on.
[28:00-28:18] The latest versions of simulator code changes to help with region crossing and teleport issues should be fully deployed across the grid following the SLS (Main) channel deployment in week #27.
[32:00-43:30 – chat] Problems have been reported with ASCII characters used in group names displayed by the avatar tag taking time to correctly display in busy regions, which are notably seen with the Firestorm viewer, but which are proving difficult to reproduce in the official viewer. See: BUG26338.
This topic kicked off a length chat discussion that rolled into avatar dot colours on the map, viewer updates for avatar tags, etc.
The chat further rolled into a discussion of “why no VR in SL?”. Short answer: performance isn’t consider good enough to deliver a really comfortable VR experience, although non-LL driven tests have continued.
Having trouble with texture loading? I could be your system, depending on its age, but it also might be your anti-virus software – try explicitly whitelisting your viewer cache in you AV software and see if that helps.
The July exhibition at Kultivate Edge Gallery opened on June 23rd and will run through until late July 2019.
Specialising in monochrome art and photography, the gallery’s roll of artists comprises aht1981, DrusillaGwind, honeyBi, KodyMeyers, understandingcomplexity, John Brianna, Eucalyptus Carroll, Davenwolf Dagger, Lena Kiopak, Nodome Resident, and Veruca Tammas.
As is always the case with The Edge, there is a rich mix of art on offer with this exhibition, from physical world photographs, as presented by John Brianna with a fascinating set of locomotive images featuring five diesel engines positioned around a marvellous picture of an old-style steam locomotive, through to evocative avatar portraits, such as those presented by KodyMeyers on the lower floor of the gallery alongside John’s display.
In many ways, I’ve always found monochrome studies of avatars to be more attractive than colour studies; its not that I have anything against the latter, its just that for me, the former carries a degree of life in the use of light and shadow that draws me in. This is true of all of the avatar studies presented here.
However, for this exhibition I found myself drawn to the physical work art on offer – John’s locomotives, together with an almost triptych of drawings by Nodome Resident and a set of eight images entitled The Blacksmith Series presented by Davenwolf Dagger.
Admittedly, part of my attraction to the latter is the fact they were taken in Launceston in Tasmania, a place (along with Richmond on the southern side of the island) for which I have happy memories. As such, the photos presented by Davenwolf piqued my curiosity and stirred those memories. But it’s not just that; each and every one of these photos is rich in detail and narrative. Similarly, Nodome’s drawings are wonderfully intricate and captivating.
But whatever your preferences for art in Second Life, the mix of physical world photos, avatar studies, art and landscapes make this a must-see exhibition.
On Thursday, June 26th, 2019 at the SL16B celebrations, the fourth of five Meet the Lindens sessions was held at the SL16B Auditorium. It featured Xiola Linden, Lead Community Manager and Strawberry Linden, Marketing Content Specialist.
The SL4Live TV video of the event is embedded below, with a couple of brief biographies on Xiola and Strawberry, based on comments they made during the session and in Xiola’s case, at past events.
Xiola is the Lead Community Manager at Linden Lab. she originally came to Second Life in 2006, and joined the Lab in 2011. Her role is broad-ranging, including elements of customer support, through blogging and social media output for the Lab, to organising events such as the in-world get-togethers. For a period of time she was also responsible for community management work on Sansar, but has been back working full-time on Second Life for around 18 months. She will celebrate her eighth anniversary with the company in November 2018.
Born and raised in California’s silicon valley, she naturally immersed her career in technology, working for the likes of Yahoo!, with a particular interest in creative communities. It was a friend’s invitation that she try Second Life that got her started on the platform, and she remains active in-world on her personal account. Her engagement in the platform led to an interest in joining the Lab as an employee, so she started keeping an eye on the Lab’s career page and when a community related post to opened, she applied and was recruited.
Strawberry and Xiola Linden. Credit: Strawberry Linden
Strawberry Linden
Also known as Strawberry Singh, she is one of the more high profile lab recruits to come from the ranks of Second Life residents, thanks to her work in building her own brand – blogging, vlogging, fashion tips, tutorials, etc., – that has been hugely popular among Second Life users, particularly those with a focus / involvement on the fashion aspects of the platform.
It is her personal brand that played a role in her decision to carry her fist name over from resident to Linden in becoming Strawberry Linden – although she notes that she had advice from Patch Linden and others to keep her Linden persona separate from her personal SL persona and admits to perhaps regretting not heeding it!
As a Marketing Content Specialist, she is focused on Second Life (no involvement in Sansar), her current focus is on tutorial videos to help incoming new users, starting with the basics: signing-up, walking around in-world, etc. From here she plans to move onto more intermediate subjects and onwards to more advanced topics, covering a broad range of subjects: buying Linden dollars, editing the avatar shape, dressing, use mesh avatars and mesh heads, etc., with videos aimed at more established users, rather than being purely for newcomers.
She had no major preconceptions about working at the Lab prior to joining, but has been impacted by the degree of love staff have towards the platform. She also loves the fact she can continue with a lot of what she did as a resident: dress avatars, create looks, take photos and make videos, and hopes to be able to carry over her blog challenges to the Lab.
The following notes are taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on Thursday, June 27th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are usually available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.
Environment Enhancement Project
Project Summary
A set of environmental enhancements allowing the environment (sky, sun, moon, clouds, water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.
Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).
A new viewer update is due to go to the Lab’s QA team over the weekend, and should surface at the start of week #27 (commencing Monday, July 1st). This should address a number of issues in the EEP code including
Water transparency rendering.
The glow seen around facial features (freckles, lips, eyelashes, and around the neck fix for mesh heads should no longer be apparent.
The difference in viewing an environment with Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) off and viewing it with ALM enabled is not as drastic.
Daytime lighting seen at sunrise, midday and sunset are much closer how they appear in the default viewer.
The request is for people testing EEP to grab the RC viewer when available and test drive it.
Bakes On Mesh
Project Summary
Extending the current avatar baking service to allow wearable textures (skins, tattoos, clothing) to be applied directly to mesh bodies as well as system avatars. This involves viewer and server-side changes, including updating the baking service to support 1024×1024 textures, but does not include normal or specular map support, as these are not part of the existing Bake Service, nor are they recognised as system wearables. Adding materials support may be considered in the future.
The Bakes on Mesh RC viewer was re-issued on Tuesday, June 25th, in the form of version 6.3.0.528495. This includes:
A new inventory icon for the “universal” wearable type.
A fix for a serious security issue type of bug.
It had been indicted at the last meeting that a required appearance service update had been made. However, this deployment did not occur until the afternoon of Thursday, June 27th.
Animesh Follow-On
Vir now has LSL functions to both set and get the visual parameters of slider-related bones in an Animesh object.
These should be enough to test the ability, so he is starting the work on getting a project viewer put together that supports the functionality.
Script Processing Issues
As I’ve noted in recent SUG summaries, there have been numerous reports of script run time issues. See BUG-226851 and BUG-227099 as examples.
There are simulator updates awaiting deployment that should provide better script performance on the “more expensive [resource-wise] scripts events”, such as sensors.
Rider Linden has been working to eliminate the overhead of idle scripts, reducing the time they need to simply work out they don’t need to process anything by 20-30%, although actual mileage once the improvements are deployed, may vary.
Rider is not promising to get script performance up to 100% per cycle (Homestead don’t end to achieve this anyway due to the number per core), but is hoping to see general improvements in processing and around those scripts that can cause unnecessary bogging down (e.g. multiple open listeners, sensors, and similar).
Viewer-side tools are to be provided (“after July”) viewing statistics on general script usage across a simulator to help diagnose local problems. These might even include / take the form of a visual indicator, such as the visual object update option (CTRL-ALT-Shift-U).
Next Meeting
Due to July 4th being a Thursday, and July 11th the Lab’s monthly All Hands meeting, the next CCUG meeting will be Thursday, July 18th, 2019.
On Wednesday, June 26th, 2019 at the SL16B celebrations, the third of five Meet the Lindens sessions was held at the SL16B Auditorium. It featured the Lab’s CEO, Ebbe Altberg, aka Ebbe Linden.
The following is a summary of the session covering the core topics raised, with audio extracts where relevant.
Discussion points have been grouped by topic, and not necessarily in the order raised during the session.
I have focused on those topics liable to be of the most interest to readers / generated the most informative answers, so this is not a summary of all comments. etc..
Topics are give as bullet-point highlights for ease of reference.
Audio extracts are provided.
These have been cleaned-up in places to remove repetition or pauses, etc.
Audio extracts may concatenate comments on specific subjects that may have been made at different points in the discussion, and so do not always match the chronology of the video.
Timestamps to the SL4Live – TV video are provided for those who would prefer to listen to Ebbe’s comments “in the raw”. This video is also embedded at the end of this article.
Note: the following is taken from both Ebbe’s comments and my own research into his background, carried out when he joined Linden Lab in 2014, and which also included input from Ebbe.
Swedish by birth and still by nationality – he is still working in the US on a green card -, Ebbe graduated fromTärnabySkidhem in 1983. His time there was focused on skiing, as he wanted to be a ski racer, with his eyes on the Swedish national team and the world cup. Unfortunately, a back injury stopped him pursuing that particular career option, and so he crossed the Atlantic to study Middlebury College, Vermont, USA.
Ebbe Linden, aka Ebbe Altberg. Credit: Strawberry Linden
Founded in 1800, Middlebury is regarded as one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the United States. While there, he “spent a lot of time in the art studio and the computer lab in an extreme left brain / right brain type of education”, before graduating with a degree in Fine Arts and a concentration in Computer Applications.
From Middlebury, and with the clock ticking down on his visa, Ebbe “slipped into Microsoft on a random banana peel”, where he spent twelve years. Joining in the pre-Windows era, he was particularly involved with the Office products (Word, Mac Office, etc) and multimedia products.
In March 2000, he moved on to Ingenio, a company that created marketplaces for people to buy and sell information over the phone. While there he was responsible for managing the engineering, program management, operations, and quality teams, and served as the company’s interim CEO before taking on the mantle of the Chief Product Officer. And while he doesn’t often mention it due to not being a huge fan of the patent system, he “racked up quite a few patents there.”
After Ingenio, Ebbe joined Yahoo! n February 2008, filling out a number of senior roles, including Vice President, Head of Audience for the company’s EMEA division, being based in Rolle, Switzerland, managing some 180 people and multiple products across six countries. During this period he also served on the board of Yahoo! SARL (Société à responsabilité limitée) – think the equivalent of a Pvt Ltd company in the UK or a limited liability partnership in the USA, before returning to the United States to become the Senior Vice President for Media Engineering at Yahoo! with global responsibly for Media Engineering, a position that involved managing an organisation of more than 600 engineers, architects, program managers and quality engineering staff, as well as having dotted-line oversight of some 150 product managers and designers.
Linden Lab’s chairman of the Board, Jed Smith, is a long-time friend of Ebbe Altberg, and had previously tried to get Ebbe to join the company prior to his appointment as CEO in 2014. (image: Owl Ventures)
Following Yahoo!, he took up the challenge of turning around a small tech company called BranchOut, based in San Francisco. Around two years old at the time of his joining, BranchOut had been through a roller-coaster ride with its product, a Facebook oriented application designed for finding jobs, networking professionally, and recruiting employees. Seven months before Ebbe joined the company, the app boasted 25 million users across 60 countries – but by the time he came on board, the user base had shrunk to just 3 million. Under his guidance, the company pivoted the BranchOut app into a new workplace messaging application called Talk.co, launched in October 2013.
Ebbe was actually aware of Second life – and had experienced it first hand – a long time before joining Linden Lab in 2014. His son Aleks, had been heavily involved in SL, starting with the Teen Grid, making content and then moving to developing a successful in-world business there (Aleks is now an Lab Employee, working on Sansar, where he is a regular at in-world community meet-ups and product meetings).
More particularly, Ebbe has had a long-standing friendship with the Chair of the Lab’s board of directors, Jed Smith. LL was one of Smith’s first investments when he became a venture capitalist, and through Jed Ebbe gained an awareness of the Lab, its product, and met Philip Rosedale.
So I fell in love with the idea, and understood what Philip and Second Life was trying to achieve, but it wasn’t until many, many, many years later – well, five years ago now – that it came up that they were looking for someone, and it was the right time and place for both the Lab and me to hook up and see how I could help keep things going here.
I have not regretted that decision for a second, it’s been absolutely fantastic; it’s an incredible group of people I get to work with. Having the Second Life team is just an absolute privilege … Everyone is just incredibly passionate about the product … that’s just been a very, very enjoyable ride for me so far.
– Ebbe Altberg, Meet the Lindens, June 26th, 2019
The Lab’s Battery Street staff (image: Ebbe Altberg, via Twitter)
One of the greatest rewards he sees in being with the company is diversity, be it within the people working the Lab or using Second Life, or the equally rich diversity of uses people find for Second Life – be it as a means of expression or as a platform for business, as tool for health improvement or an aid education, and so on, and the multiple ways Second Life can benefit those who engage with the platform.
He is also drawn to the technical aspects of the platform, including its multiple challenges, and the way it combines so many different capabilities: tools for content creation, options for social engagement, the ability to run a virtual economy, etc., all of which combine with the need to constantly discover / learn new things about the ways in which SL is being used, to continually refresh interest in, and enthusiasm for, managing, improving and expanding the platform.
As a world Second Life has a huge diversity of uses, and there is no single “one size fits all” solution.
Has always and consistently stated a belief that virtual land in SL is too expensive [it has been a major theme from users throughout his tenure as CEO as well, and preceded his arrival at the Lab].
HOWEVER, Land fees generate the majority of the Lab’s inflow of revenue, even if it has been over-monetised by the Lab in order to meet that revenue requirement.
Therefore, if land fees are to be reduced, the Lab must find ways to move its revenue generation from virtual land to other opportunities that have previously perhaps been under-monetised in their ability to generate revenue. These include things like Premium fees and consumer-related revenue generation options.
Also feels there has been an imbalance in the way SL operates, as a merchant without any land can produce goods and sell them (via the Marketplace) without really paying for the opportunity to do so (just 5% commission on sales), and could then cash-out with very little cost to their revenue.
Unfortunately, both trying to broaden LL’s revenue generation options to decrease a reliance on land fee, and trying to correct some of the balance in where fee are obtained to help with that revenue generation, can result in some feeling hurt.
LL are attempting to be careful in how these shifts are made, as there are major risks involved (for both in-world business and the Lab itself), and so are progressing in small steps – the recent Premium and processing fee increases being the latest of those steps.
Believes there are still opportunities to further re-balance things, and to reduce land costs.
Also believes it is fair to say that while things like credit processing fees have been increased, they are still well below what might be regarded as “industry standards” for many digital transactions, which can be 30% and upwards.
Understands that the increases have impacted people, notably creators with very low margins, and who may have to make adjustments to their pricing, etc., and recognises that changes like those now implemented (as of June 24th) might make it tougher for some to survive, but believes the changes are necessary.
Points out that one of the consequences of high tier is that SL so often loses stunning public regions that have been built, and which people miss when they vanish.
The annual Blake Sea raft-up will be taking place on Sunday, June 30th, and SL residents are invited to go along and help raise money for Relay for Life of Second Life.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 