Category: Second Life

Of Milk Wood and Writers in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Milk Wood, October 2024 – Click any image for full size

With November on the horizon and the start of National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo – or NAN-oh-RY-moh) I received an invitation from long-time acquaintance in Second Life, Lizzie Gudkov, to pop over to Milk Wood, the home of Virtual Writers, as they gear-up for their new event for November each year, Moxie Madness.

Virtual Writers is an on-line community of writers, originally founded in 2007. The group is committed to showcasing both experienced and emerging writers in a range of interactive and immersive environments around the globe. Milk Wood provides a focal point for the group’s activities, offering an environment which writers can come together to share in the writing experience, socialise, have fun together and – if they wish – find a virtual home.

We offer a space for all writers at all stages, within a digital medium. This unique place allows the user to more fully develop their characters and settings, meet other likeminded individuals, share experiences, and learn and grow as writers.
We know the challenges writers face because we’ve each had similar roadblocks. Many of us have had expert help along the way and want to pay it forward. We learn from each other and share our expertise gladly. Whether you’re an experienced writer or just starting out, there’s a place for you at Virtual Writers.

– from virtualwriters.org

Milk Wood – The Stone Circle, October 2024

Occupying a Full private region leveraging the Land Capacity bonus, Milk Wood has been crafted by Harriet Gausman to provide a gorgeous setting in which to stir the creative juices whilst escaping the distractions of the physical world. It is a place Inspired by the BBC-commissioned radio drama Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas, a play itself deeply interwoven with Dylan’s short life, and his passing away in 1953 whilst on a tour of the United States with the play (which he was still revising at the time,  having roots reaching back into the early 1930s and the very start of his writing career whilst still in his late teens.

Within the region is a mix of public and private spaces – the latter being a range of rental cottages, beachfront cabin, houses and the like – stirred together without obvious boundaries in places, which can make exploration a little difficult for the casual visitor. So if you are visiting out of curiosity, then please bear this in mind as regards wandering into someone’s personal space.

Milk Wood, October 2024

That said, the blending of both public and private fits the region well, given its primary intent to bring writers together to allow them to share time and experiences, engage in a shared experience of writing and reading – and as noted, provide a home for those wishing to rent one.

Milkwood Activities and Events

Events within the region include (all times SLT):

500 Word Snatch

The 500 word snatch is a popular way of breaking down a large writing project – such as a novel – into much small, easily-digested bites by scheduling a specific time each day to write 500 words. Nor does the snatch have to be related to a single work; the challenge can be used for many different writing forms, such as outlining ideas, drafting a blog post, writing poetry, producing a short story, and so on.

Poem-a-Day (PAD)

  • April, 08:00 daily

To coincide with National Poetry Month. Write a poem every day for the month of April.

Milk Wood – Forest Coffee Bar, October 2024

Moxie Madness

  • November (all 30 days)

The group’s  new challenge in respect of NaNoWriMo: write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. As a part of this Moxie (standing for Month of Xtra Inspiration & Effort) provide a wealth of support for those participating in NaNoWriMo with daily write-ins, resources, and a selection of workshops/seminars from successful authors.

Details of sessions, workshops and events associated with Moxie Madness are available via the Moxie Madness information boards (such as found at the Forest Coffee Bar).

Milk Wood, October 2024

Camp Moxie

A more relaxed version of the November novel writing event. Sessions are held in both April and July, with writing challenges with word-counts of between 5,000 and 25,000 for any type of writing project. The time can also be used to edit your Moxie manuscript from November, plan for coming Moxie Madness or delve into research.

I’ve attended Milk Wood poetry readings, daily dashes, and the intense annual NaNoWriMo event in November. Milk Wood provides a forum for interacting with other writers, both newbies and published professionals, and a place to promote books and literary events. It’s possible to join a writing circle and set your avatar to work at a computer while you type away on a real world project. There’s always someone to offer encouragement, sympathy or advice when you hit a snag or need a break

Poet and author Patricia Averbach (via virtualwriters.org)

Milk Wood – Camp Site, October 2024

It’s fair to say (having sat-in on a 500 Word Snatch – even if this blog post did run to more than that as I was writing it at the time!) events at Milk Wood are well-attended and the folk are friendly and easy-going. Therefore if you are a writer of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or a blogger or diarist, and so on, and haven’t dropped into Milk Wood, I would genuinely recommend doing so.

In terms of exploration, the majority – but not all – of the rentals are located around the region’s coastline, with most of the public spaces – the Forest Coffee Bar, the Boho Bean Coffee Shack, the Fiesta Bar and Dance Floor, the Milk Wood Camp Site, and the Milk Wood Drive-In – located within the western half of the region, and reachable one to the next on foot without fear of colliding with someone’s home; only the Stone Circle, on the north side of the region is very close to any rentals. To ease getting around, there in an in-region teleport system, together with a local Experience to help with hopping around.

Milk Wood, October 2024

Whilst not primarily intended for the purposes of photography, the region is nevertheless beautifully designed and landscapes and offers a relaxing environment with some public spaces in which to sit and pass the time  / think about what to write next in addition to the group’s various events.

SLurl and Information

2024 SL SUG meetings week #44 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hailey’s Mystical Forest, September 2024 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 29th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from the chat log and Pantera’s video of the meeting, which is embedded at the end – my thanks to her 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.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • 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.

Simulator Deployments

  • No deployments for this week, just rolling restarts across the grid.

Simulator Deployment Plans

  • The next simulator maintenance update will be Barbecue (or BBQ), which is currently awaiting further bug fixing. This should include:
    • Support for “alpha-gamma” which will allow an object owner to adjust some of the PBR alpha values that were impacting legacy things like hair.
    • llSetAgentRot.
    • A new warning on receiving direct IMs from Scripted Agents (“registered” bots): if a Scripted Agent “right clicks” you and sends you a message, it will trigger a warning about sharing personal information with bots within the chat window.
  • Following Barbecue should be Apple Cobbler, which should include:
    • llTransferOwnership which enables a prim give itself to a new user (subject to owner permissions already set).
    • An extended llGiveInventory to allow for a destination folder (system folders + RLV/a) to be specified as well (+ the use of a parameter list, so further options can be added in the future).

SL Viewer Updates

No changes at the start of the week:

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.10.10800445603, formerly the DeltaFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, etc), dated September 11, promoted September 17 – No change.
  • Release Candidate: ExtraFPS RC, version 7.1.11.11296522354, October 18.
    • Performance improvements: enhanced texture memory tracking, broader hardware compatibility and higher FPS gain.
    • Aesthetics improvements: new Antialiasing setting – SMAA; Contrast Adaptive Sharpening; Khronos Neutral Tone Mapping (can be changed to ACES via the RenderTonemapType Debug setting).

Game Control

Leviathan Linden noted the latest news on this work:

GameControl is in develop branch, not sure when it will reach an official release or find its way into TPV. Meanwhile game controller hardware support has been temporarily disabled on Mac (although it didn’t work very well there anyway since most devices are not recognized by the OS) until we sort out some “duplicate keypress” issues.

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

  • Reports indicate the the most recent simulator deployment appears to have fixed most of the lost / ghosted attachment issues experienced during teleport / physical region crossings.
  • A general discussion on RLV and possible #RLV folder structure, and RLV extensions to folders. For those curious about RLV/a, given RLVa is currently to be incorporated into the official viewer, please refer to (among other sources):
  • Further discussion on llTransferOwnership and llGiveAvatarInventoryList. Part of the latter included the extent to which scripts should be able to use it to create new inventory items (e.g. such as preventing it from using the Current Outfit Folder, whilst removing the burden of everything going to the Inventory root folder.
  • Both the RLV and LSL commands above lead to a wider discussion on inventory, folder structures, how / where items should be placed when received via script, etc.,  filtering inventory, and so on.
  • There is no current work on HTTP/2 for CDN and asset fetching. This is described as something LL want to get to, but keeps getting stalled due to the focus being on other areas of work. Monty Linden also noted a move to HTTP/2 may not yield any significant loading improvement over HTTP/1.
  • A general discussion on feature requests such as object permission information [provided] with llgetobjectdetails; add rezremotescriptaccesspin to llrezobjectwithparams, both of which are currently being TRACKED by LL.

† 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.

Lab announces Philip Rosedale appointed as CTO

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab

The event venue has been given as Linden Estate Services Meeting Area.

On Tuesday, October 29th, 2024, Linden Lab announced that the company’s founder, Philip Rosedale has been appointed to the full-time role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO), in a move that will undoubtedly cause excitement in some quarters.

As well as founding the company, Rosedale served as its CEO through until 2010, when he departed the company to work on various new ventures,  including Coffee and Power and, most notable, the VR-centric virtual world / social spaces company, High Fidelity.

The latter actually became an investor in Linden Lab / Second Life in January 2022 in a deal which included the transfer of some staff from High Fidelity to Linden Lab, together distributed computing patents held by High Fidelity, which has transitioned by that time toy working on solutions focused on spatial audio that would allow people to work collaboratively whilst geographically separate. Also as a part of that deal, Rosedale took up the role as a special advisor to the Second Life management team and the Board at Linden Lab.

In this role he has spent the last 2+ years providing advice and support to the Lab’s Board under Executive Chairman Brad Oberwager and the executive team, and has been visible at a number of Lab-led town hall meetings and similar events as well as participating in various Lab Gab events.

In his new role as CTO, Rosedale “will guide technology and product strategy daily” alongside the executive management team, and he will also resume a seat on the company’s Board.

Over the last four years since the acquisition, Linden Lab has re-focused itself on improving and serving Second Life. We’ve divested ourselves of unnecessary projects, streamlined our operations, increased the quality of customer support, and grown our overall revenues and profitability. We’re now in a unique position to define the future of virtual worlds, and Philip is returning to help myself and the exec team achieve that goal.

– Brad Oberwager, Linden Lab Executive Chair, via the announcement

Philip Rosedale Round Table Event

The announcement also indicated the Lab will be holding a Community Round Table event on Friday, November 1st, 2024, at 10:00 SLT featuring Philip Rosedale. At the time of writing, the venue for the event was TBA – this post will be updated with details when available. However, questions are being sought from Second Life users, so if you have a question for Philip Rosedale, you can submit it via this form.

Related Links

2024 SL viewer release summaries week #43

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week through to Sunday, October 27th, 2024

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

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.10.10800445603, formerly the DeltaFPS RC, dated September 11, promoted September 17 – NO CHANGE.
  • Release Candidate: ExtraFPS RC, version 7.1.11.11296522354, October 18 – NO CHANGE.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V7-style

V1-style

  • Cool VL Viewer Stable: 1.32.2.20, October 26 – release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

Ashemi revisited in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Ashemi, October 2024 – click any image for full size

Ashemi is a setting which, like the tide, ebbs and flows in and out of Second Life. The work of SL partners Ian Ventori (Jayshamime) and Ime Poplin (Jayshamime), and has been featured in this blog numerous times since 2016.  This is because Jay and Ime (sometimes with help from friends) always put together settings which carry within them certain motifs and themes which can be found in previous designs, allowing each version of Ashemi to stand both in its own right whilst also sharing threads of ideas which flow through all of them like a familiar musical refrain.

The last time I visited an Ashemi build, it took the form of a repurposed oil or natural gas platform sitting out in blue waters somewhere, its derricks and drilling and recovery equipment all gone, replaced by the living spaces and businesses of a tiny community, thus making it an island of life in a broad sea. Something of this theme is continued in the 2024 build, but in a very different manner.

Ashemi, October 2024

The region sits as an island, a semi-industrialised place looking like part of a much larger conurbation, but which seems to have fallen on hard times. A single tall smokestack exhales a white plume into the sky as it surpasses the local buildings in its height as it does so. These other buildings rise as factory blocks, apartment buildings with places of business below, and a single, strange structure rising on four stout legs to become a luxury apartment overlooking its downtrodden neighbours and offering shelter to the autumnal trees growing beneath it.

There is little other greenery to be found within the walls formed by the island’s buildings, save for an attempt by someone to make a garden around their trailer home. Here, grass has been planted together with shrubs and rhubarb is being forced under glass. Whoever lives here values their privacy: the trailer home is surrounded by a tall chain link fence topped by razor wire. Outside of this, lanterns hang prettily, suggesting a welcome might yet be found in the trailer whilst adding their illumination to that of the neon signs and hoardings of the surrounding buildings. However, whom they might attract to their businesses is anyone’s guess; even the local swimming pool is looking a tad sad, whilst a once pristine fairground rides have most certainly aged beyond their prime, leaving only the local café as possibly deserving custom within its well-kept interior.

Ashemi, October 2024

Which is also not to stay nature has entirely given up here; trees grow along the southern shoreline, whilst to the southwest the land opens up into s park-like headland where Sakura blossom and other trees offer shade and places to sit might be found (as they can indeed be found elsewhere in the setting). It is from here that visitors can get a good view of the outlying elements of the setting and add to the mystery of its possible backstory.

Two block-like islands sit just off the region’s boundaries. They carry on them squat apartment blocks hunched over their ground-floor business, the lights within them and on their advertising hoards bright and warm, feed by the overhead powerlines following the grid patterns of streets where vehicles and people might be seen.

Ashemi, October 2024

Given their regular shapes, these islands appear entirely artificial – but were they built over the waters around them, or were they once both part of the same landmass, perhaps even joined to Ashemi’s near-deserted form, only to become regularly-shaped bastions of town life as sea levels rose and cut them asunder from one another, whilst also encroaching on their heartland to form it into the island of Ashemi?

A third blocky island rises from the sea on the other side of Ashemi in relation to its park-like headland. It is crowned by massive structures dwarfing anything else to be found, with huge clusters of cables draped in the deep canyons between them. Industrial-looking, dark and almost foreboding, it stands in stark contrast to anything else to be seen, adding a further twist to any story one might try to conjure for the setting’s history.

Ashemi, October 2024

That this is place potential somewhere in the near-future can perhaps most clearly be seen in the design of that third off-region island. However, another clue can be found in the fact that air cars and moving back and forth in the sky, together with what look like automated cargo carriers. The air cars look to be for travel between the town-like islands and between them and the more futuristic island with its towers and cable and dishes. In this, they almost completely ignore the little island of Ashemi and its various attractions, perhaps living it to be visited only by boat.

Rich in detail and with multiple places to sit, this iteration of Ashemi again offers many opportunities for the imagine to wonder about its origins and for the taking of photographs. My thanks to Jay for the personal invite to pay a visit.

Ashemi, October 2024

SLurl Details

  • Ashemi (Goldenland, rated Moderate)

2024 week #43: SL TPVD meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Grauland / Primary Colors, September 2024 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my audio recording + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, October 25th, 2024. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.

Meeting Purpose

  • The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development. This meeting is held once a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
  • Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they re conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers Status

[Video: 0:00-2:30]

  • Release viewer: version 7.1.10.10800445603, formerly the DeltaFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, etc), dated September 11, promoted September 17 – No change.
  • Release Candidate: ExtraFPS RC, version 7.1.11.11296522354, October 18.
    • Performance improvements: enhanced texture memory tracking, broader hardware compatibility and higher FPS gain;  additional code to improve texture streaming on rigged attachments (e.g. if an earring is made with 2K textures, the viewer will correctly calculate the required resolution for the textures and download them, rather than downloading the full 2K textures), etc.
    • Aesthetics improvements: new Antialiasing setting – SMAA; Contrast Adaptive Sharpening; Khronos Neutral Tone Mapping (can be changed to ACES via the RenderTonemapType Debug setting).
    • UI Optimisations: lessening the impact of UI rendering on frame rates / performance (discussed more fully at 16:52-18:04].

Upcoming Viewers

  • ExtraFPS is described as having some “high priority” bug which require fixing before it progresses to release status.
  • The next RC viewer to follow ExtraFPS is likely to be the Maintenance B build, which includes work put on hold while the focus was on PBR and non-PBR related performance fixes.
  • Performance improvement will continue to be part of the on-going work with the viewer, but once ExtraFPS is promoted to release status, it is unlikely that the Lab will produce viewers dedicated only to performance fixed for a while.
  • From the comments made, it appears as if LL are going to try to pull work from what had been the Maintenance C RC viewer (also put on hold whilst the performance work was going on) into the next viewer build as well.
    • It was acknowledged that this approach may need toa delay in getting the updated Maint B viewer out and to release status, but it is hoped that in the long run, it will mean a faster release cycle with the viewer builds which eventually follow behind Maint B.
  • [Video 21:09-22:27] Vir reiterates that as the Maint B(/C) viewer appears, it should mark the return  of Linux to the list of official viewer builds.
    • However, the Linux flavour will be based on code contributions rather than dedicated support from with in the Lab.
    • If things break with it, the Lab will attempt to fix them, but will not hold back viewer releases as a result of Linux-specific breakages / bugs.

WebRTC

[Video 2:31-4:20]

Summary

  • The replacement of the Vivox Voice service and plug-in, with the WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”). Roxie Linden is leading this work.
  • Key benefits:
    • WebRTC supports a wide range of real-time communications tools in common use (e.g. Google Meet), supporting audio, video and data communications, and is thus something of a “standard” approach.
    • Offers a good range of features: automatic echo cancellation, better noise cancellation and automatic gain control, much improved audio sampling rates for improved audio quality.
    • Opens the door to features and capabilities to voice services which could not be implemented whilst using Vivox.

Status

  • There is now a “pretty significant fraction” of users still using a non-WebRTC capable viewer.
  • LL would like this number to be further reduced before they completely pull the back-end support for Vivox. As such, the exact time frame on when the switch might be thrown is still TBA.
  • [Via chat throughout the 10-25 min point in the meeting, and with some Voice from approx 18 mins] It was noted that Voice roll-off under WebRTC should work the same as for Vivox, BUT the range at which is rolls-off completely is greater (60m).
    • Some have reported that this does not appear to be the case, with roll-off potentially not working at all (also reported at the last TPVD meeting).
    • LL to investigate further.

Graphics Work

[Video: 5:28-end]

  • The first part of this update referenced rigged attachment texture streaming as noted in the ExtraFPS summary, above.
  • Also as noted above, the work on improving performance has reached a point of diminishing returns for dedicated viewer updates, so future performance improvements will be folded in ither other viewer updates making it to the Develop branch.
  • The above noted, LL is still digging into specific hardware types where the viewer does not perform well (e.g. some AMD graphics chips) in order to determine what might be done to improve things.
    • If people running a viewer with the DeltaFPS code included are still fining they have very poor performance (e.g. single-digit FPS; an already low FPS cut in half, etc.), they are asked to file a Canny report and included information on their hardware (e.g. copy-paste their hardware information as displayed in Help → About, in the viewer).
  • [Video: 7:57-9:07] A change was introduced with the Delta FPS code such that if the viewer is running in the background on a system for more than 10 seconds, it will down-rez textures to prevent over-use of VRAM when it is not the application in focus.
    • This has received completely mixed feedback: some feel 10 seconds is too long a period to wait; others feel it is too short; those running multi-screen systems with SL on one monitor dislike the fact that when they focus away from SL to work on their other screen, SL “goes blurry”, etc.
    • As a result, LL is considering making this a switchable option, so users can decide whether they want to utilise it or not.
  • [Video 9:20-11:13] A discussion on using Vsync in the viewer vs. limiting frame rates (e.g. through the viewer or via something like the Nvidia control panel).
  • [Video 27:29-33:33] A discussion on brightness and  gamma / PBR vs non-PBR / use of HDR rendering + tone mapping.
    • In terms of tone mapping, the decision is to move back o ACES as the default in light of feedback, but people will remain able to select Khronos Neutral or ACES through Preferences.
    • The long-term plan is to have tone mapping and colour correction per sky setting, allowing region holders / designs to choose which ones they want.
    • As such, content creators are reminded no to bake tone mapping in their base colour / diffuse map but let the viewer’s post-processing handle the tone mapping.
  • [Video: 33:25-38:33] Alpha / gamma work:
    • As per previous meetings: in order for PBR lighting to render anywhere close to correctly, alpha blending had to be switched from SRGB to linear colour space. This can cause some older content using Blinn-Phong, to look either more opaque or more transparent than in did pre-PBR.
    • The fix for this giving people the ability to adjust the alpha/gamma on per texture entry for the object (including no mod items)
    • A link was provided to an installer for a viewer with the code at the meeting, but this later generated a 404 error.

In Brief

  • The latter part of the meeting included a discussion on documentation + communication (e.g. communicating more fully the reasoning behind PBR – the move towards better and more consistent content using glTF).

Next Meeting

† 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 gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.