June 2024 will mark the 21st anniversary of Second Life opening to public access – and to mark it, Linden Lab has announced the 2024 Birthday celebrations as being marked across an entire month – from Friday, June 21st through until Sunday July 21st, 2024.
Theme
This theme for Second Life’s 21st birthday (SL21B) has been given as Elements, which the Lab describes thus:
This theme invites us to explore the fundamental components that make up our vast virtual landscape and the diverse communities within it. From the fiery passion of creators and artists to the fluid adaptability of our social environments, from the solid bonds within our communities to the fresh breezes of innovation that propel us forward, “Elements” is a celebration of the core forces that shape our experiences in Second Life.
The announcement also notes that applications for those wishing to host exhibits within the Birthday regions are now open, with the following notes:
Applications will be accepted through until Sunday, May 12th, 2024.
There will be both General and Adult rated regions available to exhibitors.
Exhibits do not have to be in keeping with the Elements theme – LL are keen to showcase the passions, interests and creativity of the platform’s users and many groups and communities.
In 2023, Exhibitor parcels were expressly stated as being 4096 sq m in size, with a Land Capacity of 1872 LI. While this is not stated in this year’s application form, there is no direct reason to suppose this will not be the case this year as well – although clarification from LL would be welcome.
The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday April 3rd, 2024. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy, is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.
This meeting was more a seeking feedback type of discussion than it was an update on web project projects, etc.
Meeting Overview
The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), the forums.
As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
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.
Official Viewer Search
It was noted by some users at the meeting that the official viewer takes longer to index new users so they appear within the web search People tab, whereas TPVs using the legacy search seem to index them a lot faster.
It was similarly noted that very short user / place names (3 letters of less) don’t always show up in search results.
It was asked why there is a L$30 fee for creating a Classified ad in a user’s profile / Search (short answer: to provide an additional search service of more “curated” locations over general search) and why such classifieds are not categorised (short answer: they are, via a pre-defined drop-down).
There have been some reports of the viewer search constantly requesting cookies be accepted, either on every use, or the first time Search is used during a user’s current log-in session.
In Brief
Ability for MP merchants to have their own “featured items” display pinned to the top of their store page on the first page of their MP store.
This idea has been floated by Sntax Linden a couple of times, and would allow Merchants to select items from their store (e.g. new items, best selling items, etc.) highlighted in some manner as featured items (possibly in a similarly distinctive manner to the Featured Items displayed on the MP home page).
It was met with broad approval / agreement.
LL are still looking at the way thumbnails of products are selected for display within users’ Favourite Stores lists on the MP, with a view to making it more useful to Merchants. This might be by:
Displaying thumbnails of their most recent releases, so people can use the list as a quick reference to what is new in their favourite MP stores.
Tying the selected thumbnails to the store “featured items” capability discussed above (if implemented).
General discussion on in-world store activity.
Some felt that the large volume of shopping events is having a negative impact of in-world store footfall, as people are event-focused, rather than opting to visit stores directly.
Some reported experiencing a steady decline in footfall within their stores, others no change / a potential increase in recent months.
It was pointed out that besides events, creator-merchants don’t necessarily help themselves by not updating the SLurls to their stores / items as listed on the Marketplace when they move (probably in part because there is no easy mechanism for them to do so on the MP if individual listings include SLurls).
The above led to a broader discussion on market forces, such as the fact that content creation is now for more the purview of these wishing to do so on a full-time basis (in order to remain competitive) rather than something the “hobbyist” creator can enjoy as a means of generating revenue as a means to help support their in-world activities (land tier, etc.).
Th question was raised as to whether CasperVend should / will be remained as it is now a LL property (just as OnRez and XStreet SL were purchased, with the latter going on to become the SL Marketplace).
The above included comments relating to the unfortunate / unwarranted knee-jerk reactions some users have had towards the Lab (and CasperVend users) in the wake of a certain article published within the social journalism website Medium, and which has been officially commented upon here (and, if interested, I’ve offered my tuppence worth of commentary here).
It was asked whether people have made any attempt to use generative AI in their content creation. The broad feedback was – no. This saw a series of follow-up questions:
Do people think AI tools could be useful – possibly, but not far enough developed to be sure.
Should content produced using AI tools and sold on the MP be marked as such – yes.
Are there any preferred tools already in use with content creators – not really.
This lead to a subjective (i.e. only a handful of creators) discussing how AI tools are viewed / currently used within SL (e.g. to generate vendor images).
Sntax noted that feature requests made via the Feedback Portal board for the MP /Web are recorded and used to help inform and direct WUG meetings, particularly where it is felt broader / deeper feedback on ideas is required.
A further request was made for store / brand names on within SL to be unique (as with avatar account names), to both help secure branding against copycats and also to make it easier for users to find the content they want when searching the MP.
A suggestion that when there are Marketplace issues and updates, a mechanism is put in place to pop-up a notice when users access the MP, rather than replying purely on GridStatus (+ its outlets on Social Media), as many users aren’t even aware of the latter, whilst having notices actually on the MP means they are eyeballing them directly.
Memories of Dreams, April 2024 – click any image for full size
Susann Decuir is responsible for drawing me to Memories of Dreams, a marvellously Japanese-themed Homestead region design by Yxes (Yxes Evergreen). she did so when I caught her write-up on the setting in her blog whilst I was largely outworld of SL during March 2024. As regulars to these pages know, almost anything with an Oriental theme will pique my interest, so I noted the SLurl and at the first opportunity on getting back in-world, off I toddled (or rather, my alt toddled!) so I could poke my nose in and have a look.
Spring in a Japanese styled sim….a place to sit and reflect once you’ve explored all the small nooks and crannies. Be sure to notice the Orcas migrating along the coast.
– Memories of Dreams, About Land Description
Memories of Dreams, April 2024
The setting is one of those which amply demonstrates the adage “Less is more”. Yxes has used a little of 50% of the region’s Land Capacity to produce a wonderfully evocative setting that does not need to be filled to the brim with objects in order to achieve its stated goal.
At least partially surrounded by off-region mountains (I’m actually not sure if it is supposed to be entirely surrounded, because for some reason the 3070 GPU on my current PC has a devil of a time rendering region surrounds where my old 970 rarely worked up a sweat in doing so), the setting is suggestive of a quiet retreat located on a (little-visited?) islet within the Japanese archipelago. The summer retreat, perhaps of a once-powerful Shogun.
Memories of Dreams, April 2024
The island’s rugged form is dominated by a large pagoda-like building. Perhaps once a home perhaps once a temple, it surrounded by a variety of trees – Japanese maple, Sakura, plum trees and more – which give colour and vitality to the knobbly and uneven mass of the island’s central knoll in a manner flowers and shrubs would not be able to manage. In addition, the trees obviously provide shade and a sense of coolness for those wandering this wildling garden as it sits around the main building.
Below the main structure, to the north-west and north and both sitting withing the island’s shallows, are two further structures. The each sit at the end (or start, depending on your point of view!) of a stone stairway set into the island’s slopes.
Memories of Dreams, April 2024
Located at the end of the potentially grander stairway – it being quite broad at its lower extent and semi-defensively boxed-in by walls on three sides – is a single-roomed building set upon stone slabs set above the coastal waters. Now a place to enjoy a quiet meal, it’s general design suggests that it may have once been where boats bringing people to the island came alongside.
The second building is also single-roomed, but sits slightly off-shore within the walls of what might be a man-made island. Torii gates and stepping stones over the shallow waters provide access to its gates, and the structure itself, located in a formal sand garden crossed by further stepping stones, has the feel of perhaps once having been a walled temple or shrine, but which is now given over the the art of the tattooist.
Memories of Dreams, April 2024
Close by this walled setting, and sitting on a low-lying headland, is a Japanese Zen garden offering a walk around its gravel paths and a way down to the island’s eastern beach, where visitors might to watch passing Orca as they frolic off the coast. A second arc of sand lies on the south side of the island. Located within a shallow cove, it is reached by walking down the grassy slopes from the main building.
Throughout all of this, subtle depth is added through the placement of small artistic touches – umbrellas apparently caught on a mysterious updraft so they hover above the entrance to the main building; a broken Torii gate with payer papers still pinned to it; Toro and other lamps scattered around to help hold the night at bay from the paths and steps; sculptures giving further voice to the presence of human hearts and minds on this little isle; and the gentle, watchful eyes of Buddha observing all who come and go, and the dance of Japanese Crane.
Memories of Dreams, April 2024
All told, a beautifully idyllic and beautifully relaxing (not to mention utterly photogenic) location, and once well worth visiting and appreciating.
IMAGOLand Art Galleries: Moni Beebe – Discolouration Disrupted
Having been caught up with things in the physical world for much of March (and still trying to clear up the last few issues as April 2024 starts its merry dance to becoming at part of the year’s history!), I’m caught in something of a game of catch-up with events, exhibitions and what have you. In terms of some exhibitions, there are some I simply won’t get to, as their days are numbered and they’ll have likely ended before I can get to them.
However, there is one exhibition I really wanted to try to cover before it vanishes into the ether (it having opened nigh-on a month ago at the time of writing, on March 6th, 2024). It is Monique Beebe’s Discolouration Disrupted, which (again at the time of writing this piece) is still available at Mareea Farrasco’s IMAGO Art Galleries.
IMAGOLand Art Galleries: Moni Beebe – Discolouration Disrupted
I’ve been an admirer of Moni’s work ever since her first exhibition in Second Life in 2017. Her work, which has until relatively recently focused on avatar studies, is always marvellously expressive and rich on both narrative and, frequently, a degree of subtext as well. Her exhibitions tend to be thematically driven and often highly sensual in nature, and the former is certainly true of Discolouration Disrupted, as evidenced by its subtitle Unveiling the Beauty in Imperfection, which itself might also be seen as a subtextual comment on modern society’s obsession with perfection when it comes to the human body.
No liner notes appear to be provided for the exhibition, allowing viewers to plumb the depths of the pieces and discern their relationship to the central theme for themselves. The pieces are a mixture of still life and animated works – be sure to enable the media option in your viewer (click the movie camera icon towards the top right corner of the viewer window) to see the latter in motion – and all appear (and forgive me if I’m wrong here, Moni) to be digitally generated.
IMAGOLand Art Galleries: Moni Beebe – Discolouration DisruptedThe still life images perhaps offer the clearest link to the theme of beauty in imperfection in the manner they juxtapose clearly beautiful / handsome figures (aka society’s “perfection”) with styles and colour mixes that whilst not undermining the stated beauty of the figure(s) within them offer a degree of discordance with their beauty, drawing the eye from them and imbuing a sense of mismatch or an unfinished feel to them – thus presenting the idea of the imperfect. Yet at the same time it is these very clashes of style and / or the sense of the unfinished which actually provides each piece with a depth of beauty that reaches well beyond what might have been had they been presented as “unblemished” works. The animated images share this to a degree, but also offer additional dimensions to the core theme – the blurring of images, the use of a mask and veils, etc.
And while it may just be my personal interpretation, some of the pieces perhaps present subtextual commentary on society in other ways as well. The likes of Break Away, Hiding, Undisclosed, Empowerment, and even Fish in the Sea, all appear to offer a degree of commentary on current reactionary moves in (particularly) patriarchal / pseudo-religious circles towards matters of a woman’s bodily autonomy, the dismissing of female equality / empowerment, the right to gender identification and self-identification and choice in general.
IMAGOLand Art Galleries: Moni Beebe – Discolouration Disrupted
But again, this is an interpretation informed purely by matters that impact my own thinking, and not necessarily those intended by the artist. You might well – in fact most likely will – find the images within Discolouration Disrupted speaking to you very differently. As such I do urge you to visit this exhibition, and to do so before it does vanish from IMAGO altogether, possibly in the next few days.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 2nd, 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 my chat log. No video this week.
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.
They 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
The SLS Main channel was restarted on Tuesday, April 2nd, with the Hearts & flowers deployment going grid-wide. This mostly comprises internal (non-user visible) updates, together with these user-visible additions:
llSetLinkSitFlags/llGetLinkSitFlags – allow you to adjust the sit flags for a prim. It supports the existing two SIT_FLAG_ALLOW_UNSIT and SCRIPT_ONLY.
At some future point, SIT_FLAG_HIDE_AVATAR should also be added, so you don’t need to play an animation that squishes the avatar so they aren’t visible in something like a very small vehicle.
A feature for estate managers that will allow them to schedule automatic region restarts (see below).
A new constant in llSPP PRIM_SIT_FLAGS it will contain all the sit flag information, (including ALLOW_UNSIT and SCRIPTED_ONLY (the two older constants will still be available).
A new capability to load item inventory lists via HTTP (so items with large contents will load faster when accessed, although this will require a viewer update as well).
A fix for avatars going into an animation thrash between falling and flying when using llSetHoverHeight() from an attachment.
An adjustment to the way download weight for mesh object (how much bandwidth is required to download and view the object) which should reduce this weighting by around 15% for most in-world mesh, potentially reducing the LI of said objects (but should not be taken to mean the LI for any given mesh object is now 15% lower).
There is a known bug in this release where you always show up hovering on login… until you provide any sort of movement input at which point you drop down to stand. A fix for this is in the next RC maintenance update, which will hopefully available for deployment in week #14.
Wednesday, April 3rd, should see the RC channels restarted with no deployment.
Scheduled Region Restarts
A part of the Heart & Flowers simulator update is the ability for Private region / estate holders to schedule region restarts via the Region console in the viewer.
Schedules can be set on a Daily or Weekly basis (e.g. every day at 06:00 SLT; Monday & Thursday at 17:00, etc.)
Restarts have a “vaccination” period of +/- 5 minutes of the selected restart time, so that all regions in an estate don’t suddenly restart at exactly the same time.
Any scheduled restart can be cancelled in the same manner as existing manual restarts.
SL Viewer Updates
On Tuesday, April 2nd, the Maintenance X RC (usability improvements) updated to version 7.1.5.8443777128.
Like the end-of-week #13 updates to the Maint. W and Y RC viewers, this update was to bring the viewer to parity with the glTF / PBR Maintenance-2 release viewer.
The rest of the current official viewer in the pipeline stand as:
Release viewer: version 7.1.4.8149792635, formerly glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, issued March 11, promoted March 26.
Release channel cohorts:
Maintenance-W RC (bug and crash fixes), version 7.1.5.8443591509, March 29.
Maintenance Y RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history + Maint Z RC integration), version 7.1.5.8448596295, March 29.
Materials Featurettes RC viewer, version 7.1.4.8270899680 – March 25.
Project viewers:
Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.
In Brief
Leviathan Linden hopes to get work done on providing a vehicle flag which will prevent HUD llSetVelocity() and lllApplyImpulse() from affecting the vehicle’s speed.
This is in response to a request to help solve the problem of cheaters sitting on competition vehicles. Someone sits on the object and uses a HUD with llSetVelocity() or other calls to push the vehicle faster than it would normally go.
Leviathan Linden indicated that the Lab has encountered a couple of issues in moving the simulators to 64-bit architecture:
A script memory issue. In short, some scripts that currently work at the very edge of the memory footprint might be pushed over the limit in 64-bit, and would stop working. So the Lab needs to figure out how much more memory access by scripts is required to allow all current scripts will be able to continue working. This will require a period of extended testing to see where the issue typically occurs.
Figuring out how to pack the servers on server instances. The Lab currently runs multiple servers on one machine, and some of the machine instances are currently close to their physical memory limit already when the underpinning servers run for a long time. So the Lab needs to hunt for memory leaks and resource leaks, carry out optimisation work where necessary and possibly change the server density on deployment.
The hope (as expressed by Leviathan) is to get the transition to 64-bit server architecture completed some time in 2024.
The above information was given in response to a request for an increase in the script memory allowance for Mono scripts (a frequent request from users / creators so as to reduce the overall number of scripts within an object & the number of events passing between them to achieve a given result – an important consideration, given scripts can impact the LI of objects). A general discussion on script limits, memory allowance, etc., then followed through much of the remaining time of the meeting.
A general discussion on region crossings / teleports (such as having vehicle-initiated teleports capable of moving a vehicle + occupants across and entire region / estate (“eep!” given the complexities involved), simulator management of TPs, etc. But as Monty Linden was not present – as the Linden most intimately involved in wading through the teleport / region crossing code, most of these were unanswered in terms of certainty of response.
† 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.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, March 31st, 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 7.1.4.8149792635, formerly glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, issued March 11, promoted March 26, 2024 – NEW.
Maintenance-W RC (bug and crash fixes) updated to version 7.1.5.8443591509, March 29.
Maintenance Y RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history + Maint Z RC integration) updated to version 7.1.5.8448596295, March 29
Materials Featurettes RC viewer, version 7.1.4.8270899680, issued March 25.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 