April 2022 Web User Group summary – Premium Plus

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, April 6th, 2022.

These meetings are generally held on the first Wednesday of the month, with dates and venue details available via the SL public calendar. A video of the meeting, courtesy of Pantera, can be found embedded at the end of this article (my thanks to her as always!), and subject timestamps to the relevant points in the video are provided. Again, the following is a summary of key topics / discussions, not a full transcript of everything mentioned.

March Progress Summary

[Video: 13:45-17:19]

  • The front-end work on Marketplace Styles (aka variant listings) is close to being finished.
  • [Video: 16:22-17:19] The sales tax on recurring US billing (see Linden Lab announce sales tax on recurring US billings) actually came into force on April 4th, slightly delayed from the planned introduction.
    • Note this is a state requirement, with no money going to LL, and the Lab has tried to structure things so the impact is initially felt by as few in SL as possible.
  • [Video: 53:47-55:20] Search:
    • The Search instance is being upgraded to Python 3 so that it can be hosted by an expert third-party service, who will then manage the update of the instance.
    • Once this is been done, work will commence on building a Relevance Engine to assist in managing search results.

Future Work

  • The overhaul of the Destination Guide is still being planned.
  • The “Land journey” – how to obtain Linden Homes, land via the Land Store through to obtaining an entire private region – is to be overhauled to make it easier for people to understand how to obtain land directly or rent it from others.

Premium Plus

[Video: 2:16-11:54]

  • The release of Premium Plus has been pushed back until the latter part of May. Then main reason for this is to allow additional time for all the teams involved in managing / marketing / supporting Premium Plus to be ready for the launch.
    • When released, there will be a pro-rated amount for those on annual subscriptions with 6 months or more of Premium membership left until their next renewal, and renew at their normal renewal date at the Plus rate.
    • Details to be clarified when Premium Plus is launched.
  • The overall contents of Premium Plus are locked down, but will be made public at the time of launch. However, it may include (and as noted in my January WUG summary):
    • A higher amount of free tier than Premium’s 1024 sq m.
    • A higher stipend.
    • A higher sign-up bonus.
    • More group slots.
    • Lower fees “on certain things” (unspecified).
    • Where “more” is being offered (e.g. free land tier) it is liable to be roughly double that of Premium (so the stipend will be more than double that of Premium, for example.
  • Upgrades to Premium form Grandfathered accounts:
    • Grandfather stipend accounts will receive the “standard” Premium Plus stipend, not a Stipend based on their L$500 Grandfathered status.
    • [Video: 43:59-45:10] It is not clear at present if Grandfathered accounts would recover their Gandfathered L$500 a week stipend on downgrading from Plus to Premium, or revert to the standard L$300 a week. This will be clarified for the next WUG meeting.

Questions / Poll from LL

[Video: 19:38-35:05]

The Lab is looking to gain feedback from users, with a series of questions asked at the meeting, which may well be asked again through the forums as well. These included:

  • How do you to find things to do in SL? – responses included: opening group chat with the message “I’m bored”; using the Destination Guide; asking friends; using travelogues such as in this blog; visit the What’s Hot section of the viewer splash screen; Tweeted from other SL users.
  • How did you get started in SL? – responses included: friend already active in SL; seeing one of the SL video ads; seeing people discussing SL on Twitter.
  • What makes you stay? – responses essentially revolved around creativity of others, ability to explore, opportunities to meet people, a group of close friends, art, building etc.; force of habit.
  • How familiar with the SL client and finding things you’re looking for would you say you are? – most said they felt they are all reasonably familiar.
  • What’s the hardest part about finding friends/activities in SL? – responses varied from simply finding other who are willing to engage in conversation through to the rate at which many social spots can be opened and closed (and the reasons for this, which flowed between tier costs and the sheer amount of work involved in day-to-day running of a venue); timezones.

In Brief

  • [Video 36:06-37:10] BUG-226218 “Ability refund purchases but disallow redelivery on Marketplace” – a feature request that has been accepted for consideration.

Linden Lab announces the “Second Life University”

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab

Encouraging and supporting new users in order to grow the active Second Life user base has been specified as a key goal for the Lab for the past 15-18 months.

Some of this work has already been seen with a further iteration of the Welcome Islands (see: Poking at the new Welcome Islands), with it being indicated that more is to come, together with an overhaul of the entire new user experience and the starter avatar system.

On Wednesday, April 6th, the Lab announced a further programme to assist those who may be new to Second Life, and / or are finding it hard to get to grips with a range of aspects of using the viewer and the platform, which they are calling the Second Life University.

Welcome to Second Life University, a new project that aims to teach people all about the vast virtual world of Second Life! 
There are many videos and tutorials out there for Second Life already, including Second Life Tutorials on our YouTube channel as well as those created by our Residents, — and we’d like to consolidate information in one place as well as ensure that all content is up-to-date. We will begin with topics that are particularly relevant for newer users. This is a huge project that will take time, and we’re excited to work on and collaborate with the community to make it easily understandable and fun.

– From the official blog post

To start things off, the Lab will be hosting a livestream event, Viewer Basics, which will stream on You Tube on Thursday, April 7th, 2022 from 14:00 SLT, with the Lab further noting:

After the livestream, we’ll be  posting general notes on topics covered in the video here in text format, too. You can also get written information and assistance from our Knowledge Base and the Community Forums.

Given that trying to locate up-to-date information is often a cause for grumbling, even among established users, this sounds like a worthwhile goal, and I applaud the Lab from attempting to tackle it. However, I do so with one plea: as the idea is to gather all such information “in one place” – then please make sure it is a centralised, easy-to-find resource that is both decently indexed / categorised and properly searchable in its own right, rather than simply lumping /burying it with other options.

Skip Staheli at NovaOwl in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
NovaOwl Gallery: Skip Shaheli, April 2022

NovaOwl is a new gallery space operated by ULi Jansma, Ceakay Ballyhoo & Owl Dragonash within the Mainland community of Novatron on the southern side of Corsica. It opened at the start of April 2022 with an exhibition of art by Skip Staheli, that runs through until late June 2022.

As a part of a broader community, the gallery presents a waterfront location, complete with local boat moorings, an outdoor events area with café bar, opportunities to participate in a fishing contest to music every Monday at noon SLT, while a teleport centre alongside the landing point offers connections to other point of interest on the southern side of the continent.

NovaOwl Gallery: Skip Shaheli, April 2022

The gallery building offers a main events space with a galleries lounge over, with the gallery hall running to one side, from front to rear. For Skip’s exhibition, this has been split into three, each of which with a specific focus for the presented art, which Skip describes thus:

The first room [is] a dark room, inspired by my dark thoughts, my worries and sadness, doubts and sometimes anger; about life and things going on in the world. Raw emotions.
The second room [reached] through a gateway, will bring you to a more mystical ambiance [one] still with a eerie feeling to it. Feel the calm, inhale the scent of fantasy, tiptoe to the little pond. Breathe in and see the fireflies dancing.
The third room will bring you to the light [and] a carefree happy spring feeling. [A place] where you can sit down and enjoy the flowers and tea with cake while your feet can rest and relax in the soft early spring grass. Maybe [you might] think a little about this journey in my head and I hope it can tickle you some, and at least give you a little well-deserved smile.

– Skip Staheli

NovaOwl Gallery: Skip Shaheli, April 2022

The result is three rooms with three distinct, but equally captivating artistic thrusts- although visitors should be aware that the layout of the exhibition space means that the first room to be encountered is actually Skip’s second room, with the first immediately to the right on entering and the third immediately to the left.This tends to interrupt the flow of ideas compared to Skip’s notes, as the mystical setting is the first to be encountered – but it does not alter the fact that across all three halls, Skip presents selections of his art that are richly captivating, each one carrying with it a particular narrative – or narrative themes in the case of some.

In this, I would dispute Skip’s reference to the first hall being about “dark” thoughts per se; both Run! and Tears for Australia speak to a man with a depth of love for nature and for animals that reaches well beyond anger to empathy and desire to help and care – although one can well accept an underlying anger at those who are careless enough to bring about wildfires quite outside of any natural causes of the same.

NovaOwl Gallery: Skip Shaheli, April 2022

The love of animals and nature is reflected in one of the images in the second room, sitting among those that turn more to fantasy for their narrative, and which in turn flow through to the remain hall, where beauty and nature take centre seat. Thus, while the three halls each have their own core ideas, all are joined through the richness of art and thematic flow that passes through all of the pieces presented.

SLurl Details

2022 SUG meetings week #14: summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Soft Melody, February 2022 – blog post

The following summary notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 5th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. It forms a summary of the items discussed, and a video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Server Deployments

Please refer to the deployment thread for any recent updates.

  • On Tuesday, April 5th, the Main SLS channel simulators were updated with simulator release 569934, which primarily contains a update to support the move of profile information back to the viewer, hopefully allowing the Legacy Profiles viewer (see below) to move forward.
  • On Wednesday, April 6th, the RC channels will be updated with server release 570305, comprising:
    •  Fixes issues with llRequestAgentData and llRequestSimulatorData sometimes failing after they’ve been called repeatedly.
    • A couple of crash fixes.
    • Additional logging around simulator start-up.

Available Official Viewers

All official viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Release viewer: version version 6.5.3.568554 – formerly the Maintenance J&K RC viewer, promoted Monday, February 28 – No Change
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
    • MFA RC viewer, update to version 6.5.4.569725, on March 24.
    • Performance Improvements RC viewer version 6.6.0.569349, dated March 14.
    • Lao-Lao Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.5.4.569191, issued on March 11.
  • Project viewers:
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.569531, March 18.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.5.2.566858, dated January 5, issued after January 10.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

In Brief

  • Monty Linden has been working on updating the Simulator Capabilities wiki page – still a work in progress.
  • A general discussion on scripting and code options (lua, c#, etc.), but nothing that forms any intended LL project.

A touch of Italy for photographers in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Ars Vivendi, April 2022 – click any image for full size

Ars Vivendi has been a public destination since late January / Early February 2022, and a place I’ve dropped into on a number of occasions and explored with the intention of writing about, but never quite getting to. However, after receiving several suggestions that I pay it a visit (thanks to all who forwarded them!), I felt it about time I did put down some notes on the setting.

The work of Camila (Camila Runo), it is a part of her 80 Days series – builds focusing on various locations from around the world. In this case – as the name might suggest, this full region takes as its inspiration the countryside of Italy.

Ars Vivendi, April 2022
Stroll through the wide, yellow rapeseed fields and discover the splendours of the Tuscan countryside and beaches. Places that look like they were drawn by hand: a vineyard, a cypress alley, an old town inviting you to sit down and breathe the atmosphere!

– Ars Vivendi About Land description

This is very much a setting that speaks for itself, from the landing point within the walled courtyard of the farmhouse landing zone, up through the hilltop town and over the water to the neighbouring little island that has been topped by a villa.

Ars Vivendi, April 2022

The landing point farm sits on a northern headland to the west of the region, ribbons of beach sitting at the bottom of the sloping cliffs on either side. Reached via stone steps to the west and a set of wooden stairs mounted on tall wooden piles to the east, these beaches offer sandy walks under the Sun, shaded places to sit and, in the case of the eastern beach, a little pier from which a Culprit motor boat can be taken to that neighbouring island and its villa crown.

Meanwhile, reached by a country track running up to it from the farmhouse, the hilltop town spans the southern extent of the region, west to east. With its walls and towers, it has about the the sense of once having been fortified, and with it, a sense of age – one that possibly runs back as far as the days of the Roman Empire. At the western, down slope end of the town stands a great bathhouse, its waters clean and clear, its walls painted in frescos. But whether a place of antiquity that has been preserved, or a reproduction designed to lure tourists, is up to you to decide.

Ars Vivendi, April 2022

Above this, to the east, the little town rises in steps and sloping streets up to where the hill is crowned by the local church, sitting as it does on its own small headland, somewhat aloof and separated from the main town by a set of gates and single track reaching out to it from the town’s piazza.

The town is rich with a sense of life. Shops are open, the piazza is set with bleachers and a stage ready for an outdoor event, whilst locals shop and barter and tourists take photographs. To one side of the piazza sits The Four Seasons boutique hotel as it rubs shoulders with the houses below and looks across a broad slope of road running up to the piazza to where the local cinema stands, a pizzeria nestled beside it.

Ars Vivendi, April 2022

This is a location that is worth taking the time to explore as it has much to see, and care has been taken to presenting it as a living, breathing place. Similarly, the countryside to the north and the beaches to either side of it offer an escape to the country that many in towns large and small appreciate, and so then blend well with the hilltop town whilst also presenting the full richness of the Tuscan countryside from the beauty of its often rugged coast to the rich colours of its inland towns and farms.

Taken as a whole or in its various parts, Ars Vivendi is a beautiful and well-executed design and a deserving destination not to be missed while it lasts.

Ars Vivendi, April 2022

SLurl Details

The week with Seanchai Library – April 4th-8th

Posted on by Inara Pey
Seanchai Library

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 in Nowhereville, unless otherwise indicated. Note that the schedule below may be subject to change during the week, please refer to the Seanchai Library website for the latest information through the week.

Monday, April 4th, 19:00: When They Saw

Having graduated from the juvenile education system, Ana Mia decides to join her sister as a part of Fort Hope’s Midnight Guard. Fort Hope is a stronghold, protecting its inhabitants from Earth’s alien invaders; and the Midnight Guard forms the eyes, ears and guardians of the stronghold’s Wall.

Without the Guard and without the Wall of the stronghold, the aliens would be free to harvest humanity, using their ships and the Coyotes who form their eyes and ears in opposition to the Midnight Guard.

But now things have changed. Now Ana is something more, as she notes herself:

I never expected to be abducted. But here I am, standing onboard Their ship, facing Them down for the first time in my life, seeing the true face of the Earth’s invaders from another world.
My task is simple: to act as Earth’s emissary and negotiate peace. But it is far more complicated than it seems. I know nothing of politics, and even little of persuasion, but I have no choice. I must do this to keep my friends, and my world, safe. I cannot afford to fail humanity.

Join Gyro Muggins as he reads the second volume of Kody Boye’s When They… saga.

Tuesday, April 5th

12:00 Noon: Russell Eponym

With music, and poetry in Ceiluradh Glen.

19:00: Love Knot Tantra

Guest Singh Albatros (Chris Mooney Singh) presents selections from his latest work: poems, short prose pieces, original audio recordings & fabulous new videos. Love Knot Tantra shares insider perspectives on traditional India, its culture, myths with highlights on ancient tantric fertility practices..

Wednesday, April 6th: Dark

No readings.

Thursday, April 7th 19:00: Scary Stories for Sleepovers

With Shandon Loring.