Above an Endless sky in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Endless Above - The Lost City
Endless Above – The Lost City – October 2019; click any image for full size

In January 2019 we visited Endless, a Full region designed by SombreNyx and a place of untamed beauty suggestive of coastal fens and lowlands (see: Endless: lowland beauty in Second Life). Since that visit, the region has been extended – albeit it not on the ground. Instead, there is an element in the sky Endless Above – The Lost City, that is also captivating to the eye.

Designed by Jackson Cruyff, this is a region-wide platform that offers, as the name might suggest, an ancient and lost city sitting within a forest. It’s a place that appears to be under investigation: the landing point is set within a camp on the south-west corner of the landscape. Others are to be found scattered around the landscape, inviting exploration.

Endless Above – The Lost City

The stone ruins give the impression of great age, in places suggestive of large halls with arched doorways while other offer a limited hint of what might have been homes, together with circular structures, all of which is overlooked by a large structure sitting on the landscape’s lone plateau. Is it a place of former rulers or a place of ancient worship? That’s for visitors to decide.

There’s no set path for exploration per se; while there are blazing torches sitting within and between the various ruins, they offer more suggestions of routes that might be followed rather than set paths. Thus, the best way to explore this setting is to simply follow your feet. Doing so will not only heighten a sense of discovery when seeking the ruins, but also lead you to the beaches to the south and north of the land, both of which offer places to sit and relax.

Endless Above – The Lost City

To be honest, Endless Above is the kind of place that doesn’t require that much description; it does so for itself. The simplicity of design and layout naturally encourages exploration, with repeated motifs among the ruins that offers a sense of continuity as you wander between them.

For those looking for a slightly different location for avatar photography, this is a setting that could be worth investigating; there’s a certain Lara Croft / Indiana Jones suggestion to it. Similarly those looking for a more unusual style of SL landscape to photograph might find Endless Above worth a visit, the setting lending itself well to most outdoor Windlight settings.

Endless Above – The Lost City

There’s apparently a teleport point connecting the ground level setting to Endless Above. It is described as being at a crossroads, but I confess that while we found a roads sign referencing the sky build, we completely failed to find a hint of any obvious teleport – but we could have easily missed it; therefore a direct SLurl is offered in this piece and one for Endless for those who have not visited that location.

Finished with an immersive soundscape, Endless Above offers something of a different setting to Endless below it, but both environments do complement one another and offers similar feelings of escaping civilisation and freedom of wandering that invites visitors to tarry and enjoy the surroundings as they explore.

Endless Above – The Lost City

SLurl Details

Haraiki Bay is rated Adult

April offers a look at the October 2019 woes

Posted on by Inara Pey

The period of Thursday, October 24th through Sunday 27th October, 2019 saw Second Life encounter a rolling set of issues which finally came to a head on Sunday, October 27th. The issues affected many Second Life users and services from logging-in through to inventory / asset handling.

As has become the case with these matters, April Linden, the Second Life Operations Manager, has provided a post-mortem blog post on the issue and her team’s work in addressing the problems. And as always, her post provides insight into the complexities in keeping a platform such as Second Life running.

In short, the root cause of the weekend’s upsets lay not with and of the Second Life services but with one of the Lab’s network providers – and was exacerbated by the fact the first couple of times it happened – Thursday and Friday – it appeared to correct itself on both occasions before the Lab could fully identify the root cause.

April Linden

On Sunday, the problems started up again, but fortunately April’s team were able to pin down the issue and commence work with their provider – which obviously meant getting Second Life back on an even keel was pretty much in the hands of a third-party rather than being fully under the Lab’s control.

Our stuff was (and still is) working just fine, but we were getting intermittent errors and delays on traffic that was routed through one of our providers. We quickly opened a ticket with the network provider and started engaging with them. That’s never a fun thing to do because these are times when we’re waiting on hold on the phone with a vendor while Second Life isn’t running as well as it usually does.

After several hours trying to troubleshoot with the vendor, we decided to swing a bigger hammer and adjust our Internet routing. It took a few attempts, but we finally got it, and we were able to route around the problematic network. We’re still trying to troubleshoot with the vendor, but Second Life is back to normal again.

– Extract from April Linden’s blog post

As a result of the problems April’s team is working on moving some of the Lab’s services to make Second Life more resilient to similar incidents.

During the issues, some speculated if the problems were a result of the power outages being experienced in California at the time. As April notes, this was not the case – while Linden Lab’s head office is in San Francisco, the core servers and services are located in Arizona. However, resolving the issues from California were affected by the outages, again as April notes in her post.

It’s something I’ve noted before, and will likely state again: feedback like this from April, laying out what happened when SL encounters problems are always an educational  / invaluable read, not only explaining the issue itself, but in also providing worthwhile insight into the complexities of Second Life.

2019 Simulator User Group week #44

Posted on by Inara Pey
Abrahamstrup, September 2019 – blog post

Simulator Deployments

At the time of writing, no deployment notes had been published. However:

  • There was no deployment to the SLS (main) channel on Tuesday, October 29th, leaving it on server release 2019-10-03T01:12:11.531528.
  • There are two RC deployments planned for Wednesday, October 30th:
    • 2019-10-24T19:07:13.532143, comprising further internal script improvements, internal logging changes and improvements to simulator state saves.
    • 2019-10-26T00:06:48.532192, comprising a previously released hotfix to fix teleports being 5%-7% less reliable and makes the simulator take a little bit longer to report as “Up” to the Lab’s internal tools to more accurately reflect when residents can actually access a region.

SL Viewer

The Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer updated to version 6.4.0.531949 on October 28th. The update brings it to parity with the release viewer, but contains not project updates.

. The rest of the viewer pipelines remain as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.3.2.530962, formerly the Vinsanto Maintenance RC viewer, dated September 17th, promoted October 15th – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
  • Project viewers:
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.3.531844, October 21st.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th.

Script Event Order

It was asked if the script updates would affect the order in which script events are handled, Rider Linden stated:

Some events have always had priority just by virtue of the order in which they were collected. The order of collection has changed. For instance, sensor events were collected and posted before chat events and then touch events. Chat events are now posted immediately upon processing in the simulator. It should still be FIFO… just don’t bet on what event gets collected when.

In addition, it was noted in regards to event messages:

  • Generally, event handling should not to be counted on in any sort of coding since it may change again in the future.
  • Link messages:
    • If multiple link messages are sent from a single source to a single receiver script, the ordering should be preserved. Similarly, when using llLinkMessage to send a message from script A to script B in the same prim, they are posted immediately, and the order is maintained.
    • If the same message is sent to link A and then to link B, the order the links get them is not always the same. Similarly, if script A and script C are using llLinkMessage to post to B, all bets are off which gets there first.

 

 

 

2019 Creepy Crawl in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Dreadville – one of the destinations in the 2019 Creepy Crawl

Following their recent call for venues, Linden Lab announced the route for this year’s Halloween Creepy Crawl on Thursday, October 31st, via a blog post by Xiola Linden.

The Creepy Crawl is a tradition whereby Lindens and Residents get dressed up in their best Halloween costumes and roam from spooky spot to spooky spot for music, dancing, and celebrating.

As Xiola has blogged, the event will take place between 10:00 and 14:00 SLT on Tuesday, October 31st, and will be moving through a number of selected venues:

So, if you fancy meeting some of those responsible for bringing us Second Life and having a little fun, conversation and maybe dancing along the way, keep this list of destinations handy on the 31st October, and drop in to any of the venues along the route!

A return to Dystopia in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Dystopia // Carnage City, October 2019 – click any image for full size

We originally visited Dystopia // Carnage City (then called Dystopia // [flit ink] + aberrant) almost three years ago  – see A taste of Dystopia in Second Life – so a return visit seemed well overdue.

As the name suggests, this is something of a post-apocalyptic themed region that offers a group build – supported by a website – intended to offer some fairly free-form role-play for those interested, based around a back-story set in the 2030s and a time when global warming has passed beyond the tipping point.

Dystopia // Carnage City, October 2019

A group build, the region is divided into a number of parcels – most open to the public, although be warned that there is a private parcel in the middle of the north side of the region – which run together and the overall build sprawls across them.

Given it is a post-apocalyptic design, it should comes as no surprise that the city that takes up most of the region is in a state of decrepitude: the roads are partially flooded  – the result of rising sea levels, perhaps – the buildings in a state of ruin, and nature is taking back control.

Dystopia // Carnage City, October 2019

The city is roughly divided into three areas: Carnage City, which I’m using as the landing point here; the Boondock Slums and Happenstance, a wilder element of the region which – as the description states, offers a coastal forest and air crash site.

The Slums are perhaps the most inhabited aspect of the region: homes and places of commercial stacked one atop another, reached via ladders and steps or – for the keen eyed, a tunnel under the nearby hills. Aglow with neon signs and with pier for those seeking a little beach-side relief, it has the look and feel of life trying to pull itself together and thrive beyond the disaster that has overtaken the city.

Dystopia // Carnage City, October 2019

Elements of the region offer echoes of past designs – such as the fun fair, aspects of which were present when we visited in 2016. Others are more unique to this build – but all offer a plenty of opportunities for photography and exploration.

I do confess to having some issues with performance when visiting – fps dropped to single digits until I disabled shadows. A little annoying, but not enough to prevent my appreciating the region during our wanderings.

Dystopia // Carnage City, October 2019

All told, Dystopia // Carnage City remains an eye-catching visit that comes complete with the opportunity for light role-play among groups visiting the region, or for photography.

SLurl Details

Remembering Darrius Gothly

Posted on by Inara Pey
Darrius Gothly

I received word from Torric Rodas today of the sad news of the passing of long-term Second Life resident and creator, Darrius Gothly.

Founder of the DG4SL range of products, Darrius had a wide range of interests in Second Life, and always sought to improve people’s SL experience through many of his products, whilst also being a very vocal member of the platform’s merchant community, offering both positive critiques of the Lab’s approach to its Marketplace environment and suggestions for improving it.

I did not know Darrius well, but I believe we became long distance friends outside of Second Life for long enough for me to appreciate him for his insight and integrity.

We first really got to know one another when he stepped in to try to address an age-old problem in Second Life: what happens when you pass out a load a landmarks for your store, club, region, etc., – and then are forced by circumstance / opportunity / whatever to relocate, other than to start revising all your LMs, push new ones out to visitors / customers / friends, try to get the word out through forums etc.

To explain: back in 2012, artist and creator Toysoldier Thor put forward an idea and feature request for “virtual landmarks” to present a means by which LMs need never go “stale” (see also: Virtual Landmarks: solving an age-old problem?).  As per Toy’s comments in a forum thread on the idea, for a time it looked like LL might be interested in implementing something along the lines of his suggestion (subject to other commitments / priorities). Sadly, nothing ever really came of this (nor of subsequent suggestions along similar lines). So, Enter Darrius.

I first got to know Darrius as he developed his Virtual Landmarks products

Taking a dive into things, he formulated a means by which Toy’s idea could be realised via an external service. In typical Darrius style, he also added elements such as web support (“VMurl”), stats reporting and support for “favourite places” to provide a comprehensive product. He dropped me a line about the product in December 2012, which resulted in my articleVirtual Landmarks: offering a solution to the age-old problem, and in my playing a very small role in testing the system.

As a result of that initial contact, Darrius and I became what might best be referred to as “pen friends” over the next few years, exchanging ideas and comments and holding forth with each other on a wide range of subjects, from “technical” chats about SL through to more esoteric matters – identity, anonymity and personal expression in VWs, the new user experience, perceptions about SL in other platforms / the worlds at large, etc. -, through to chatting about physical world home and family, health, and our mutual enjoyment of assorted film franchises, and even touching on politics on occasion.

Sadly, our conversations waned to the point of becoming non-existent for the last couple of years. At the time this happened, I was aware that Darrius was dealing with illness and couldn’t always get in-world / on-line perhaps as often as he would have liked, and I feel a certain amount of regret that I didn’t do more to keep our exchanges going. He didn’t believe in putting up walls between his SL persona and himself; whom you encountered through his avatar was very much Darrius himself: honest, up-front, friendly, caring, supportive and with a wonderful – and at times quite wicked (in a good way!) – sense of humour. He is someone who will be missed.

My sincere condolences to his family and to his close friends on their loss.

Note:

I understand from Torric and the London City website that the DG4SL team are attempting to ensure the popular Rental Beam service add-on for CasperLet is transitioned to new management so that it can continue to run as customers expect. Anyone with enquires about that service are asked to contact Mysti Nowles directly, rather than raising a support ticket. At this point, I do not have information on what will happen to other DG4SL products utilising back-end services (such as the VLM product) or who to contact about them. Should I come into such information, I will give an update here.