The 15th edition of Lab Gab will be live streamed on Friday, February 28th at 11:00 SLT (19:00 UK; 20:00 CET). For those who have not seen the official blog post about it, the segment will feature Patch Linden and members of the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW) – the famous Moles, resident builders who undertake Mainland infrastructure and other projects on behalf of Linden Lab, and who have been spending a lot of time over the last 12 months building-out the Linden Homes continent of Bellisseria, and who also provide the regions and infrastrucutre / core builds for SLB event, including this year’s SL17B.
Part of Patch’s responsibilities at the Lab covers the work of the LPDW, although his remit is far wider than that.
Patch Linden. Credit: Linden Lab
Originally a Second Life resident and business owner who joined the platform in 2004, Patch joined the Lab in 2007, initially working as a support agent and then as a support liaison. From there he moved to the Concierge team, eventually becoming that team’s manager.
Following this, Patch shifted focus to the role of Operations Support Manager for a year prior to pivoting away from support entirely to join the Product group, the team responsible for defining the features, etc., found within Second Life, where he developed the Land Operations team, which includes the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW).
In 2019 he was promoted to Vice President, Product Operations and joined the Lab’s management team. The role continues to see him managing all of the Lab’s user support operations (some 5 teams), including the LPDW. He also forms one-third of the “troika” (as Grumpity Linden has called it) overseeing Second Life’s continued development, working closely with Grumpity and Oz Linden, both of whom also joined the Lab’s management team alongside of Patch.
Patch and the Moles will be responding to questions put forward to them by users – and there is still time (just!) to submit yours.
So, if you would like to know about Patch’s role, how support works, what might be coming to SL as a part of the Product Operations team’s work, how you might become a Mole, or have questions concerning Linden Homes and future plans – including the 5th Bellisseria Linden Homes theme – or what might be coming with SL17B this June, then drop them via the Lab Gab Episode 15 Questions form!
The programmed will be streamed via YouTube, Facebook, Mixer, or Periscope, and if all goes according to plan, I’ll have a summary of the video (and the video itself) available soon after the the broadcast, for those unable to watch live.
Some of the LPDW moles and Patch, as they appeared at the SL16B Meet the Moles event.
What’s That? “New Linden Homes Theme”?
Yes, one hour before Lab Gab airs, Patch and the LPDW, in conjunction with Relay for Life of Second Life and the American Cancer Society, will be revealing the next new Linden Homes Theme, as announced by ACS:
What might the new Linden Homes theme be? Find out when LPDW and RFL of SL / ACS reveal all on February 28th, 2020
The American Cancer Society is excited to host the 5th Linden Home Reveal as part of the 2020 SL Home & Garden Expo. Residents are welcome to take a tour of the new Linden Home theme that will become available at 10am SLT on Friday, February 28, 2020. Residents can land on the American Cancer Society Island and walk to the Reveal region following the directional signs from there.
“We are always grateful for our relationship with Linden Lab and are honoured to host the Themed Home Reveals,” says Stingray9798 Raymaker, American Cancer Society staff Director in Second Life. “We hope to use this opportunity as a way to educate the residents of Second Life that the American Cancer Society is here to help cancer patients and caregivers from around the world, and to give our Second Life community a means to fight back against a disease that has taken too much.”
This marks the 5th Linden Home theme that will be added to the Bellisseria community, alongside the previous 4 themes: traditional, trailers, houseboats, and Victorian.
– from the official ACS announcement about the new Linden Homes reveal
I’ll also have more on the new Linden Homes theme following the reveal.
Dedicated to the memory of ALS victim and Second Life resident Harvey22 Albatros, the week focuses on music and art, with both live performers and DJs offering sets, and a number of SL artists offering pieces for auction, with all proceeds as well as donations during the week going to AISLA, the Associazone Italiana Sclerosi Laterale Amiotrofica.
Art by Cica Ghost (foreground) and Solkide Auer
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), sometimes also referred to as motor neurone disease (MND) or by the synonyms Lou Gehrig’s disease and Charcot disease, is a specific disorder that involves the death of neurons that control voluntary muscles.
For about 90-95% of all diagnosed cases, the precise cause of the disease is unknown; for the remaining 5-10% of diagnosed cases, it is inherited from the sufferer’s parents. There is no known cure, and symptoms generally first become apparent around the age of 60 (or 50 in inherited cases). The average survival from onset to death is three to four years. In Europe and the United States, the disease affects about 2 people per 100,000 per year.
ALS Awareness Week 2020 schedule board
The Harvey Memorial Ensemble in Second Life features a daily schedule of music running from 07:00 SLT through to 18:00 SLT, comprising a mix of live performances and DJ sessions lasting between one and three hours. A schedule board (seen above) is available at the event location.
In addition, there is a special art auction taking place throughout the event, featuring 3D pieces donated by Solkide Auer, Cica Ghost, Mistero Hifeng and Bryn Oh. Those wishing to keep up with the event outside of Second Life can do so via the event’s Facebook page or Discord server.
The 14th edition of Lab Gab was live streamed on Friday, February 21st and featured as guests, Ebbe Linden (aka Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg) and Grumpity Linden, Vice President of Product, who between them discussed the Second Life roadmap for 2020.
As might be expected, a call to Second Life users to submit questions that might be asked of Ebbe and / or Grumpity generated a lot of feedback, so little time was lost in getting down to hearing their responses. Note that this summary may not reflect the chronological order in which questions were asked; however, time stamps are provided for those wishing to jump to a specific point in the video, and a complete video is embedded at the end of this article.
At the top of the programme, Ebbe confirmed Linden Lab is no longer “sponsoring”, as he put it, Sansar, and are actively seeking a new home for the platform.
So as you might have heard, sadly we have decided that we, as Linden Lab, couldn’t continue to sponsor the project financially, so we’re looking for a plan B for Sansar to continue. I can’t say much, but we’re having very interesting conversations with several parties to help that project move forward, which I’m really excited about. But no deal is done yet, so people will just have to be patient and see what happens with it, but yes it is true that Linden Lab going forward will focus entirely on Second Life and Tilia. I’m still busy making sure that Sansar finds a great home and that the great work that that team has started can continue.
– Ebbe Altberg
He went on to note that the company is continuing to work with those they have laid off to help their secure their futures, and that overall, Linden Lab remains in a strong financial position with strong confidence in the future, vis Second Life and Tilia Inc.
Cloud uplift is the term now being employed by the Lab to describe the project to transition all of Second Life to cloud-based provisioning.
This has been a long-term project, with considerable planning and preparation work having thus far been completed, and 2020 marking the time when the actual transitioning of services takes place (“lifting them to the cloud”).
The work is long-term not just because of the number of services that must be transitioned, but also the amount of operational / engineering requirements required to ensure that services that are linked by physical proximity and connectivity in a single hosting environment continue to function and communicate with one another when moves to an environment where they no longer share that proximity or direct line of communication.
There are a lot of perceived benefits from the move, most noticeably that hardware / infrastructure renewal will no longer be a significant factor for the Lab, while longer-term the grater spread of geographical options, hardware options, etc., may mean the Lab will be able to offer broader simulator products or reduce latency between physical groups of users and the servers they most regularly access, etc.
The downside of this is that for the time being, the focus for engineers and developers at the Lab is very much on the cloud uplift, and not on developing new features.
The hope is that his work will be completed by the end of 2020, otherwise the Lab starts incurring costs (e.g. Cap Ex costs) they’d prefer to avoid.
Once the transition has been completed, a further benefit could be with LL being able to experiment with different (and more recent) server types to help with simulator-side performance, and perhaps even offer different product offering based on different servers, with suitable price points (e.g. those running venue that have high numbers on attending avatars can opt to pay to have their regions hosted on very high-end servers capable of managing the script, etc., load.
Currently, there are no plans to make private regions an on-demand service in the cloud (that is, only spinning up a region when there is one or more avatars in it).
This is primarily because of the persistence model around which Second Life has been built, and the expectations of some of the operations services have around this.
However, at some point after the cloud migration, it might be possible for LL to offer a kind of on-demand private region product with a suitable price-point.
It is currently in internal alpha, and does *not* have 3D rendering but does provide chat, group chat, IM, and other core communications capabilities, although additional functionality may be added over time.
Development will be iterative, and there will be opportunities for users to help test the app when it is ready to be public-facing. The exact mechanism on how this will work is still TBD.
There is no formal ETA for the app, but the hope is some form of (closed?) alpha testing period may be made available in the next few months (or sooner).
[54:28-55:15] The focus is on iOS, with the hope that once done, it will not be a major effort to port the app to Android.
Premium Plus is the upcoming new Premium subscription offering that will sit “above” the current Premium, and jokingly referred to as Premium Plös (“ploos” with a French sounding accent).
No formal release date as yet – as LL prefer not to commit to specifying dates so as not to disappoint should things get delayed.
It has, however, been stated at the monthly Web User Group meetings, that Premium Plus will not be released until some time after Name Changes has been implemented – so it is in the Soon™ category .
When introduced, it will have a pro rata option, so existing Premium users will have any remaining balance on their subscription at the time they upgrade credited to Premium Plus.
Premium Plus will have a range of additional benefits – most of which are still TBA. However, it will mean Name Changes will be “around” US $20 cheaper for Premium Plus members (so if the Name Changes fee in US $39.99 for Premium, Premium Plus many only have to pay US $19.99).
Focus at present is on putting in place the coding and updates required to support multiple Premium account levels.
Lab will continue to add value to both Premium Plus and Premium.
A lot of work has been put into the Marketplace in responding to a lot of long-standing feature requests, etc, from users and in dealing with some of the low-hanging fruit of MP fixes, etc.
More work is planned, but again, the cloud uplift project – which includes the MP and all of the other Second Life web properties – is the primary focus at the moment.
In terms of questionable content on the MP (e.g. the mis-selling of No Copy items), this isn’t an issue that can be solved via any automated means, and is thus resource intensive and does require the support of users in flagging items, etc.
However there are plans to replace / update some of the existing processes around these issues, so that issues can be more readily reviewed and dealt with.
LL are conscious of being vague on matters like this, but feel they need to be, as saying too much publicly could open the door to those less-than-earnest actors trying to circumvent actions that might otherwise impact them.
Ebbe, Strawberry and Grumpity (+cats!) in Lab Gab episode 14
A major cause of performance issues is sub-optimal content that the viewer has to deal with when rendering (e.g. poorly-designed mesh, heavily tortured prims, sculpties, flexies, etc.), and which impact performance.
There’s not a lot that LL can do about this, other than appeal to content creators to consider performance when designing their models, and to region creators to do likewise when designing their regions and the impact overly complex content or the over-use of unique high-resolution textures has on the viewer.
In time, the more powerful server options that will be available for running simulators once they have been transitioned to the cloud may help improve server-side performance (e.g. thing like script processing, etc.).
In the future, more work may be put into providing better tools to help creators ensuring their content is more performant.
As an aside, and as reported in my CCUG summaries, work is already in progress to provide creators and user with better means of understanding the impact various content is having on their system’s performance – remembering that it is the *viewer*, not the simulator , that does most of the heavy lifting.
Elsewhere there have been subtle performance improvements:
A move of Marketplace infrastructure to a new environment means page loading times are measuring an 11% improvement; changes made to the asset services have improved inventory stability.
There are currently simulator updates that are being / about to be deployed across the grid sever channels that should see improvements in region crossings (updates on server deployments can be found in my weekly SUG summaries).
Last Names competition has seen EIGHT names (rather than the originally stated five) selected to go into the first list of last names that will be available when the service is deployed: Conundrum, Dismantled, Huntsman, Littlepaws, Nova, Ravenhurst, Wumpkins, Yeatley.
These are the only names that will be in that first list, and the winners will be informed via e-mail.
The time taken for the project to be implemented is due to it touching every aspect of SL, and thus requires careful implementation and testing.
Rather than using a credit card or similar to pay for a Name Change, Premium members can opt to use a USD dollar balance in the Tilia Wallet, including by converting L$ to USD via the LindeX. Note that anyone who has not previously held a US dollar balance associated with their account will have to accept the Tilia Terms of Serivce, but no identification documents need be submitted, unless any remaining US dollar balance is to be cashed out.
As per my CCUG summaries, the are around a dozen remaining rendering bugs to be resolved, but the hope is the deployment is now weeks rather than months away.
There will still be changes in how some region environments are seen in an EEP viewer compared to a non-EEP viewer, but the decision has been made to deploy rather than constantly trying to strive for a like-for-like look in all cases.
There is a pending rendering / graphics project that is held-up by EEP, partially prompting the desire to get what is available deployed.
Will be covered more in-depth in a future Lab Gab segment with the Lab’s marketing team.
The best way for users to help with new user retention is a) bringing friends into SL and spending time with them, getting them engaged and making friends; b) offering support and friendship to newcomers.
There has been some success with recent attempts to re-introduce new user mentoring.
LL has also invested a lot of time in bettering understanding the traffic coming to SL, allowing for more refined approaches to user acquisition.
There is a firm belief within LL that SL’s user base can be grown.
[53:54-54:25] There are roughly 5,000 new accounts logging-in to Second Life every day.
Other Items
[8:30-10:30] Will LL resume issuing economic stats for SL?
The reports were stopped many years ago. Currently the focus is on the cloud uplift, and this together with the work on projects the Lab does have in-hand or planned, means there are no plans for the present or foreseeable future to re-implement reporting economic stats.
However, it might be possible to implement some form of “spot” economic reporting via one of the official blogs.
[20:00-23:00] Does Linden Lab manipulate the LindeX L$ exchange rate?
Short answer: no, they do not.
The most LL do is sell into the market if there is a genuine need for L$, but even then, this is kept to a minimum both in terms of frequency and amount.
[52:02-53:52] There will be a blog post (/ series?) on how the LindeX works, etc., appearing in the near future.
[35:55-] Account security and two-factor authentication (2FA)
Yes, there are plans to introduce 2FA.
The first step is providing notifications of possible attempts to wrongfully access your account. This is to be rolled out in the near future. However, notifications will only be sent to verified e-mail addresses (see: Important: verifying your e-mail address with Second Life).
The next step will be to disallow unverified log-ins from unfamiliar locations until verification is given.
There are some complexities in implementing 2FA as a result of SL’s age and design, but these are being worked on.
There are no near-time plans to revive the work on supporting VR headsets in SL.
The requirement for 90-ish fps throughout for a really smooth experience is considered as mostly beyond SL’s reach due to the nature of the content.
However, once the cloud uplift has been completed, and after the major rendering / graphics overhaul has been delivered (e.g. 18-24 months hence), the question of VR support in SL may be re-evaluated.
The 14th edition of Lab Gab will be live streamed on Friday, February 21st at 11:00 SLT (19:00 UK; 20:00 CET). For those who have not seen the official blog post about it, the segment will feature Ebbe Linden (aka Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg) and Grumpity Linden. They will be discussing the Second Life roadmap for 2020.
As Linden Lab’s high-profile CEO, Ebbe really needs no introduction; however, as Grumpity may not be familiar to everyone, here’s a thumbnail bio.
Grumpity originally came to Linden Lab as part of the team provided by consulting and software development company, The Product Engine, which supports viewer development at the Lab. She was initially involved in the development (but not the design) of viewer 2.0, and joined the Lab full time in 2014, rising to the position of Director of Product for Second Life, a role in which she became one-third of the “troika” (as she has called it) responsible for SL’s technical and operational directions, alongside Oz Linden and Patch Linden.
In October 2019, Grumpity, Oz and Patch joined the Linden Lab management team, all three being promoted to Vice President in their respective roles.
Ebbe and Grumpity Linden
As per the official blog post, Second Life users can submit questions for the show concerning Second Life’s development roadmap and future.
So if you are curious about Name Changes, the Environment Enhancement Project (EEP), future development of the viewer, the work in transitioning to the cloud, Second Life web services such as the Marketplace, back-end services such as Group chat, concerns about fees or land tier – or anything else that is specific to Second Life, why not submit them through the Lab Gab Episode 14 Questions form? Not all the questions may be asked / answered, but if you don’t try, there’s a greater chance your question may not be asked anyway!
The programmed will be streamed via YouTube, Facebook, Mixer, or Periscope, and if all goes according to plan, I’ll have a summary of the video (and the video itself) available soon after the the broadcast, for those unable to watch live.
Linden Lab has issued a call to merchants interested in participating in their 2020 Valentine’s 2020 in-world shopping event, scheduled to run from Monday, February 3rd through to and will run through Friday, February 17th, 2020 inclusive.
Merchants interested in participating are asked to offer at least a 20% discount on the normal price of their goods, and to indicate whether or not they would be willing to offer a gift to shoppers.
Those wishing to participate in the event should do so via the official application form, and do so no later than Monday, January 20th, 2020. Note that this is only an application – depending on the number of respondents, it is possible that not all those who apply may receive a place at the event. Successful applicants will be contacted by the Lab after January 20th.
Running now through until January 1sts 2019 is the 2019 Survivors of Suicide Christmas Fair, an event that serves as a both fund-raiser for the group, and to mark its anniversary.
Founded in December 2008, Survivors of Suicide (SOS) is the longest running support group of its kind in Second Life. A a peer to peer support group, it is dedicated to helping those who have been impacted by depression, thoughts of suicide, or who have attempted suicide or have lost someone to suicide. The group offers support and a safe platform for Second Life residents through weekly activities at their in-world headquarters, one to one support, mentorship, and via group chat.
The 2019 Christmas Fair features:
40+ merchants and designers, each offering at least one item with 100% of sales proceeds going to Survivors of Suicide.
A photo contest with prizes by The Bearded Guy and Paper Sparrow.
Raffles.
Live entertainment and DJs.
Donation kiosks.
Survivors of Suicide 2019 Christmas Fair – the meeting place (l), two of the photo contest boards and the entertainment stage and dance area
The schedule of entertainment for the event can be found at the Survivors of Suicide Information Kiosk in the event’s shopping area, and also via the group’s event calendar. The information kiosk also provides details on the photo contest, as do the photo contest boards located around the entertainment area.
As Christmas can be an especially stressful period for many, the Christmas Fair includes an Information Gazebo, located between the shopping and entertainments areas of the event. This provides self-help guides to those who many want to take advantage of them. For those who may want more direct help, Survivors of Suicide mentors will be available at the Fair, and there is a special meeting area with chairs and an open-air fire for those who would like to meet and talk, while the Survivors of Suicide headquarters will be open throughout the holiday.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 