Update, Wednesday, November 8th: the planned upgrade has been further delayed, until 15:00 SLT om Monday, November 13th. See here for more.
Update, Tuesday, November 7th: the planned upgrade has been postponed until Wednesday, November 8th, starting at 15:00 SLT. See here for more.
This is a reminder that the SL support site will be undergoing an upgrade commencing at 15:00 SLT on Tuesday, November 7th, 2017, and likely extending through until Wednesday, November 8th, 2017, in which the support offering will be migrated to Freshdesk.
News of the update was first announced by the Lab on Tuesday, October 31st, and I’m blogging on it now to hopefully help keep the news fresh in people’s minds.
The overall migration will be handled in two parts, the first being a migration of all open support tickets, and all those raised since the start of 2017, as the official blog post notes:
What this means for Residents is that after 3pm (PT) on 11/07 you will be unable to submit, edit, or view your current support tickets. The downtime will be used to complete a migration of all the current support tickets to our new Customer Relationship Management tool.
We currently plan to have the support system back up and running by 9am PT on 11/08 …
The initial migration will include all open support tickets and any which have been opened since the beginning of 2017.
Once this phase of the migration is completed, the support site will be re-opened for the submission of new tickets / review of open tickets, etc., all of which will be managed using Freshdesk.
Following this, work will commence in migrating the remainder of the support site data. However, this will take time, as the Lab notes there are around 1.2 million historical support tickets to migrate, together with some 200,000 Live Chat records.
Should you have any closed ticket from 2016 or earlier which you think you may need to access, you have until 15:00 on Tuesday, November 7th to collect that information.
Further information on the migration will be posted by the Lab as the work progresses.
On Thursday, November 2nd, the Lab issues two blog posts which are of import to Second Life users.
The first blog post provides news and information on further updates to credit processing and LindeX fees, together with an overview of upcoming improvements and features coming to Second Life over the next several weeks / months.
Some of the improvements I’ve already blogged about – notably Animesh, which is currently in public beta testing on Aditi (the beta grid) and the upcoming Environmental Enhancement Project (EEP) – , together with a reminder about the grid-wide game, Tyrah & the Curse of the Magical Glytches. In addition, the post offers updates on some of the longer-term projects, such as the work to move Second Life services (including, eventually and if all goes according to the Lab’s plans, the grid simulators) to the cloud, which we learn is now called Project Brave New World.
However, it is the new LindeX / credit processing fee changes which are the headline news, and are unlikely to be welcome. Each is being increased, with the new LindeX transaction fee coming to within a hair’s breadth of US $1.00 per transaction with immediate effect.
To quote from the blog post:
Underlying SL’s user-to-user economy and the ability to buy and sell L$’s for real currency is a significant amount of ongoing work to ensure that everything remains compliant with applicable laws and regulations, while also preventing fraud and money laundering. This work comes at a cost, and we are adjusting related fees in order to help cover those costs and enable us to continue to invest in Second Life’s future. The changes are as follows:
Effective today, the fee for buying L$ on the LindeX will be $0.99 per transaction (previously it had been $0.60 per transaction). These changes impact only buys on the LindeX, and the fees associated with buying L$’s during SL Marketplace transactions remain unchanged.
On January 3, 2018, the fee for processing credit transactions (i.e. paying real money into a PayPal or Skrill account) will be 2.5% per transaction, with a $3 (USD) minimum, and no maximum. This fee is currently 1.5% per transaction, with a $3 (USD) minimum and a $25 (USD) maximum.
Also in this blog post, mention is made of an issue which has been felt by many content creators who sell No Copy items (generally via gacha machines), and which has been the subject of recent discussions at Simulator User Group meetings: fraudulent sales of such items. This is an issue to Lab has been attempting to address, and while it may not be completely eliminated (the Lab is still working on further improvements), the blog post offers a note on the work carried out thus far:
Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for successful platforms to attract cheaters and bad actors. Some of these villains attempt to hurt Residents’ businesses by bypassing creator protections in SL, and we’re continually developing new tools and techniques to combat this. Recently, we closed an exploit that fraudulent gacha re-sellers had used. Our governance team can now catch them when they attempt the cheating method that we have already fixed. Many bad actors have already been banned from SL, and additional changes will soon make our team even more effective.
Finally, and alongside the promise of a new, shopping-oriented, perk for Premium subscribers, there is a reminder that if you wish to continue receiving IMs as e-mails while off-line, to make sure you have verified your e-mail address. This will become even more important in the future, if you wish to continue receiving communications from the Lab via e-mail.
The second blog post introduces the new Web User Group meetings, which will be launching on Friday, November 10th, 2017, and which will generally take place every two weeks, starting at 14:30 SLT.
Grumpity and Alex Linden will be holding the Web Group meetings at Alex’s barn, starting on Friday, November 10th, 2017
The aim of these meetings is to discuss issues relating to all of the Lab’s Second Life web properties, including the Marketplace, Profiles, Place Pages, and Search. The meetings will be chaired by Grumpity and Alexa Linden at Alexa’s barn.
You can find out more about the majority of the Lab’s in-world user group meetings on the User Group wiki page.
Writing for Ars Technica on Monday, October 23rd, Samuel Axon, the Senior Reviews Editor, tells of his time Returning to Second Life. It’s a lengthy, involved piece, and perhaps one of the most broadly integrated write-ups on Second Life to have appeared in a good while.
Mr. Axon is no stranger to SL, having been dipping in and out over a number of years up until around 2012. As such, he brings to the piece first-hand experience based on more than just random exposure to the platform. In addition, he spoke directly with Peter Grey, the Lab’s Global Director of Communications, and Bjørn Laurin, Vice President of Platform – who has responsibility for both Second Life and Sansar. But that’s not all, he also sought out a number of Second Life creators to gain their insights as well.
The opening paragraphs encapsulate Second Life on a number of levels: the early hype around it being the “Internet 2.0”, the media hysteria of 2006/7, and an attempt to explain, as quickly as possible, was SL “is” for those who might view it as some kind of MMORPG.
From there, the article weaves a fairly comprehensive tapestry of several aspects of Second Life: commerce, creativity (and their relationship), social interactions and the changing face of discovery in SL, and more.
Samuel Axon, writing for Ars Technica
For example, with commerce and creativity, he brings together several threads: how both have given rise to what might be regarded as “unusual” (to the outside world) markets – such as breedables; how creativity has changed thanks to mesh and (for many) the move away from prims to external tools; the influence this has had with commerce, the rise of the Marketplace, and its impact on land in in-world stores.
The article also doesn’t shy away from issues. It delves into the question of why Second Life failed to become as all-encompassing as the early days seemed to promised. Here the finger is pointed squarely at social media being a major reason (outside of the overall hype surrounding SL), and I wouldn’t dispute it’s validity. Back when SL was at the height of its hype (2006-early 2008), Twitter was just starting out, as was the iPhone, Android had yet to arrive, and even Facebook had yet to start its meteoric rise in user numbers (2008 onwards). Thus, there wasn’t really anything out there by which SL’s real potential could be measured and the hype around it countered.
Sex in Second Life is also dealt with head-on, with a very tidily written sidebar to the main article. In it, Mr. Axon offers one of the most considered and well-balanced ripostes to those who insist Second Life is, to its larger extent, “all (/just) about sex”.
There are one or two elements in the article which might have been tackled a little differently. The changing face of discovery – where to go and what to do in Second Life – is examined, with a degree of lamentation that the kind of exploration possible when SL was more mainland / very large private estate oriented (i.e. pre Homestead) no longer seems to be the case, with the bias now towards “siloed” activities on isolated private islands or “big public” calendared events, with information on them effectively coming through word-of-mouth.
However, rather than lamenting the change, I’d perhaps liked to have seen it examined more along the lines of how we tend to imprint our physical world activities on Second Life. It’s fair to say our social activities in the latter are “siloed” between our homes and public venues / calendared events. We visit family and friends via the most direct means possible, rarely taking time to explore what lay between; we rely on specific “word of mouth” to get news on events of interest – websites, social media, clubs / organisations, etc. So is it really that surprising social activities have evolved in a similar manner in SL, particularly as some of the tools – like Groups – naturally lean in that direction, and are very effective in their reach?
Later in the article, Sansar enters the equation – as might be expected, given there is much concern about how it might impact Second Life. Here, those concerns are confined more to the technical / fiscal: that Sansar will draw off resources / investment from Second Life to its detriment.
While these – and other – concerns are valid, right now none of them are coming into play. On the technical / fiscal front, for example, we know the Lab is still recruiting skills specific to Second Life, and we’re still seeing user-visible capabilities added to the platform, Animesh being the most recent (albeit on a test basis), with things like the Environmental Enhancement Project and Bakes on Mesh (see my CCUG updates) following it down the pipe. The Lab is also continuing its overhaul of the infrastructure underpinning Second Life, up to and including an attempt to move SL services to the cloud. If nothing else, and providing other factors don’t come into play, all of this work should help towards SL’s continued longevity.
I could go into greater lengths, but really, suffice it to say that in Returning to Second Life we have an informed, balanced piece on the platform, which reasonably attempts to reconcile past with present and offer honest insight into why, fourteen years after its public opening, the platform still has appeal, as well as offering viewpoints from both the Lab’s and users’ perspectives. As such, it is more than worth a read in its own right, and if you haven’t done so already, I urge you to do so.
On Wednesday, October 18th, Linden Lab announced the release of their much-anticipated Animesh project viewer had been made available, marking the start of public testing for the Animesh project.
For those who have not been following my Content Creation User Group meeting updates, “Animesh” is an amalgam of “ANImated MESH”. The overall goal of the project is to provide a means of animating rigged mesh objects using the avatar skeleton, in whole or in part, to provide things like independently moveable pets / creatures, trees with animated branches, etc.
In short, an Animesh object:
Can be any rigged / skinned mesh which and contains the necessary animations and controlling scripts in its own inventory (Contents tab of the Build floater) required for it to animate itself.
Can be a single mesh object or a linkset of objects.
Has been flagged as and Animesh object in the project viewer, and so has an avatar skeleton associated with it.
Uses three new LSL methods to run or stop animations, or check which animations are currently running:
Animesh allows you to take rigged mesh objects, add animations and controlling scripts to them, associate them with an avatar skeleton, and have them run in-world without the need for any supervising viewer / client
The Animesh project has been in development for the last several months, and has involved ongoing discussions and input from content creators at the Content Creation User Group meetings, which are held in-world at the Hippotropolis Camp Fire Circle most Thursdays at 13:00 SLT. As such, the arrival of the project viewer does not mark any kind of official release of the project. Rather, and as noted, it marks the commencement of public testing for what will hopefully become the first release of Animesh functionality.
Currently, testing can only take place on Aditi, the beta grid, where five regions are available with Animesh support enabled. These are: Animesh1, Animesh2, Animesh3, Animesh4, all rated Moderate, and Animesh Adult. Again, please note that Animesh functionality in the project viewer will not work on the Main grid at this time.
Animesh objects are created in-world, not uploaded as such. They must contain the animation(s) they are to run and a controlling script (l), and are enabled via Animated Mesh object in the Build Floater’s Features tab (centre). Note that if you select an unrigged / non-mesh object (or a No modify rigged object), the option will be greyed out and unavailable (right)
An Animesh User Guide is available to help people get started with Animesh, and a forum thread has been set-up for feedback and discussion, while specific bugs or feature request suggestions for the project should be reported via the Second Life JIRA.
Test content is also available to help people get started, if they don’t have suitable content of their own they wish to convert to Animesh objects. The test content can be found here.
In addition, those who test the viewer and Animesh are invited to attend the Content Creation User Group meetings and join discussion on Animesh (and other content related projects), and / or are welcome to follow my Content Creation User Group meeting updates.
One of the aims in testing Animesh will be to see how many Animesh objects a region and the viewer can comfortably handle without impacting the performance of either
Eventually, Animesh will hopefully support fully fledged non-player character (NPC) creations which can, if required have things like an avatar shape associated with them, use a dedicated, avatar-like inventory, and utilise both the server-side locomotion graph for walking, sitting, etc., and the avatar baking service. However, these capabilities do not form part of the current Animesh project, but will be added as a future project, once other elements which can also help better support NPCs have been put in place (such as an update to the baking service, which forms another project within the Lab).
Related Links
Animesh project viewer: version 5.0.9.329815 dated November 9th, 2017
September 30th marks the last day of voting in the Blogger and Vlogger Network (BVN) 2017 Blogger and Vlogger Awards, also to be known has “The Bloggies”, intended to recognise bloggers and vloggers covering Second Life. Nominations took place in July / August, and voting / judging opened on September 1st.
Nominations for public voting have been split into a number of categories, which cover topics such as fashion, accessories, home and garden, news, SL travel, humour, tutorials, and newcomer blogs. A number of special awards will additionally be given for a selected set of categories: BVN Member of the Year, Founders Award, Blogger or Vlogger of the year, Best Female Fashion Blogger, and Best Male Fashion Blogger.
I’ve so far steered clear of writing about the awards, as I’m actually a nominee in one category, and writing when nominated feels somewhat self-serving. However, there is a lot of variety within the various categories (including a number of blogs I’d not come across before (to my loss) and am now enjoying taking a look at as and when time permits.Also, given this is the last day for voting, it seems a good time to offer a reminder that voting is about to close for anyone still intending to vote, but hasn’t so far done so.
So if you haven’t already voted, hop over to The Bloggies before the end of the day on September 3th, 2017, look through the nominated blogs in the categories, and vote on those you like – note that voting requires a Google account to prevent multiple repeat votes.
Winning nominees will be announced on Saturday, October 14th.
Updated, September 25th: As indicated to me by Grumpity Linden, and following testing with the Second Life Wolfpack RC viewer update 5.0.8.329128, this issue should now be resolved.
On Friday, September 22nd, Linden Lab issued a warning to Second Life users on the Windows platform that for a period of time, they may get a Windows SmartScreen warning when installing or updating the official Second Life viewer.
As explained in the blog post, the warning from Windows SmartScreen is displayed when trying to install anything via the Internet and Microsoft is unable to verify whether the software is “safe” for installation.
The reason the warning is being generated against the official Second Life viewer was explained by Oz Linden at the Third-Party Developer meeting, with a similar explanation in the blog post. Speaking at the meeting, Oz said:
Unfortunately, our [Microsoft] code-signing key expired this week, and we had to get a new one, and that has caused Windows SmartScreen Defender to no longer believe in us. So it will warning you when trying to install any of the new viewers, including release candidates … so we’re putting out a blog post about that and putting in on the status page, so hopefully people will get the word.
In addition to this, the blog post explains why the warning will be displayed, even after the Lab has obtained a new code-signing key:
Until enough people install the application signed by the new key, it won’t have a good enough “reputation” with Microsoft to avoid the warning.
Oz further added during the TPVD meeting:
Hopefully, the number of people who need to install it [the viewer] to get Microsoft to believe in it is not too big; [but] we have no idea how long that will take.
So again, if you’re a Windows user (notably Windows 10), and you’ve downloaded one of the more recent viewers from the Lab’s web site, and you get the Windows SmartScreen warning, you can safely install the viewer.
Simply click on the MORE INFO link when the warning is first displayed. This will give you the application name and publisher’s name, together with an option to RUN ANYWAY. Click on this to install the viewer.
Windows SmartScreen warning – may be displayed when installing a latest version of the official SL viewer.
Remember, if the viewer has come from the Lab’s website or via the viewer’s own updater, it is safe to install.
Update, Wednesday, November 8th: the planned upgrade has been further delayed, until 15:00 SLT om Monday, November 13th. See here for more.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 