Tag: Linden Lab

Posted in General, Mesh, Opinion, Second Life
Posted on by beccapet

Some really interesting points raised by Qarl here. I have to concur with his comments about the new TPV policy and how it stifles innovation; it can’t do otherwise.

It’s funny that he should comment that Linden Lab didn’t see Mesh clothing coming because I was having the same discussion with a friend just recently. The Lab’s response has been very much “but why would you want to do that?” and then bury their head in the sand about it. The fact that pretty much every major clothing Designer is offering Rigged Mesh clothing now is surely a pretty bloody strong indication that sorting the Mesh issue is of prime importance, yet their support of Qarl and the Parametric Deformer project seems lukewarm at best.

I’m still unswayed in my opinion that this is make-or-break for SL.

Posted in General, Opinion, Second Life
Posted on by beccapet

It was absolutely awful yesterday. I had a bit of a shopping spree on Marketplace yesterday morning (UK time) and 33% of my items failed to be delivered. Then in the afternoon I crashed and couldn’t get back on for ages and it said that logins had been disabled and to check the grid status page – which hadn’t been updated in 2 days.
And then today I got hit by a rolling restart on two different sims, both of which gave 5 mins notice to get out. 5 mins! What kind of notice is that?

Also, SCHEDULED maintenance is maintenance you know about beforehand. So how about publicising it with a little more notice, Linden Lab?

Posted in General, Opinion, Second Life

Differing definitions of ‘crowded’

Posted on by beccapet

I was at a concert for the wonderful Lisa Brune last night, and the sim was absolutely packed – my Firestorm ‘People’ list told me there were 66 people on the sim and it certainly felt like it – people were grey, the lag was insane like the air had turned to wallpaper paste, and people were crashing all over the place. In fact Lisa herself crashed and couldn’t get back in but valiantly carried on with the concert anyway. I myself gave up trying to get back in after the 3rd crash and was listening to the stream with an external media player.

Anyway, all this got me thinking about the perennial issue of what we think of as ‘crowded’ when we’re in Second Life. It seems to me that a concert in real life where the performer only had 66 attendees would be considered ‘intimate’, ‘tiny’ or ‘woefully under-attended’ depending on the size of venue and the expectations of the performer or their management. Yet in Second Life it’s considered a massively popular attendance.

Back in the early days of Second Life, much was made of the educational and media event possibilities, and many people dipped their toes in the water with such things as Virtual Embassies, learning centres, corporate presences and the now famous Suzanne Vega concert, but interest very quickly waned as it became abundantly clear that the Second Life platform just simply cannot cope with a decent attendance.

My understanding is that the fundamental limitation is that each full sim in Second Life is hosted on a single core of a multi-core processor (for Homestead sims it is 4 to a core) and it’s simply not possible to throw more processing power at a sim. The nearest that can be achieved is to use two or more adjacent sims playing the same stream so that people can get some sense of “being there”, but even then that’s not really ideal.

I am sure that this issue has had Linden Lab scratching their collective heads for years, and I would like to think that they have it on their roadmap to address it, but we’re in 2012 now. I joined SL in 2007 and we had the issue even then and we still have it now.

What Second Life needs is to somehow break free from these limitations and for the servers to be truly scalable. Once that is achieved, it could be monetarised with perhaps a graded tier for sim capability or a dynamic billing model not dissimilar to webserver bandwidth. I am sure that the owners of popular sims would be happy to pay for the ability to have a decent number of attendees to an event without the whole thing falling over in a horrible mess. At the moment there is simply no choice, no option; it’s a hard limit.

Second Life is a wonderful place to be, but this limitation is fundamental and if it isn’t addressed I can’t see how Second Life is ever going to progress beyond where it is today.

Footnote

After a little googling, it turns out the Suzanne Vega concert was in 2006 and in order to get 80 attendees people had to have not a single prim attachment on themselves, not even hair. So really not a lot has changed in 6 years.

Posted in Exploring, General, Phoenix / Firestorm, Second Life

Round, round, I get around

Posted on by beccapet

[Last updated 12-Feb-2022]

Hello! And welcome to another of my little tutorials that have been born from a conversation I had in-world and thought might be useful to someone.

This time it’s to do with getting round within a sim and also keeping up with someone who is doing it. Or, to be more specific, the trials and tribulations of my hubby as he tries to keep up with me when I’m shopping!

Continue reading “Round, round, I get around” →

Posted in General, Opinion, Second Life, Viewer 2.x, Viewers

Second Life increasingly a misnomer?

Posted on by beccapet

There has always been a blur between Second Life (SL) and real life (RL), with residents choosing how separate they want to keep the two.
However, it seems to me that Linden Lab (LL) are losing sight of what SL is meant to be. Or, if you prefer to rephrase that, they are moving SL in directions that are different from how they started out. And, increasingly, those changes are removing some of the choice residents have as to how separate the two remain.

For me, the clue is in the name “Second Life” – an alternative life, secondary and separate from your real one. But it seems that is becoming less and less the focus of SL, with residents being encouraged (and in some cases forced) to involve their RL more and more in their SL.

So when did this rot start to set in?

Some might say it started with Age Verification where you were required to provide some form of RL identification. This was probably the first time you were required to disclose your RL identity. Up until then, provided you didn’t have payment information on file and were using a free email address like Hotmail, Yahoo, etc., there was no link between your RL identity and your SL one.

Others might say it started when LL stopped the idea of a firstname & lastname and instead moved to having just a username and an optional Display Name. In many ways this weakened the separation between SL and RL – a username is just a login for a website or service. You were no longer creating an identity or character; you were just creating an account. Perhaps the distinction is subtle, but I think it is relevant and significant.

Others might say that it was the introduction of Viewer 2.0 and the different way in which it presented profiles, no longer calling the tabs “2nd Life” and “1st Life” but “Avatar” and “More Info”.
Or perhaps Viewer 2.0’s emphasis on voice chat, with text-based interaction being de-emphasised and harder to find in the User Interface.

But, for me, what really highlights the fundamental shift in attitude are the profiles at http://my.secondlife.com

One of the sections of your profile is called “Social Identities” where you are able to link with your Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Plurk, Twitter and YouTube accounts.
Now I happen to know that Facebook and LinkedIn are adamant that you must use your real name and real identity to have an account with them. Yes, many SL residents do have a Facebook account for their Avatar but you are on borrowed time there – when Facebook get round to noticing they *will* delete that account.
So Linden Lab are encouraging you to link your SL account with RL services that only have relevance to your RL.

Of course, you could argue that just because LL allow you to do this it doesn’t mean you have to – and you would obviously be right. But I think it highlights a push by LL to make Second Life just another social media / social networking tool; a glorified 3D chatroom and messaging facility for the casual user, with the immersion and roleplay that many of us enjoy being of secondary importance. There is even talk of a reduced functionality internet browser-based Viewer to make SL “more accessible” to more people. And if that doesn’t sound foreboding to you, then it probably should do.

So one has to beg the question at what point Linden Lab should rename “Second Life” to “Augmented Life”?

 

Update:

Here are some links to the issue of Facebook deleting accounts of SL avatars

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Forums-Blogs-Answers-and/Facebook-deleting-Secondlife-Avatars/td-p/887663
http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Deletion-Of-Hundreds-Of-Second-Life-Facebook-Accounts-Being/td-p/884697
http://virtualoutworlding.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/your-avatar-identity-in-facebook-issues.html

Posted in Second Life, tips, Viewers

Oh no! I deleted half my house! (and other disasters)

Posted on by beccapet

[NOTE: This is very out of date now that we no longer have prim link sets and most things are mesh instead]

A friend recently IMed me with exactly that. And, to be fair, most of us have been there. But don’t panic, and all is not lost.

Likewise do not panic if you accidentally moved something. Or if you rezzed something and exceeded your prim count and half your house got returned to you instead (that happened to me once), or your landlady had a blonde moment and returned half your stuff (happened to me also).

Here are some handy hints on what you can do in each circumstance.

 

You moved something

If you’ve moved something by accident the first thing you should do, if your Viewer supports it, is to hit Ctrl-Z which is the shortcut key for “undo”. Very often this will snap things back exactly as they were.
Phoenix and Firestorm both have this functionality, and doubtless many other Viewers do too.

However, this does not always work. So you will have to move it back manually. Now your first inclination will be to grab the object and start dragging it around but this is the worst thing you can do as, trust me, you will not get it back to exactly where it was. Oh, sure, it may be “good enough” and that’s fine. But then you wouldn’t be reading this if you were happy with just that. Besides, in the case of segments of a house it will not look right unless correct down to the smallest decimal point.
What you need to do it right-click on the object, select Edit, and then choose the Object tab. If you look at the screenshot above you can see what I mean. I was running Firestorm Viewer so if you’re using a different Viewer it might look slightly different.
If you look on that you’ll see all the numbers for the exact placement of the object. Now, with some rezzboxes (the box that rezzed your house) they add the exact position co-ordinates of when they were rezzed to the description field. So if that’s the case then you’re sorted as you can manually set them back to the correct value. They will very likely write the X, Y and Z values as , eg. <105.83778, 146.98111, 35.75515>
If not, you may be able to deduce the settings by looking at surrounding objects. This is often hard though.
One sure-fire way, albeit rather tedious, is to rezz a copy of the house (you may need to go to a sandbox if you have insufficient prims to do that) and examine the values of the offending segment and also those of an adjacent one, and with some very simple maths deduce the offset of one to the other. Then return to your proper house and apply the same offsets, thus returning the moved segment to its correct position. So if, for example, SegmentA is at 100,100,100 and Segment B is at 100,110,100 on the new house, and on the proper house SegmentA is at 200,200,100 then SegmentB should be at 200,210,100 because there is an offset of 10 on the Y co-ordinate.
I find that using a simple spreadsheet to do this helps enormously. If there is enough demand I could make one available.

Finally, prevention is better than cure. Once you have things back the way you want, be sure to lock the object. All this does is mean you can’t accidentally move it again until you unlock it; it’s just like the safety catch on a gun. You’ll find a tick box to lock & unlock objects on the same tab as all the numbers we’ve been looking at – it’s called “Locked”.

 

You deleted something

First thing to do is to find it in your inventory, and it will be in your Trash.
Note the name of the object, then right-click on it and choose “Restore” to undelete it. Do NOT click “Purge”!!
Then find the object again (searching for it by name if necessary) and see what menu options are available. On some Viewers there is the option to “Restore to last position”. Phoenix and Firestorm definitely have this, and I’m sure many other Viewers do too. If that is the case then use this option and you will very likely find the object restored to its correct place. However, I disclaim all responsibility if for some reason it doesn’t, especially if it is a no-copy item that disappears into the far blue yonder never to be seen again. You have been warned.
The other option is to just rezz the object in approximately the correct place and then use the techniques mentioned earlier for moved objects (although obviously not the first one to do with “Undo”)

 

You had something returned

First thing to do is to find it in your inventory, and it will be in your Lost & Found. Something worth bearing in mind is that if a large number of objects are returned to you, SL may package them up. You will find what looks like just one of your objects but it will have an icon that looks like a pile of building blocks rather than the normal icon for an object which is a box. Rezzing this will rezz all the returned objects inside the package, although possibly in the wrong place. But at least they will be rezzed in the correct relative positions to each other so it should be a case of calculating the offset to their correct position (as I outlined earlier) and then moving them.
However, if it is just one object, and not a package, then use the same technique as outlined above for deleted objects.

Posted in Exploring, General, Second Life

Lest we forget

Posted on by beccapet
Lest we forget
Lest we forget

—

My friend Rorrim Wrigglesworth has built this wonderful Garden of Remembrance, which includes The Cenotaph.

Please do visit it to pay your respects. It is located at RoBeck land in Second Life (click here for SURL)

The Two Minute Silence is at 11:00am 11th Nov 2011 (UK time, which is 3am SLT/PST) and Remembrance Day will be on Sunday 13th Nov this year.

www.britishlegion.org.uk/remembrance/the-nation-remembers/remembrance-sunday
www.bbc.co.uk/news/11734920
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day

—

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

—

Update: I was at the Garden of Remembrance for the Two Minute Silence, and was very moved that there were 11 other people there at the appointed time (11am UK time).
We were all silent and then just after 11.02am somebody said something appropriate. I added the quote in italics above and someone immediately echoed “We will remember them” (which is the correct and traditional response).
A few more very appropriate things were also said.

It doesn’t sound much, but it was very moving and very special. Possibly the most special thing I have experienced in my 4 years on Second Life.

Posted in Exploring, Fashion, Photography

Konnichiwa

Posted on by beccapet


Konnichiwa, originally uploaded by Becca Ashbourne.

The creativity and ingenuity of the residents of Second Life never ceases to amaze and delight me, and none more so than sims that have beautiful attention to detail and are a visual treat.

I was exploring, looking for Japanese sims for a photo shoot I wanted to do, and came across the simply wonderful Japan Dream Kenjin. This sim is so worth a visit – it’s a seaside fishing town that is just crammed with visual detail and atmosphere.

—

Skin: Sophie by DrLife
Hair: Holly by KeeLee Designs
Outfit & shoes: Hentai Hottie 2.0 (Classic Version) by Danika
Backpack: Randoseru Japanese backpack by House of Curios

Posted in Fashion, Flickr, General, Opinion, Second Life, Viewer 2.x

Mesh

Posted on by beccapet

Slink Mesh Boots!!, originally uploaded by Nana Minuet.

I have to say I was getting very excited by Mesh, especially with the recent announcement that Phoenix is going to be supporting it (thanks to some dedicated work by Henri Beauchamp of the Cool Viewer).

These boots are a great case in point – imagine how wrong the knees would look in that pose if those were sculpt boots!

However, all is not as good as it seems; I’ve learned that the current implementation of Mesh is worse than useless, for clothes at least. It would seem that a mesh object attaches to your skeleton, not your “flesh”, and cannot be resized in-world. That means that if you are slim like the model in the above pics, those boots would look great. However, if you are any other size than her they won’t fit. Oh, sure, an alpha layer will mask out the bits of you that the boots cover but if you have bigger thighs than her you’re fresh out of luck.

One of the biggest benefits of Second Life is you can be who you want to be. You (or, rather, your avatar) can be exactly as you want it – it’s the overriding expression of your individuality and what makes Second Life so wonderful. But if Mesh clothing is going to force us all to resize our avatar to the clothing, rather than the clothing to the avatar, then this is a bad thing.

There is a JIRA running on this. It’s rather technical but the gist of it is “change Mesh to resize to your flesh not be fixed size and attached to your skeleton”.
See https://jira.secondlife.com/si/jira.issueviews:issue-html/SH-2374/SH-2374.html

Posted in Emerald, General, Imprudence, Phoenix / Firestorm, Second Life, Viewers

Killer features (Imprudence & Phoenix)

Posted on by beccapet

What I like the most about Third Party Viewers such as Imprudence and Phoenix is that they are developed by people who actually use Second Life and so have features that, whilst they may not grab the headlines, are genuinely useful. As an aside, I think it’s pretty clear that the developers at Linden Lab who developed Viewer 2.x don’t, but that’s not the subject of this entry.

This is a roundup of what I consider to be genuinely useful features. It’s by no means an extensive or all-inclusive list.

Imprudence

Profile groups
When viewing your profile, groups that you have hidden from public view are shown greyed out, giving you an idea of how your profile will appear to others.

Communicate window
When new IMs come in, the title bar of the ‘communicate’ menu updates to say how many are unread. My friend Mariana actually ported this to Phoenix and submitted it as a patch and it was rejected as the person who rejected it didn’t see it as being useful, which was a shame as I think it is.

Group chat
You can suppress Group Chat for individual groups. This is just so useful for those busy groups where people just can’t STFU in group chat but you still want to receive group notices.

Radar
The client-side radar / Avatar List is very compact and hung off the bottom of the Mini-Map. I actually really like this as it is very compact and can be up all the time, unlike the Phoenix one which takes up too much screen space to be up all the time.

Phoenix

Intra-sim teleports even when there is a Landing Point
By this I mean teleports that take place within a sim, rather than when teleporting into a sim from another sim.
Sim Owners have long been able to set a Landing Point to dictate where you land when entering their sim. I can see the value of it, as it means people are forced to rez near a rules giver, or a prim notice, or a shop display, or the starting point on a tour, or whatever. But when you are already in a sim, is it still necessary? I don’t think so. In fact it is really, really annoying when you want to cam around a large shop (for example) and then TP to where your camera view is to get closer to a vendor board, or the like. Most Third Party Viewers allow you to double-click teleport, but often you fall foul of the Landing Point and get an unhelpful message saying you are unable to TP closer than where you are. Or, worse, you get zapped back to the Landing Point.
However, there is an option in Phoenix when using the LSL Client Bridge to use llMoveToTarget for double-click TPs and this zips you straight to where you double-click even if this sim has a Landing Point. It does this because llMoveToTarget is a script command used to move things around rather than a teleport as such, so isn’t restricted by the Landing Point rules. For me this is the killer feature as it is just so useful for enabling me to shop in a large store the way I want to.

Aspect ratios on textures
As I’ve blogged about before [link], Second Life stores pictures (textures) in squares, or rectangles made of squares, and unless the Aspect Ratio exactly matches that of the texture it’s going to be distorted. With most Viewers you have to stretch the texture till it looks right.
Phoenix adds a useful little drop-list at the bottom of a texture view to let you tell it what Aspect Ratio it should be. So for a 16:9 picture stored in a texture you can send it to a friend and, provided they are using Phoenix, tell them in IM “you’ll need to view that at 16:9”. They set the drop-list selection to 16:9 and ‘hey presto’ the picture looks right. Useful!

Profile pictures
This one has been around since the Emerald days. When there is a picture in a Profile (wherever it appears) you can pop it out into its own window and view it actual size (which will be bigger than it is being displayed at in the Profile). Of course the Aspect Ratio may then be wrong and you might need to refer to the above and also my blog post on Profile pic aspect ratios [link]

Prim manipulation – cut & paste values
One for the builders and tinkerers amongst us. Phoenix has a really useful feature where you can copy the size, rotation, etc. of a prim and paste it to another. It saves you having to individually highlight and copy each value for x, y & z and paste it into the same box on another prim.
It’s easy to miss this feature, but if you look next to the values you’ll see little buttons marked “c” for copy and “p” for paste.

Prim manipulation – linked prims
Following on from the above, there are also useful buttons for linking / unlinking prims when editing parts of a linked prim set. There is also functionality for moving through a linked prim set.

Autocomplete for names in chat
Finally, a useful little feature for open chat. If you type part of someone’s name you can hit the tab key and Phoenix will try and complete if for you based on who is in chat range.

—

It’s a shame that Phoenix is now in a maintenance phase, with no planned new functionality, because I would love to see the features I mentioned for Imprudence brought into Phoenix. However, I have it on good authority from one of the Lead Developers that this is not going to happen.