EOTB: Lab Announces Upcoming Changes "To The Financial And Billing Systems of Second Life"

 

 

A few days ago on Friday January 17, Linden Lab announced they would be making some minor changes to how residents buy and sell Linden dollars. 

 

We are introducing improvements to the financial and billing systems in Second Life in partnership with Tilia, our trusted billing provider. These upgrades aim to streamline and modernize transaction processes, ensuring a more secure and reliable platform for our community. While you may notice some visual updates when interacting with payments and payouts, the overall experience will remain familiar and seamless.

The announcement promised wallet integration, better cashier and account dashboards, faster payouts and more options for them, The updates will be released "on a rolling basis with everyone" near the end of January. This includes a different look for the screen appearance. 

There are currently no changes to the fees, but there is one less option for transactions, unless you already have it. Starting in January 30, people will no longer be able to add Skrill as a payout method, though if you already have it you can still use it. 

Also, five countries will no longer be able to have new payout connections: Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Bosnia. That Russia and Belarus can't is no surprise due to Russia being under sanctions and Belarus having close ties to it. 

For the blog post in detail, Click Here. 

Bixyl Shuftan

EOTB: April 2024 Mobile Viewer Update

 

 A few days ago, Linden Lab announced it had published new versions of it's mobile viewer, for both Android and IOS. Among the improvements, avatars that used a deformer for their shape and didn't load correctly in earlier versions should show properly now.

New Android and iOS Alpha builds were published Wednesday, April 3rd.

We’ve been working hard for the last two months and are excited to share some major steps forward for the mobile client -- correctly displaying avatars and teleport improvements have been at the top of the list.

If your avatar depends on an avatar shape deformer, you should immediately notice the changes to avatar rendering! Avatars that didn’t render at all before, or didn’t look the way you intended, now render correctly.

 

Also mentioned was improved teleporting, less likely to get stuck on the loading screen, And if you're in a place with music streaming, you'll be able to use more normal controls to start or stop it.

 

Teleports are also greatly improved – no more getting stuck on a loading screen! If you’re on a parcel with streaming audio, you’ll now be able to use standard audio controls to stop/start and change the volume (tap main menu > tap the audio metadata at the bottom of the screen).  We also found and fixed some issues with the order of group chat messages.

 

Currently, the mobile viewer remains in a "private alpha" status, with access limited to Premium Plus residents, who need to apply to be on the list to use it.

 

For the blog post in full, Click Here. 

 

Linden Lab Announces Improvements on Sim Crossings

One of the pet peeves a number of residents have is sim crossings, or "region crossings" as Linden Lab calls them. Sometimes there's a short pause. Occasionally there's a longer pause. And sometimes there's the "walk of lag" that results in you going walking on and on until you either "rubberband" back to the sim crossing, or the viewer crashes and you get knocked offline.

Last year, crashing after teleporting and sim crossing was getting to be worse of a problem. Though after a while, things began to improve. So how are things now? Yesterday on the "Tools and Technology" Linden blog, April Linden, announced that the programing on how sim crossings/teleports was changed and the results were that they were easier and less glitchy than ever.

The process of crossing from one region to another when you’re riding in a vehicle is pretty involved. The region you’re leaving needs to be able to tell the region where you’re arriving  everything it knows about the vehicle, and has to do it really quickly. That includes all of the scripts in the vehicle, everything that’s attached to it, the direction and how fast it’s going, and lots of other stuff. 

To make this happen quickly, early on in Second Life’s history we made some assumptions about our network, including things like how big a packet can be. Those assumptions generally worked okay on our own network, but not outside it. 

When you crossed from one region to another, the regions were putting a lot of information into large packets and sending them across our network. This was usually okay because our network was purposefully built to run Second Life. Then, as soon we tried to do this on someone else’s network (in the cloud), things didn’t work quite right. The problem was most noticeable when crossing from a region in our data center to one in the cloud. 

The first thing our engineering teams tried was breaking those large packets up into smaller ones, but that actually made the problem worse. Rather than send one big packet and wait for the other side to say it received the data, with smaller packets, it had to repeat that bunch of times for each packet. (Send, get an acknowledgement, send another piece, get an acknowledgement, etc.) It was still mostly okay across our network, but way worse when a region in our network was talking to one in the cloud. We now knew this code would never work well, so we needed a different approach. 

Next, our engineering team decided to use another way to send the data across the network, using the same protocol and method we use for other types of data. Most importantly, it is faster and more reliable. That did the trick! We’re still collecting statistics on the impact this change has, but things are looking very positive. 

Once this new code was written, the performance when going  from region to region got a lot better, and it worked between our data center and the cloud! The improvement was so dramatic that we decided to not make our Residents wait for uplifted simulators, and rolled the changes out right away. That code is what rolled out to the grid this week.

"It’s really exciting that the cloud migration is helping us find really old bugs and make Second Life better as we go," the "gridbun" would conclude.



Luca decided to test things out for herself. This video she did shows her testing several vehicles. Although some took longer than others, she concluded all showed some improvement, a few making the crossing in less than a second.

Have you found sim crossing and teleports easier? What about vehicle crossings? Please leave comments below.

Source: Linden blog, Luca 
Hat tip: Cynthia Farshore, Liffento 

Bixyl Shuftan

Safra Nitely and Darkwing Village

Safra Nitely has gotten attention for her Christmas Village every year, and in the past for her Relay team "Ministry of Dance." But what she's been active the most with is her village in the sky high above Devon Dream for her closest friends and virtual family, "Darkwing." Well decorated, the buildings look like they're from the pages of a book of a magical fantasy land. The walkways connect the buildings, in addition to leading to the stables and playground areas down below. She holds occasional events at a small club. One Halloween party I went to, Safra had gone all-out with spooky trees, fog, and other decorations.

But Safra isn't quite satisfied with the area, fancy as it is. She messaged me to remind me she keeps looking to see how things can be improved. In this case, the walkway railings, looking to see what could look still better.

Much of the place is open to the public, the club being at Devon Dream (207/31/3992). it should be noted that some of the village is reserved just for friends and family, so if a place has a sign mentioning that, please respect it. Also, Safra wants her friends and SL family to have fun, so some of the village does have adult overtones.

Bixyl Shuftan

News and Commentary: Sansar, One Year Later

With the attention on InWorldz's collapse, it went almost unnoticed that a week ago it was the one year anniversary of the official release of Linden Lab's newer virtual world, Sansar. Initially simply called "the next generation virtual world" for over a year of it's three year development, once most Second Life residents had a look at the place or talked to someone who had, interest in the place by the users of it's established world quickly plummeted. So a year later, is the place any better? In short, maybe a little, but ...

Read more in Other Grids, MMOs, and Games.

Eye on the Blog: Linden Lab Reports About Recent Developments

Earlier this week, Linden Lab announced on the official Second Life Blog updates on developments on some projects, in addition to announcements on some new ones, as well as new areas.

Project Bento was the first of the topics mentioned, but the Lab didn't go into specifics, saying only that "resident testers continue to improve this project," and that they were "very close" to making a release viewer (an early access viewer with a certain feature that hasn't quite had all the bugs worked out yet) with Bento as part of it. But there's no estimate yet as to when this will be made part of the official Second Life viewer. They did suggest those interested could join their "Bento User Group" which meets time to time. Inara Pey has a record of the meetings she has attended (here). Loki Elliot, a noted builder, says he has no plans to make anything with Bento until next year at least.

Next up for discussion was a feature useful for residents with lots of outfits: the Visual Outfits Browser, which has been made into a release viewer. Inara Pey described it as "this viewer allows you to use the Appearance floater to capture / upload / select images of your outfits and save them against the outfits in a new Outfit Gallery tab within the floater."

We realize Second Life Residents have dozens and dozens of outfits and looking at a list can be boring and uninspiring, not to mention difficult to remember what is what (imagine that you couldn't look at the clothes in your own closet at home, but instead could only see a list of their names!). With the new Visual Outfit Browser, you’ll be able to see your outfits via an all new gallery-style display, making selecting outfits a snap. You provide the images that are displayed for each outfit or try out VOB’s new snapshot utility. Playing dress-up has never been so easy and fun!

Third was Quicktime Replacement

Apple recently withdrew support for the Quicktime player for Windows, which has in any event been a steady source of security vulnerabilities over the years. This project replaces that plugin for the Windows Viewer with newer and more robust media support (the Mac Viewer will also get this new tech soon). It will play some media that Quicktime would not, but will not play some older Quicktime-only media. Content creators that incorporate media should be testing with this Viewer to see if the media they use is supported. In general, we recommend upgrading any shared media to mp3, mp4, or any HTML5 compatible format for best performance and stability.

As it turned out, Inara Pey earlier this summer wrote about both the Visual Outfit Browser and the VLC Plugin Viewer.

Also brought up were some new Learning and Social Island locations, which the Lab says were introduced in March. They called these, "the first to utilize Experience Tools as part of the new user experience." They also had a new location: Gaming Island.

A new Linden Lab region dedicated to educating Residents about skill games in Second Life.  On this region, anyone can learn how to play all available games of skill in a free-to-play setting. If you want to then go play the games for Linden dollars, the Portal Park makes it easy to find them.

"Skill gaming" is something of a controversial subject, some saying the difference between it and outright gambling are technical and legal loopholes. The place is  likely to be the subject of a number of discussions as word reaches the residents.

There was "Group Chat and Bans,"  the ability of group moderators to ban individual residents and keep them from returning. They also released the "Jellydoll Viewer," "which allows Residents to set limits on the amount of avatar complexity they render in their viewer." They stated they improved security for Linden transactions and email security. They stated they replaced the viewer's core HTTP infrastructure, "this has resulted in fewer problems with high volume operations like loading inventory, and has significantly reduced certain kinds of load on the simulator hosts." The Lab stated they've continued to improve the new Marketplace search they introduced last November.And they've continued to clean up bugs in the system, "we do try to introduce fewer than we fix! "

Do you the readers have anything to say about these improvements and developments? Please leave your comments below.

"SL13B Rights and Wrongs"

KT Burnett (KayT Resident), whom recently started a new Second Life blog "The Digitized," posted a commentary "SLB13: Right and Wrong" about what she felt what went well, and sometimes better, with the Birthday celebration, and a few things that could be improved on.

Among the pluses were the freebies and always having greeters at the Welcome area, separating the event into a busy week of events for those who love activity and crowds, and a more relaxed week (which in the past was as short as a couple days) in which residents could leisurely explore the exhibits with the crowds gone, and the Lindens at both the "Meet the Lindens" events and "dragging the Lindens in front of live audiences" which she felt "this had been something the community needed so badly – the feel that Linden Lab has not deserted Second Life, that they care, that they take interest in what’s happening on the Grid."

Such a big event inevitably has things going wrong. And among the minuses, in her opinion minor inconveniences, were that most performers did not put on a show that was significantly different from their usual performance, many exhibits were challenging to photograph (something I can relate to), and that she wondered if some exhibits could have done a better job in reflecting, or speaking about, the community they came from.

In the case of the Second Life Newser's exhibit, we've had an interesting challenge: what kind of exhibit represents a newspaper? The settings of our stories change with the locations. In the past,we've had office buildings. But after a while, we were soon asked to come up with something different. When our friend Silvia Ametza offered to build us a 19th Century style riverboat, that in my opinion would fit in a cowboy adventure, we went for it. Since we have a couple cartoons every week, it was suggested we put some up, so we did in the form of a slide show. And in the end, it worked. The exhibit got a number of complements from people who saw it.

What we'll build next year, well, that depends on the theme. Unless real life decides to throw a real humdinger of a monkey wrench at us, the Newser will be there.

Bixyl Shuftan

Eye on the Blog: "Second Life Improvements"

On October 20 on the official Second Life blog, Linden Lab announced some details about some upcoming planned changes to the grid, as well as one current change to it's website, "There’s a lot going on with Second Life these days, and we wanted to talk about a few of the projects that are either out or in the works!"

The first thing on their list was "Project Valhalla," which replaces the old Internet viewing framework with one that supports more recent technologies.

A new age of modern HTML5 content is upon us, and we're overhauling the way shared media (aka "media on a prim") works so that you can enjoy all kinds of modern web content within Second Life. Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) is coming to replace the aging QTWebkit framework. What you can now see in a Project Viewer is the latest released version of Chrome - so it will render all modern web technologies - like HTML5, CSS3, WebGL; has the latest security patches; and will be easy to keep updated to a recent version. What does this mean for your Flash content? What about Quicktime? They may still work, but because both can only be viewed if the user has correctly installed a 3rd party plugin, we can't  promise support and you shouldn’t expect that it will work for everyone. Standard HTML5 is the way of the future and this Viewer will enable it for anyone. There are still bugs to squash, and we’re iterating quickly to bring you a smooth inworld media and browsing experience.

On the official forums, Linden Lab invited residents to leave comments on a thread on the topic. Among those posting was AI Austin, "An initial test of the Project Valhalla viewer on my Windows 10 setup did have the media texture screens showing a quicktime server .sdp stream and a looping MPEG-4 video on the screens (as shown in the image above), but I am not sure if that is because of other elements I already have installed or if its included by default in the Valhalla viewer."

One can read more about, and download, the Valhalla Viewer Here.

 Next was an "Avatar Rendering Complexity" feature.

A new *Avatar Maximum Complexity* control lets you prevent expensive-to-render avatars from lagging you; any avatar over the limit is displayed as a solid color rather than rendering in full detail. A default limit is set based on the rendering performance of your system. You'll also get a notice when your own rendering complexity changes, and an indication when you're over the limit of too many of the avatars around you. Bundled together in this Viewer is a change that allows you to create and quickly change presets of your graphics settings, so as you go from a club to an art gallery, to the beach, or to your home, you can quickly adjust your settings to fit the scene.

Apparently if an avatar goes over the limit you set, it's displayed as a simple, single color, mannequin-like shape.

On the Linden-created forum thread on the topic, one resident expressed concern, calling it "giving avatar makers just another migraine to now deal with." Another felt it would encourage them to be more efficient. In New World Notes, Hamlet Au commented, "If it's implemented well, this could be an important feature to improve overall performance. At the same time, the very fact that it's necessary makes me sadly smile, because it reflects a paradox with user creativity in Second Life that's existed from the beginning: By making Second Life as open a creative platform as possible, Linden Lab unleashed incredible amounts of inventiveness that continues to be impressive (if overwhelming). At the same time, because it is so open, there's also abundant opportunities for creativity which is overly complex and laggy."

For now, one can try out the feature on the Release Candidate Viewer.

A few other details were briefly mentioned. Sorting notifications into categories, removing Flash from the secondlife.com website due to security concerns, a change that "now prevents loss of no-copy items due to a failed rez," and continuing the HTTP Project for improved texture loading.

For the blog post in full: Click Here. Besides Hamlet Au, Inara Pey and Daniel Voyager also wrote on the topic.

Eye on the Blog: "Check Out the Latest Improvements to Second Life"

In their latest blog entry, the Lindens talk about what they've been working on lately, "We (both the Lindens and some hard-working open source contributors) have been busy making improvements to Second Life, and now is a good time to let you know about some new things you’ll soon be able to enjoy. These changes include improving the way your avatar interacts with surfaces inworld, giving you more tools for managing your preferences for notifications and graphics settings, as well as improvements to make life easier for mesh creators and merchants."

What they talk about the most is a problem most of us have had, when an avatar appears to be floating a few inches off the ground, or the feet seem sunken into the ground like a plush carpet, or what they call "Hover Height." They begin by explaining why this has been a problem.

One of the surprisingly difficult things to do in a virtual world is to make things come to rest in a natural-looking way. Keeping feet on the ground when standing and the right body parts on furniture seems obvious, but getting an avatar to "just touch" without either floating above or penetrating into the adjacent surface can be computationally quite expensive. To avoid some of that expense, Second Life has always used approximations, which rely on some simplifying assumptions about the avatar shape and size. Those assumptions are adjusted by a number of factors including several of your shape parameter choices, values included in attachments you are wearing, and active animations. As we've all seen, sometimes these things combine to leave you floating above or sinking into the surface on which intuitively you should be resting. This is because the adjustments come from many sources and sometime interact in unexpected ways. Because they have not always been applied in exactly the same order, even if you wear the same set of attachments in the same setting you could sometimes get different results.


The Lab explained they've been working on the problem and making tests with an experimental "Project Hoverheight Viewer," "This viewer, and some accompanying server changes, improve things in two ways: the order in which we make adjustments to your vertical position has been made more stable -- combining the same set of attachments and animations should now always produce the same vertical offset: even if it's not perfect, it will at least be predictable."

Users can make adjustments as it's still not perfect, which are visible to both the one adjusting and those around him/her. It's also notable the Lab gives credit to Team Firestorm, "This new feature was inspired by a proposal from the Firestorm viewer team, and they've been helping with testing it."

There were other improvements mentioned. The Lab stated an upcoming viewer release will offer different types of notifications for different kinds of notices, such as money transactions, group invites, inventory items received, etc. They announced they're upgrading mesh import support due to problems with uploading larger and more complicated works. It currently can be seen in the "Project Importer Viewer," but should soon be available in future viewer release, including being able to see how one's model is being processed. The Lab also promises "in the next couple of months" that merchants will be able to make changes in their Marketplace page through the viewer. For those whom keep fiddling with their graphics between crowded events, going about lightly populated areas, and taking scenic pictures, one will be able to save separate sets of settings and name them. Linden Lab says, "All of these changes, along with other fixes and small improvements, should reach the default Viewer over the next several weeks."

For the blog post in full, Click Here.

Bixyl Shuftan

Eye on the Blog: Linden Lab Asking Residents Their Opinions About Marketplace

For those residents whom have had problems with Marketplace, here's your chance to sound off. Linden Lab says they'll be making some changes to the online shopping site, and are open to opinions on what needs to be fixed.

Next year, we'll be making some improvements to the Second Life Marketplace search functionality. To help focus those efforts, we'd like to get some feedback from Marketplace users (both buyers and merchants) about how Marketplace search is working for you today and, more importantly, what you’d like to see in the future.

For feedback, Linden Lab had a link to a survey, which can be found Here (click here). It will be up until January 6.

For the blog post in it's entirety, Click Here.

Eye on the Blog: "New Video: What’s New in Second Life?"

(Click here if the video fails to load)

A few days ago, Linden Lab posted on their blog a video, showing off their more recent improvements, in addition to Oculus Rift. 

We’ve just published a new video that briefly highlights a few of Second Life’s recent improvements and new features. If you’re a follower of this blog, the content will probably be familiar - it includes initiatives like Project Sunshine and SLShare  - but we all occasionally meet someone whose notions of Second Life are a little (or more than a little) outdated, and we hope this video may help get them more up-to-speed on what Second Life is like today. 

Considering the video was released right during the Terms of Service content creator rights controversy, some residents might consider the timing more than a coincidence.

EOTB: Linden Labs "Update on Recent Improvements"

At the close of February, Linden Labs posted on their blog a list of improvements they felt they made on the Grid recently, "We have recently released fixes that improve the user experience and performance. Here's a quick progress update on some of the projects we've been working on."

First on their list was the CHUI Beta Viewer, or Communications Hub User Interface. This project had several goals, such as bringing "all communication functions and conversation text into a single window," keeping IMs from being lost, and being able to view chat transcripts.

For more  information, DrFran Babcock reviewed the CHUI Viewer, and her article can be read here. There's also a thread available in the official forums.

Also on the list was Region Crossing, "We have made several improvements to region crossing that allow a smoother transition between regions, instead of the jerky transition some users experienced in the past." The Lab stated this feature was installed on the Grid on Jan 25, and claims "the number of reported teleport failures has dropped by 91%."

An announcement by RacerX Gullwing about this month's upcoming Cross-Sim Giant Snail Race mentioned the region crossing improvements. RacerX stated when an avatar is on a sim, information comes in not just about the region it's on but also the four adjacent ones. So when one enters a new sim, the information's already partially downloaded. RacerX felt this feature would save quite a few headaches for the cross-sim races.

Also, there was "a new version of Marketplace" released on Feb 5, "which adds new emails and provides the ability to opt out of each type of email. This will allow Merchants and Shoppers to be better informed about Marketplace activity," in addition to improving the reliability of email deliveries. Finally, an improvement aimed at Macintosh users: the Cocoa Project Viewer. It now has updates "to streamline development and improve viewer performance." It is available for download in the SL Wiki "Alternate Viewers" page. This viewer is not available for PCs.

The Lab promised further improvements soon, including a viewer made for content creators in mind.

Mesh Imports & “Back to Basics” Tech Improvements

On October 13th in the Second Life Blog, Jack Linden announced that the Mesh Import Beta was open to all residents, “Mesh Import allows you to bring models into Second Life from the many popular 3D tools such as Blender or Maya(t), using the COLLADA file format. We see this as an important step to empower content creators to make the inworld experience an even richer and more creative one than it is today.”

Those wanting to use the Beta will need to download a special Mesh Viewer, which will gain them access to the Aditi test grid. It’s sperate from the Main Grid, so anything done there can’t be moved back with you. To help out, a few walkthroughs are available to follow. Residents are reminded the same Terms of Service of the Main Grid also apply here, so only material a resident has rights to can be imported.


Although the base technology that drives mesh is in good shape, we still have some way to go before this is production ready. We wanted to get it into your hands sooner, versus later, to get your feedback. You should only take part if you’re comfortable with beta software that may crash or cause content that you’re working on to break in unexpected ways. In addition, the product design piece -- the user interface -- still needs some work so you can expect that the interface for mesh will change and improve over time. The Mesh Project Viewer will auto-update as we ship updated versions, so when there’s a new version, then you’ll be prompted to install it.

For the beta Grid, the maximum size of a prim was increased from 10 m to 64. This change may soon be main on the Main Grid soon, depending on how these larger prims perform.

For the rest of the blog entry, Click Here.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The next day on October 14th, FJ Linden announced some new developments for improving performance on Second Life, results of Philip Linden’s “Back to Basics” directive. To combat the “jitters” residents in a sim sometimes got whenever a new resident, especially a number of new residents about the same time, the “slow point” in the code was moved “to a seperate thread.” Faster texture loading times were aimed for, with reduced latency time for Viewer 2. A new group chat service under development was announced, with “test deployment ... by the end of the year.”

The 25 group limit will be raised to 40, with the “qualifier” that if it results in more lag they’ll roll the limit back. There was also a new Main Grid code deploment process, from three to four times a year to a weekly basis. He also announced the “Display Names” Feature was now in public beta, and mentioned the Mesh import beta of the previous day.

Response to the Mesh release was overall positive, with several people reporting some bugs. To the new tech developments, most everyone was happy to hear they’d be able to be in more groups, though a few expressed reservations about the possibility of having to give them up later. Of FJ Linden’s statement lag was being reduced, numerous residents responded they hadn’t noticed any less lag on the Grid.

For the complete blog post on tech improvements and responses, Click Here.