Recent Relay For Life Events

 

There's been much happening with the Relay for Life in the past few days. With the Fantasy Faire and Relaystock over, there were a number of events by the teams. On Thursday May 19 was "Bid the Lindens Bald," taking place at the side of the Relaystock sim next to American Cancer Society. A number of Lindens and Moles, including Patch Linden, were in five teams, each with a kiosk for people to donate to. The team that raised the least would end up losing their hair.

It was a huge part with way over fifty people present, including many of the Lindens and Moles. Team four, consisting of Frosty Linden, Kit Linden, Sequoia Linden, Derrick Linden, Milli Mole, was the one that came up short, and ended up in the barber chairs. A total of 620,682 Lindens was raised.

Saturday May 20 was the Sunbeamer (and Roos) Air Show. Taking place at Farshore Field in Sunlight Bay, as usual Cynthia Farshore outdid herself with displays of WW2 aircraft, numerous carnival rides, had a cannon people could shoot themselves into the air and a parachute to float back down, and a bicycle blimp racetrack that had people going about in three dimensions. There was also a performance by "DJ Kayala and the Kamgaroos" from "Roos With a Dream." 

There was also a performance from the Hawks Aerobatic Team, which put on quite a show.

Wildstar Beaumont would take some pictures and post them: (here). 

A little more than 10,000 Lindens was raised by Team Sunbeamers that day. The Roos would also make several thousand Lindens.

Later that day from 3-5 PM Was "The Ultimate Hud To Hud Dance Challenge," taking place between the Relay Rockers and "Roos With A Dream." This was a competition decided by donations to the kiosk of each team. 

There was some playful trash-talking between the two teams as the competition for Lindens was fairly intense as the two teams were close. But in the end, the Roos pulled out a win. Then the two teams danced together in celebration.

A total of $100,000 LIndens were raised by both teams.

There were other events that weekend by other teams, and there was the Sci-fi con (https://www.scificon.org/) and several more "Bid Me" events by the Sunbeamers at Club Cutlass. More on those later.

Go Relay!

Bixyl Shuftan
 

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.