RFL Announcement: Special Video Event

 

Event Name: SPECIAL EVENT VIDEO ANNOUNCEMENT

When: Saturday FEBRUARY 7, Noon - 12:15pm

Brief Description of Event:
Watch along as two of your favorite mischievous dinkie cats reveal the World Premier release of a new RFL video on YouTube that will promote an event we will be hosting soon at a parcel near you! Video available starting at noon SLT at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tt7oRrWabI

Public Viewing Location:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/American%20Cancer%20Society/229/229/31

TEAMS: Ertina Loopen Memorial Foundation and Hope Floaters 

 

Avatar Release Party at Avagora Mall

 

 

Shukuavli Release Party

December 01 at 7PM SL time, 9PM SL time

 

Three Avatar Raffles

 

Live DJ, Sponsored Mods

 http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Montecito%20Bay/92/139/702

 

Laura X Is Out

 

After months in development, Laura X has been released.

 

It was August in which it was announced that Maitreya announced they were coming up with a new mesh body, the Laura X. Several days ago, there was an announcement in the group they were "coming ever closer to release," and that already clothing for the new body was out "we work with the creator community to make this release the best it can be for everyone." 

 

Finally on late Monday night, there was talk in a few groups about the body finally being available. On Tuesday, Gemma Cleanslate would confirm it was finally available at the Maitreya store. She managed to get to the sim, also named Maitreya, which was packed, "prepare for lag." Someone would comment, "It's not an update, which is why I'm being careful to not say update .. it's redeliver your purchase which now contains a new body as well. ... You don't buy if you already own, just get your previous purchase redelivered."

Ryan Schultz would message the Newser, "Everybody who has Lara can just click on the Redeliver button (under the Misc tab) on the HUD to get a redelivery, which includes both LaraX and Lara 5.3. ... I'd say that the biggest differences are in the shoulder, armpit, and upper arm area, and the hips and thighs. A lot of mid-sleeve and short-sleeve items are not going to work with LaraX, as well as bathing suits, panties or any other skimpy clothing. Full sleeve length or sleeveless outfits should work, though. Full-length pants and non-skintight skirts of any length should also work, as you can still alpha out what pokes through relatively easily." He stated the body included some underwear, and felt about half of one's outfits wouldn't work well with it, "And they finally fixed the too-high armpits."

 

So Maitreya fans now have their new body just in time for the Christmas shopping season.

Bixyl Shuftan and Gemma Cleanslate

Laura X Release Date Not Announced Yet

 

 Checking in on Bellisseria chat, one question that occasionally came up was about when the new Maitreya avatars were coming out. It was soon brought up by Gemma Cleanslate that there had been no release date given, posting a notice from the Maitreya group about it.

 

The most common question all day every day is about a release date for Lara X.   We do not post projected release dates. When something is ready, we release it. This means that we do not sit waiting for the date to arrive. When it's done you get it. This also means that we never have to deal with the drama of delaying a release. And we don't have to rush anything to get it good enough for release. This is how we have always done it. Nobody knows a release date.

 

Gemma would say the notice was sent by Gryphon Ronas, "first notice I have ever gotten in that group."

SL Video: "Second Life Mobile - June 2023 - SL20B Update"

 

 

 (Click here if the video does not play)

From Linden Lab, a five minute video with Grumpity, Mojo, and Patch Linden about the Lab's progress on the Second Life Mobile Viewer. It's looking like it's release won't be until 2024 as Grumpity was saying, "More features are coming in the next couple quarters as we work towards a beta." Grumpity was saying some of the latest work was about getting the viewer to unload old objects so new ones could be loaded as people move to different areas.

 

Announcement: CAF Knucker Avatar Release Party at Montecito Bay

 

Montecito Bay is proud to present the CAF Knucker avatar!

The Knucker comes as Bakes on Mesh, and the skins can be tinted to any color desired. Comes with many different markings in an included box. There will be more skins available in the future. For those wanting to dress it, it has a tophat, neckbow, t-shirt and headbow left/right. The creator includes a little over 40 accessories that aren't clothing items that come included with the avatar.

Currently the Knucker has six dances in its action HUD and one meme dance. You can click these dances independently or click the randomize dance to let it dance for you at random. It comes with a random sound maker, and walking sounds.

The party is Friday January 28 at 6 PM. There will be three raffles for a chance for a free avatar. The contest is "Best in Fantasy."

See you there.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Montecito%20Bay/44/154/902
 

A Bad Week For Facebook and Twitch, Windows 11 Launched

It was not the best week for Facebook last week.  On Tuesday October 5, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook manager turned whistleblower, testified before Congress. She stated the company knew it's app Instagram could be hazardous to the mental health of teenage girls, and knew it was not doing enough to combat disinformation on it's social media website that contributed to the worsening political divide in the United States and led to the January 6 riot. While it could have taken measures to protect girls on Instagram and done more about misinformation on Facebook, it had not done so as the company didn't want to cut into it's profits, putting money over the safety of it's customers. Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg would respond with a statement denying her accusations.

But then came more bad news in the form of a six hour outage of both Facebook and Instagram. While for most it was an annoyance, some small businesses have come to rely on Facebook for communication with their customers. Also affected were sets of Oculus VR headgear. The company would eventually offer an apology.  It's estimated that the company lost billions from this outage. Then on Friday, the company suffered another outage and once again Facebook and Instagram were down once more, another blow to it's reputation.

Facebook wasn't the only social media platform to face big trouble. On Wed Oct 6, there was a massive data leak targeting Twitch. Over 100 gigabytes of data was posted online on Wednesday October 6. This includes operational details that the company "fiercely guards," such as how many millions the top streamers made in revenue from broadcasting. "Aside from the salary details, the documents seems to contain the site's source code and even technical details for yet to be released products and platforms," Joe Tidy in an article on BBC News would say, adding if everything was confirmed it would be, "the biggest leak I have ever seen - an entire company's most valuable data cleaned out in one fell swoop." ThreatModeler founder and CEO Archie Agarwal would say of the data breach,"This is as bad as it could possibly be."

While there didn't seem to be any passwords included in the leaked data, it was listed as "part one," hinting there was more to come. Still, it is reccomended that Twitch users change their passwords anyway.

Tuesday October 5 was the release date of Windows 11. Six years ago, Microsoft was saying there would be only new installments of Windows 10. That has changed, and the company has launched a new version that promises to be "clean and fresh and simpler." If you're reluctant to change over to the new system, you'll have plenty of company. The list of machines the company says this version of Windows needs has been described as "ridiculously strict." In a review on PC Gamer, the writers thought Windows 11 had a few nice improvements, but nothing worth upgrading to the new system, and a number of reasons to wait. Officially, PC users have until October 2025 to wait. After that, Microsoft plans no more technical or security updates.

Sources: BBC News, PC Gamer, The Verge   

Bixyl Shuftan
  

Red Rocket Cola

 

In real life, temperatures are rising in much of the world as the late spring arrives and summer is around the corner. And in many places nothing quenches the thirst quite like a good ice-cold soda. In Second Life, avatars don't exactly get thirsty, but it can look better if you get something to drink. While there's a few venting machines inworld, they're often just props or have limited interactivity or are "spammy." Recently at Montecito Bay, a new one was introduced made by someone who thought they could be much better: "Red Rocket Cola." It was a fun party with lots of music, plenty of games and prizes, and lots of virtual soda. The Newser was there, and had a word with Eliwood407 Resident, the maker of the dispenser.

Read the story in Design. 
 

New Firestorm Viewer, Christmas Gifts

 

Although the Linden Viewer made the Environmental Enhancement Project part of it's features in April, it wasn't until August that Team Firestorm so much as had a beta version of a viewer with the feature available. A few days ago on December 10, they finally released an official version of their viewer with the feature: 6.4.12 (62831).

Many of you have been waiting a long time for our full release of EEP! This is Linden Lab’s “Environmental Enhancement Project,” which replaces Firestorm’s Windlight feature. This feature has meant we’ve had to redesign some UI panels and functionality within the viewer. Now, we know that change can be hard, but there’s no getting around this one. EEP is here to stay, and Linden Lab did a crazy amount of hard work on this as we and others incessantly found and reported the bugs. ... But this update has LOADS more than just EEP packed inside. It’s been a long time since our last release, and we’ve had plenty of time to add valuable changes, features, fixes and improvements! ...

Some friends of mine have already downloaded the viewer. A few have told me that the new viewer seems to take longer to rezz objects than the last one, so some people may want to be prepared to reinstall the previous version. The beta EEP viewer and Firestorm version 6.2.4.57588 will be blocked on December 31, "As per our 3-version rule."

To celebrate, Team Firestorm threw a party with some gifts. While the party is over, the gifts are still available. In the sky platform above the Firestorm sims, one can pick up the "hair gift" and two pets, a panther and a ferret. 

!!Firelight!! is celebrating with a unisex holiday hair gift. It looks great on both male and female avatars. The gift includes two versions: a rigged version and an unrigged version. You can resize and reshape the unrigged version to fit almost any head. The gift comes with a 16-shade hair-color HUD. A color wheel is also included so you can tint to your liking.

Wild Kajaera has made us 2 gifts! First is the most amazing and stunning Limited Edition Black Panther to celebrate the holiday season.

Their second gift is a Ferret! WK Ferrets are much like the real world they love to run around and play with their toys they have. As a forever pet they need no food unless you give them a wild thing potion.

It's unknown how much longer the gifts will be around.

https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Firestorm%20Dow%20Forest/228/244/3902

Bixyl Shuftan

Firestorm Has Bakes On Mesh

It was a little over a month ago when Linden Lab announced the Bakes On Mesh feature was on the official Second Life viewer. As it's the Firestorm viewer which is the most popular, many residents were not as excited as they otherwise would be, feeling it's real impact would be felt only when it's team came out with a version with the feature. A few days ago, Team Firestorm announced their new version 6.3.2.58052, which has Bakes On Mesh, was live and available for download.

The Bakes on Mesh release from Firestorm has been long awaited; apologies for that. This should be considered by all in SL a MAJOR UPDATE, and it is important that all our SL users upgrade to it. This update contains a lot of rendering-related changes from Linden Lab, without which you WILL be running into avatars that look badly broken to you. Even if you don’t intend to use or purchase anything with BoM, you will still need to be able to see BoM items in your viewer. Please take the update. I can assure you we have put this through a rigorous QA process; it’s a great build!

On the whole, response has been positive. I have heard a couple people feel the viewer was bugged, and recommended people wait a few to several days for bug fixes until downloading for use. But others didn't seem to notice a problem. Some are already taking advantage of the features Bakes On Mesh has to offer. And using the previous version, I was starting to notice a few of them, identifiable as their textures appeared glitched. To stop seeing these glitches, one has to download the new viewer.

With the most popular viewer in Second Life now Bakes On Mesh compatible, hopefully residents will start seeing more of the benefits such as better designed avatars, and somewhat less lag.

Bixyl Shuftan

Firestorm To Offer Seperate Viewers For Second Life And Opensim

For years, Team Firestorm has offered not only a viewer that can access Second Life, but also one that can go online either Second Life or the Opensim girds. In a recent announcement however, Firestorm's team leader Jessica Lyon announced they would no longer offer a viewer that can get on either virtual world.

We have reached a milestone in how we handle Open Simulator and Second Life binaries. In the past we have provided SL-only builds AND OpenSim-and-SL builds. This has always caused much confusion to our users, and for that reason—among many others—we have forked our code into two repositories. This means we can now issue updates for Second Life and updates for OpenSim independently of each other. It also makes it a lot easier for us to develop for Second Life without worrying about backwards compatibility with OpenSim, and to develop for OpenSim without concern about SL compatibility. Everyone wins!

No longer will the two be tied by release date or version numbers. Firestorm developer Beq Janus has been communicating with OpenSim developers and grid owners and has been working hard on OpenSim-specific issues for a future OpenSim Firestorm viewer update.

The SL and OS Viewer will still work for now. But the next viewers for Second Life and Opensim will only work on their respective grids.

Click Here for the blog post in full.

Gaming News in Brief

Antilia Releases Character Creator Demo: Antilia, the Fantasy game that's been in development for about a decade, recently released a game character creation demo. Besides species, and appearances, players can chose what kind of background the character had, such as location, occupations of the parents, education, etc. (youtube) But don't expect the game to be available to play anytime soon. The game "is still in early to mid development," and no beta release has been set yet.

Wildstar Closure Announced: Carbine Studios, the makers of the Wildstar MMO which was recently slated for shutdown due to Carbine's owners, NCSoft, announcing the closing of the studio, announced the date of the game's shutdown: November 28. Some seasonal in-game events have been placed on an accelerated schedule, and Carbine invited all players on the last day to "Join us in-game for the final few hours as we have some fun. More details to come!"

PC Magazine, MassivelyOp , 

Maple Story 2 : There's an upcoming MMO that will be launched later this week that's gotten a little talk among people I know: Maple Story 2. A prequel to the original game, there's much more content here than the previous game, such as player housing. One review I listened to cautioned that the game comes from a company, Nexon, "that loves to monetize their games" and that it had the potential to go "very pay to win very fast."

MMOByte, MassivelyOp  

 Image credit: Nydia Tungsten, MMOByte

Milky Way Kirin Mod Release Party at Montecito Bay's Avagora

Tuesday August 28 was the day The Avagora Mall at Montecito Bay had a release party for a new product: the Milky Way Kirin Mod. The event had four raffles, three of which were for gift cards to the Milky Way store, the fourth which was for a free modded avatar. There was also a "Come As You Are" contest that started out for 3400 Lindens, but people added more and more to the prize, 5000 Lindens, 10,000 Lindens, and finally at 13,001 Linden dollars. "That board, think it was about to blow up," someone would comment in the Discord chat. There were about 42 people in the sim at one point, presumably all but maybe one or two at the event. 

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Montecito%20Bay/53/130/703

Scenes From The Relay: Lantern Release Ceremony

The Relay for Life is usually a fun time for all. But there are occasional reminders of the seriousness of why the fundraiser exists. At the Home and Garden Expo, there's been a daily lantern release ceremony, every day at 4PM. It's suggested those watching set their viewers to Midnight.

In the ceremony, many dozens, well over a hundred, of paper lanterns slowly float up into the air, illuminating the sky. The lanterns represent friends and loved ones lost to cancer. The time I watched the ceremony with several other relayers, one talked about how his grandfather had taught him how to make his own paper. We each reflected on those we knew whom had passed away from the illness, and hoped that someday soon, there would be a cure for all forms of it.

Bixyl Shuftan

Press Release: GoSpeed Racer Publishing eBook Novel

What? :        Release of an eBook novel from an SL resident.
Who?:          GoSpeed Rasere aka GoSpeed Racer
When?:        3 February 2018

Long time Second Life Resident, GoSpeed Rasere, is self publishing a science fiction novel on Amazon and Smashwords. The novel features several SL residents as main characters living in a futuristic virtual reality simulation. The novel, Rasere's War, is the first in a three book series. The follow on novel, We Built This City, is completed and will be released later in the spring.

Links to purchase the book are at: http://www.rjacques.net/bookstore/

I'm available for interviews on weekends and from 3-6pm SLT weekdays. Alternately you may submit questions via email gospeed@konastream.co

Lantern Release Ceremony At The RFL Home And Garden Expo

The Home and Garden Expo is taking place in Second Life. Among the events there is the Lantern Release Ceremony. It takes place every day at 4PM at the Hope 5 sim. At the start of the event virtual replicas of Asian lanterns are released into the air, in remembrance of friends and loved ones whom have been lost.

Saffia Widdershins, who invited me to the event, told me, "These lanterns were created especially for the Home and Garden Expo about seven years ago, by Alchemy Immortalis. We started the tradition of releasing them then, and ever since, every day at Expo, we have the lantern release ceremony."

The ceremony ends with a sunrise, a reminder that tomorrow is another day, and of new beginnings.

For more on the ceremony, check the RFL Home and Expo blog. To head to the Expo, head to http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Hope%201/128/123/23 .

Bixyl Shuftan

News and Commentary: Linden Lab Changing From Open Beta to Open Alpha Release

When Linden Labs first gave an estimate in September 2016 of when their next-generation virtual world Sansar would be in open beta, the date given was January 2017. In early Janurary, the date was described as "after March." Later in January, the date given was sometime in "the first half of 2017," meaning as late as June 2017. But when the Irish Times wrote about an interview they did of CEO Ebbe Altberg, they reported that Sansar would be in an "open alpha" release sometime this summer 2017. At what point it would go into beta was unexplained.

What this suggests is not only is Sansar currently at "an early stage of development," as Hamlet Au commented, but that they are having more difficulties and delays than anticipated. When Linden Lab placed an ad for Linkedin for a software engineer to help them develop a voxel-based terrain editor, Hamlet was initially quite impressed. But with these delays, he feels they should "have hired someone to build that maybe two years ago." This is on top of existing doubts about Sansar, it beginning to remind him of the old "Blue Mars" virtual world of several years ago, which was fading into obscurity after less than two.

So when will Sansat be complete? Hamlet was thinking that might not be until sometime in 2018. How will users react to an unstable open alpha Sansar that crashes more than Second Life? Probably not very well.

Source: New World Notes , The Irish Times

Bixyl Shuftan

Firestorm Releases Bento-Capable Viewer One Week After Linden Lab's

It was a little more than a week ago on December 5 in which Linden Lab announced that Project Bento was now part of the official viewer. For those who don't know, Project Bento has been in development by the Lab for more than a year. The most significant update to avatar design in many years, it allows for more detail in avatar design, such as facial expressions and hand movements, and would allow for more flexibility in nonhuman designs.

Linden Lab is proud to announce that Project Bento is now part of the default Viewer! Bento is probably the single most extensive update to the avatar skeleton ever, and as a result of countless hours of testing, updating, reconfiguring, testing… you get the picture, we are now live. Now everyone can enjoy the extra bones creators have taken advantage of to bring you true quadrupeds, winged avatars, fingers, facial expressions and more.

Xiola Linden stated that the Lab was working on "Best Practice" documents, including tutorials,  that would be available next year. For now residents could check out Bento's entry in the Knowledge Base.

With this much-anticipated update, Hamlet Au of New World Notes (and probably a few others) were predicting a number of Second Life's longtime users, whom as a group have an "overwhelming" preference for third-party viewers, would finally start embracing the Linden Viewer. But as it turned out, not many seemed to be downloading it. Apparently people were waiting for Team Firestorm, the developers of the most popular Second Life viewer to  come up with their own Bento-integrated viewer.

On Tuesday December 13, Team Firestorm announced their Bento-compatable viewer was now ready and available for people to download and use.

The demand for a Bento-capable Firestorm Viewer has been overwhelming, to say the least! With over 8,000 people in our preview group running it, is widely regarded as faster by testers and is expected to be a rock-solid update.... Even if you have no intention of using Bento-enabled content or animations, you will need this viewer in order to see it properly on others.

Team Team Firestorm recommended checking out Inara Pey's blog entry on the Bento release, whom would also write about Team Firestorm's Bento viewer.

With The Firestorm Bento-capable viewer out, this means that many more residents will soon be able to see and use avatars making use of the improved avatars. Which means more content creators will be certain to build such avatars. Considering the variety of avatars already on the market from the giant Colossus, to micros, to taurs such as Chakats, and many others, it should be interesting to see what designers come up with in the coming months.

Sources: Linden Lab, New World Notes, Team Firestorm  

Bixyl Shuftan

Project Sansar to Go Public in January 2017, Ebbe Linden States In Interview

More than two years since it's development was first announced, Ebbe Linden is confident enough about Project Sansar's development that he announced a date for when it will be fully available for the general public: January 2017.

Ebbe gave the date in an interview with Donnie SC Lygonis. He stated a few months ago in testing, Sansar had a high "discomfort rating." But since then, it's improved. Ebbe also repeated that the Lab plans to invite in an additional number of testers, by invitation only, later this August.

So it seems after about two and a half years, people will finally be able to set foot in the virtual world.

For the Podcast with the interview: Click here .

*Addition* Listening to the video, Ebbe Linden described the decision to start work on a new virtual world as their response to Second Life's slowly declining user base. They had been trying to do something about it for a while, and after Ebbe came in they concluded the best thing to do was to work on something entirely new.

Sources: Daniel Voyager, Jo Yardley

Bixyl Shuftan

Linden Lab Launches Dio, "Creative and Social Experience"

Just a few days after announcing it's purchase of Blocksworld, Linden Labs unveiled it's latest product: "dio."

In the video Linden released in time for dio, it was branded as a "creative and social experience that allows anyone to make and explore places based on anything." The press release stated users could "create places by adding text, photos, videos, and interactive objects into interconnected 'rooms' that give spatial context to the content you share. You can keep your places private, share them with friends and family, or allow everyone to explore and enjoy them." It also states there was an online chat feature with other users, and in the future one would be able to make money off the places they created.



Rod Humble was quoted as saying, "dio is a new shared creative space on the web. Based around the concept of linked spaces, dio makes it easy and fun to create  or visit experiences of all kinds." He described dio as still being in development, in beta, "but so far our testers have created a vast range of spaces." He also brought up the future ability to make money by mentioning what Second Life's content creators have done, "One of the things that's made Second Life successful is that users were able to monetize their own creativity by selling their creations. Second Life's economy was extremely robots with over $500 million worth of user to user transactions last year." He hoped that by sharing ad revenue with dio space crators and allowing them to sell their spaces, "this will encourage the kid of incredible dedication and creativity we've seen in Second Life."

Forbes writer Carol Pinchefsky wrote about someone from the Linden Lab staff showing some of what dio had to offer, saying it could be used for personal pages, games , and more. He suggested the same features that could be used for a game could be used to make an advertisement for a hotel's page. Of the plans to allow dio users to make money, Pinchefsky called it a welcome contrast to the Instagram service changing it's fine print to sell the pictures uploaded by it's users without permission or giving them a dime, "Linden Lab will be giving rather than taking. It's a great concept, one that I can't wait to see implemented."

Hamlet Au expressed similar optimism about dio. He also noted that in the terms of agreement, transactions would be done in Linden dollars, and mentioned the LindeX exchange. He felt this was a sign there would be some future interaction between Second Life and dio "at least through commerce." Hamlet reported on a dio space created by SL blogger Inara Pey, "it seems to be the most detailed and interactive by far, though there seems to be no sign of it now.

Not everyone has been impressed with dio. Iris Ophelia commented that the hype made it look like "possibly the latest and greatest thing." But sitting down to take a look at it, her impression changed. She described the video as misinforming, feeling it suggested moving a character around. She, and a number of other readers, felt "dio is more like a MUCK/MUD/MUSH with pictures than anything else." The idea of using dio to make a store for Second Life merchants she thought "would be one of the least effective uses of the platform," contrasting the "dynamic social experience" of the Bare Rose store to the "comparatively static spaces of dio." She felt dio was easy to use and had much potential, "but it's not the only option, nor is it the best tool for the job."

If you want to check out dio for  yourself (and yes, it really is spelled with a lower case 'd'), go to https://www.dio.com. One of the spaces there is a new rendidtion of a classic computer game from the late 70s, "Adventure the Colossal Cave." There's also a list of tutorial videos Here.

Sources: Linden Lab, Forbes, New World Notes

Bixyl Shuftan