Category Archives: Second Life

City streets and dungeons deep …

I’ve been covering Chic Aeon’s Machinima Open Studio Project (MOSP) for a while now. Originally a part og the LEA’s Artist-in-Residence programme in 2012, where I first reviewed it, MOSP has more recently become a permanent part of the LEA environs, with a dedicated home on LEA7.

Chic herself continues to revise and enhance the facilities in the region, adding additional sets, props and vista in order to provide machinima makers with the widest choice of opportunities to meet their filming needs. Overall, the best way to keep up with the updates and changes is via the MOSP blog. The two most recent updates include a full region cityscape and a dungeon environment, both of which are well-suited to a number of uses.

"Night had fallen by the time I reached the city. The streets were deserted while all around me, lights shone from the high-rises and apartment blocks; a thousand silent eyes watching my every move..."

“Night had fallen by the time I reached the city, and I came full circle. The streets were deserted while all around me, lights shone from the high-rises and apartment blocks; a thousand silent eyes watching my every move…” – MOSP’s full region cityscape

The City build is a simple but effective set, offering a backdrop of tall buildings, streets, a row of shops and a large open area suitable for a number of uses, such as a park scene or open-air concert scene, and so on. Cars parked along the roadside add a measure of additional depth and the shops themselves are suitable for outfitting – or could even double as a row of houses.

The Dungeon is another simple but effective build, offering a series of torch-lit rooms built of stone and with stone floors which could easily be taken as the island of a castle or the cellars of a great, old house or simple a goal or cells standing out their own (there is a desert-like landscaping outside).

MOSP: Dungeon set

Chic intends to keep on adding to the various sets as time goes on, and in introducing more in the way of mesh as a primary building option, which is not to stay the current prim builds will vanish any time soon.

“When I started putting the first MOSP together — and again when it was resurrected on LEA7 — I wasn’t terribly concerned with prim counts. I mean, a WHOLE sim!” she explains on the MOSP blog.

“But as more sets were added, those new land impact points became more important. So part of my self-described job description for the future will be continuously updating existing builds with the emphasis on super quality and low land impact mesh. My personal equation has something to do with visual impact in comparison to land impact costs. So some older prim buildings will certainly remain for a while. They have their own charm and are some of the most popular places at MOSP.

“But I suspect that in a year, most of LEA7 will be mesh, so much more can be fitted in.”

As it is, and especially with the ground-level vistas, she’s achieved a good balance between mesh and prim builds, presenting a range of sets and options which are suitable for both machinima filming and photography. With the arrival of the new city and dungeon sets, Chic has further added to the many opportunities MOSP offers the machinimatographer and photographer.

“I knew the SUV was Calhogie’s; who else would drive something so over-the-top these days? Parking opposite, I got out of my car, feeling the comforting bulk of Mr. Redemption snuggled under my right arm inside my jacket. The SUV’s headlight flashed twice, and I paused, determined to get Calhogie out into the open….”

SL10BCC: “And soon, it begins…”

2 Replies

The sun dips slowly towards the sea, spreading shadows across a patchwork landscape of interacting footpaths which mark out a seemingly endless parade of green squares. Neat. Regimented. Empty.

On the water, the wooden piers also mark a series of tidy squares over the water, the tide occasionally slapping against their sides. For now, their lamps remain unlit and the track running beside them quiet.

Almost everywhere is still beneath the high, scudding clouds. Nowhere is a soul to be seen.

It is a time of quiet expectation. A calm before a coming storm of activity which will see the squares of green and blue transformed into the most amazing and awesome builds, all raised with a single purpose: to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Second Life.

This is a last chance to see the regions in their almost untouched state. For on Sunday 26th May they will be open to the exhibitors who have waited so patiently to be a part of the celebrations, and so will begin the first of several weeks of building and arranging which will itself herald the coming celebrations.

Soon gardens, buildings, stages and other wonders will spring from the ground, and over – and under – the water wonderful builds will start to appear, and these regions, so quiet and calm when seen on the map today, will be a riot of green dots as builders, assistants, helpers and SL10BCC staff work to ensure everything is ready for the Grand Opening on June 16th.

And if truth be told, some of the work has already started … Over here I can see the land has been altered, sculpted into hills and other forms, where it is rumoured strange beasts may well roam; over there lay woods and trees in bloom; and over there. Oh my, over there stands … Well, you’ll just have to wait and see, for I’ve promised to say no more…

But the wait will be worth it, of that you can be sure.

Key Dates

May 26 – Sims open to builders
June 6 – Photo contest closes
June 16 – Grand Opening
June 23 – Official Birthday day and final day of performances
June 29 – Sims close to the public
July 1 – All builds to be dismantled – sims go offline

Home and Garden Expo opens

Release a Lantern of Peace and Love

In 2012, Alchemy Immortalis created a lantern which formed the centrepiece of remembering all those who had survived cancer’s ravages and those who had succumbed in their battle against the disease through a special daily ceremony in which lanterns would be released and allowed to float up into the sky.

The ceremony became very special to the people who attended, and so the folks at PrimPerfect have decided to host it again in 2013. So, they’ve extended an invitation for people to join them at the Prim Perfect platform on Home Expo 6 every day of the Expo at 16:00 for a communal release of lanterns both to celebrate the living and in memory of those we have loved and lost.

PrimPerfect are also hosting a series of talks with designers throughout the week of the Expo, starting at 15:00 SLT on Friday May 24th with Loz Hyde, Maxwell Graf and Kriss Lehmann, all of whom will be talking mesh.

Meet the Designers with PrimPerfect

The talks will all be taking place at the PrimPerfect Temple at the Expo.

SL projects update week 21 (3) more server, viewer and interest list bits

Server Deployments

As noted in part 2 of this report, due to issues with the JSON deployment made to all three Release Candidate channels in week 20, there was no Main channel deployment in week 21.

Maestro Linden likes to keep fit while chairing the Server Beta meeting

On Wednesday May 22nd, the three Release Candidate (RC channels should each receive the following updates:
Magnum received an update to the server maintenance project deployed to all three RC channels in week 20 which includes fixes for bugs within the LSL support to create and parse JSON-formatted strings. Release notes.
BlueSteel received a further update to the experience tools project, and there should be no visible changes with this update. Release notes
LeTigre received an update related to the simulator’s interest list subsystem which reduces scene loading time when entering a new region. Release notes.

As mentioned above, the Magnum updates included a fix for an issue within the LSL JSON capabilities deployed to the three RC channels in week 20. Currently, the fix appears to have resolved the issues, so it is possible the JSON capabilities will reach more of the grid once more in week 22.

“json is a javascript way to describe data and pass data between scripts or services. In that regard one of the biggest benefits of json in LSL is for improving the ability of LSL to interact with 3rd party APIs,” Kelly Linden explained at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday May 23rd after questions were asked as to the purpose of the capabilities. “Because it is simple and relatively ‘complete’ even non-javascript services use it on the internet to exchange data … I’ve been interested in services like parse.com for example which let you store and retrieve data very easily … in json … https://parse.com/docs/rest this is what would work with LSL.”

Kelly also noted the new capability might be used within LSL, but with a small caveat, saying, “If you are only working within LSL there may be some specific cases where it is beneficial, but other string to list functionality will probably be fine.”

The package deployed to Magnum also included a fix for the bug introduced into the RC channels in week 20 which affects control event triggering in attachment’s child prims after changing regions. However, the fix as deployed is described as “interim”, and corrects the problem (which is described in full here) by reverting the fix for SVC-8227 (ApplyImpulse now works only in the root prim). Referring to the situation at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday May 23rd, Maestro Linden said, “we hope to get a ‘real’ fix in for that sometime in the future.”

SL Viewer

Further to part one of this report, Oz Linden has clarified the function of the new “Willing to update to release candidate” option in project / beta viewers. As I’ve previously mentioned, when a viewer is believed to be of release quality, it will be put into a release candidate, which will be released to a chosen number of users (the number determined by Linden Lab). By leaving this new option checked, users are indicating that they are willing to receive any such release candidate updates if they are selected by LL to receive them. Unchecking the option means that a user will not be included in the count for any release candidate update, and so will not receive any updates until such time as the viewer reaches release status.

The new “Willing to Update” option

Even so, leaving the box checked does not mean a user will automatically receive release candidate updates – as noted above, LL will determine the total number of users who will receive any given release candidate updates. These will be chosen at random from those who are using the project / beta viewer, and once this number has been reached, no further users will receive the update regardless as to whether the option is enabled or not. If necessary, the selection process can be additionally targeted at specific operating systems, but the Lab currently don’t have plans to use this capability.

While the new release process is not dependent upon Materials Processing project viewer reaching a beta release status, it still appears unlikely that the new processed will be deployed until after Materials has done so. Once the new release process has been deployed, Oz indicates that it is likely that a number of viewer candidates will appear – such as a bug fix candidate a Snowstorm candidate and possibly others as well, although the exact timing and spacing of the releases is unclear.

Interest List News

Andrew Linden

Also attending the Server Beta meeting, Andrew Linden provided a further update on the interest list updates deployed to LeTigre. These amount to a number of fixes and updates to the code.

“The main thing in that RC is some minor tweaks to help the scene load a little faster on login and teleport. The effects are small, especially in the case where you have a full cache for that region so I’m guessing that no one has really noticed the scene loading any faster.” Andrew explained, “There was [also] one minor bug I fixed for people with really low-bandwidth settings… the updates were not properly getting re-sorted when the camera moved around, so the scene would continue to stream in based on where you were standing when you arrived but most people with >500kbps bandwidth shouldn’t notice that problem — the scene usually loads fast enough now. “

He went on to reiterate that the LeTigre deployment also includes a partial fix for the “Meeroo update” problem of objects not updating correctly after being outside of the camera’s field-of-view. Again, as mentioned in part 2 of this report, the fix works with affected objects which are up to 10 metres away. However, he believes he now has a more complete fix for the problem, but has yet to test it. He also believes that the issue causing the “Meeroo update” problem may also be responsible for BUG-2644 (pathfinding characters not updating behind the camera) is the same problem as the Meeroo animation, and is hopeful his intended fix will correct that as well.

Finally, the update fixes a minor bug where the green avatar dots on the mini map would not update correctly for avatars behind the camera.

The downside to the LeTigre update is that it did introduce a crash mode, which Andrew described as “rare… only about 6 per day,” and which is currently being investigated.

Server-side Baking / Appearance

As noted in week 20, it has been hoped that the server-side of the SSB/A code would be enabled on two test regions on the Main grid. These regions are Intended specifically for TPVs to carry out functional tests on the viewer code away from the distractions of broader issues which interfered with testing on Aditi. As such, they should not be considered a sign that deployment of the server-side code had commenced. It had been hoped that the two regions would be enabled this week, but at the time of writing, this is not yet the case. This doesn’t necessarily mean the project is delayed, however.

In terms of overall deployment, matters are unlikely to have changed since week 20, and the Lab will still in part be looking at this initial “TPV test” period as an opportunity to gain further additional metrics on the system and to look for anything untoward occurring prior to committing to possible dates.

Living in the Modem World

One woman's views on Second Life

Category Archives: Second Life

City streets and dungeons deep …

Related Links