Category Archives: NEWS

Kim K. Using Second Life Avatars In Her Social Media Postings

by

Could this be the beginning of a new wave of Second Life users? We shall see.

Kim Kardashian Second Life avatars

From Kardashian’s Instagram feed

Turns out that Kim Kardashian Second Life avatar from last week wasn’t just a one-off to promote her perfume brand — Ms. Kardashian-West just posted this pic above featuring three SL avatars on her social media channels. And so many, many years after any major pop brand has integrated Second Life content into their media, Kim Kardashian remains an outlier. I really can’t think of a precedent to this; I mean, Drew Carey used to talk about his favorite Second Life creators on Twitter, but even Carey would agree that this Kardashian campaign is many multitudes more massive. The mystery is how it came to be.

Kim Kardashian Second Life avatars Instagram KKW perfumeKardashian’s official @kkwfragance perfume brand on Instagram has even more SL pics

I have, of course, reached out to Kardashian’s social media people, and will let readers know when/if I get a reply. By the way, some have speculated that these SL avatars are from her Kimoji mobile app, but having just downloaded it, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The Kimoji avatars all appear to be from IMVU — look:

 

Kimoji IMVU avatarsAnd indeed, this was actually announced a couple years ago:

IMVU, the social network with 3D animated avatars, said that it has provided the technology behind a new version of the popular Kimoji paid app created by Kim Kardashian West… “Kanye and I found this amazing social experience company, IMVU, and worked with them on creating some of our latest Kimoji designs and GIFs. They’re such innovators who have helped me really set Kimoji apart,” Kardashian wrote on her site.

So it’s even stranger that she’d switch from IMVU to SL for this new campaign. (Stranger still that her SL avatar looks less like Kim Kardashian and more like Cher, but that’s a topic for another post.)

Update, 4:40pm: Added links and pics to KKW’s perfume brand on Instagram (hat tip: Kirsten Corleone).

SLB15 Meet the Lindens – Follow Up and Summary

by
Promotional poster for Meet the Lindens at SL15B. Credit: Linden Lab
It was most definitely interesting to sit in and listen to what each Linden who spoke had to say.  From learning about the future of Second Life, to the everyday workings behind the scenes,  I have found an article written by Inara Pey – that summed everything up beautifully- that I would like to take the time to pass on – she is a wonderful source of inspiration and news in second life – give her a follow!

Until next year!

Credits: Inara Pey

Meet the Lindens is now a regular part of the Second Life anniversary landscape. Over the course of the week of celebrations, it gives Second Life users the chance to find out more about the people working at Linden Lab, find out about projects and plans, and the work being carried out on Second Life and Sansar, ask questions about matters of interest / concern to them.

For Meet the Lindens 2018, Saffia Widdershins sat down with six members of the Second Life team, and also with Linden Lab CEO, Ebbe Altberg.

The six SL team members attending the sessions were:

  • Xiola Linden (Community team)
  • Brett Linden (Marketing)
  • Keira Linden (Land team) and Patch Linden (Snr Director of Product Operations)
  • Grumpity Linden (Director of Product for Second Life) and Oz Linden (Technical Director for Second Life).

Each of the sessions was recorded by SL4Live and made available through YouTube as a part of the SL15B sessions.

For those who prefer to read about what was said, I have produced this set of summary articles of the different sessions.

Please note that these are not intended as full transcripts; some topics came up more than once through the week, so I have tried to focus on subjects that were answered in the greatest detail within each session.

Audio extracts are included with each summary. These have been edited to remove pauses, repetitions, etc., with care taken to maintain the overall context of comments and answers.

The full video for each session is also embedded with each summary for completeness, and timestamps are included for each of the topics in a summary, and will open the relevant video in a separate browser tab, at the point at which the topic is discussed.
Table of Contents

Please use the links in the contents list to the right to jump to the topic summary that interests you, or to a specific topic within a summary.

ZI Business District Renovations to Begin!

by

Hello ZoHa Islands Business District Renters,

I’d like to start off by thanking you for being a great addition to the community we have here at ZI over the years. Its been awhile since the Business District has been set, and its time for a makeover! The 12 region estate there will be undergoing some construction, new roads systems, landscaping, teraforming, and completely redone to attract more businesses, homes, etc by giving it more dimension and appeal. In addition to this we will be monitoring the regions for quality builds and ensure the regions maintain a quality standard we envision for our business district with an end product resulting in a place that people want to be, see and explore! …Thus leading more prospective patrons to your establishments.

We would love as we move forward with the project (which is to be completely overhauled by mid July 2018) to see you all get creative and add to the beauty of the project, each location will have foot traffic access and we also have a wonderful array of new exciting projects coming your way. Events, Showcases and other traffic boosting elements will be added in addition to our business directory.

Please note. This will NOT affect any land tiers.

These 12 sims will be included ONLY:
Business District Alpha
Business District Bravo
Business District Charlie
Business District Delta
Business District Echo
Business District Foxtrot
Business District Golf
Business District Hotel
Business District Indigo
Business District Juliet
Business District Kilo
Business District Lima

So please pardon our dust and be patient while we are under construction!

Thank you Kindly!

ZoHa Islands Support

ZoHa Islands – Request Form

Linden Lab 15 Week Gift Hunt/Grab

by

The Big 15th Birthday Weekly Gift Grab

Credit from Second Life Blog

Fifteen years is a tremendous achievement for any community, and we’ve been hard at work on a fun and interactive gift hunting series to thank our Residents. The Big 15th Birthday Weekly Gift Grab starts today – June 18th, 2018!

For the next 15 weeks, we’ll be releasing a different crystal-themed gift each week. All you have to do is find and collect the gifts. Each fabulous gift is available for one week only, and in one Region only. The Region will change each week, and we’ll be publishing clues each week to help you find the Region to search for that week’s gift – watch the Second Life social media channels and the Blog at for the clues.

How to get started:

  • Visit the Swaginator HUD kiosk here to grab your Swaginator HUD
  • Attach your Swaginator HUD
  • Investigate the clue for the week by checking our Blog or social media channels ( This week’s clue is already up so go check it out now!)
  • Find the Region and start searching

Remember, each gift is available for one week only, and then it’s gone. You can collect as many, or as few gifts as you want, but if you want to collect the final super-special Birthday Gift in the final week you will need to have collected all 14 of the previous gifts.

Don’t forget to check the Blog each week for updates.

NVIDIA 1180 Rumors

by

Credit:

The release date is the big rumor. It ranges from July to September 2018.

It also looks like NVIDIA may be the only manufacturer releasing a major video card in 2018. The collection of information available as of June 2nd, 2018 is in this nerdy video.

The TL:DR take away is it will be the best card of 2018 (…is that because it is the ONLY card?), pricy, somewhat faster but no one is for sure, will use the newest GDDR6 VRAM which is in short supply… But, this is only speculation even when based on educated guesses.

From an earlier video we get more specific details and for the visually oriented (aren’t all SL peeps visually oriented?) it is in an easier to compare format.

The take away from this video is the new 1180 will outperform the 1080 Titan, which is the pentacle of the 10xx series of cards.

The big thing in the new cards is their design for raytracing light and shadows. Raytracing is literally calculating the path of light from the source to the camera/eye (actually for each pixel on your screen) and all the things that happen to it along the way. This is WAY math intense and time consuming. So, all sorts of alternative systems are used to fake lighting in games and improve performance. Building fast ray trace engines into the video card is about getting more photorealistic images in less time. Meaning the card will provide enough performance games needing performance for VR will likely be able to start using raytracing.

What will the new cards do for Second Life peeps? Not a lot. Expect them to be faster. The total number of polygons they can render per second is like 10 million to 16 billion, depending on who you read. For SL that means about 352,000,000 polygons per frame in an SL viewer. At the Cosmopolitan even I only need to render 700k to 900k polys per second, 33k per frame actual from Viewer Stats. It isn’t the polygons that are choking the system. So, faster video cards won’t provide enough muscle to turn our unoptimized content into something that renders like Unreal, Cry, or Unity games.

We also have the challenge of OpenGL limits. In January 2018 OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 was released. My NVIDIA driver uses that version in its driver. But, OpenGL and Second Life use of it are not at parity. Only recently did a software engineer with in depth rendering knowledge come over to the SL product. There is a lot to fix in the SL render engine. That work is just starting. How much can be done or will be done is unknown. But, I don’t expect to see the Lab attempting to adopt the new NVIDIA features any time soon. Improving and using performance features, yes. But, adding raytraced reflections and shadows… no.

I don’t see US$700± of possible improvement from a new GTX 1150, 60, 70, or 80 video card for Second Life users. But, the new cards will give a bit more performance. Of course, some will have to have the latest and greatest.

I think our gains in performance will be from changes in the SL system. The move to the cloud and the Bakes-On-Mesh project reducing our texture count have the most likelihood of improving performance.

Mad Pea’s “Mad World” Coming Soon to Commemorate Made Pea’s 10th Anniversary in SL – Come be a V.I.Pea!

by

Mad Pea games in Second Life are a wonderful fun filled immersion into creative worlds and brilliant story lines.  They’ve taken us on dangerous adventures, horrors, and puzzles that boggle the senses!  I’m sure this will be of no exception to the quality we’ve all come to know and love from the wonderful crew over at Mad Pea Productions.  The excerpt below was featured on Mad Pea’s website, I am so excited to see what madness Queen Pea, Kiana Writer and her crew of Peas have come up with us for this adventure!

WHO WANTS TO BE A MAD WORLD V.I.PEA?!

“NO GREAT MIND HAS EVER EXISTED WITHOUT A TOUCH OF MADNESS.” ARISTOTLE

Over at MadPea we are literally bursting with excitement over the impending release of our new and unique 10th Anniversary interactive experience Mad World, and we can’t wait to share it with all our lovely Peas! Unless you have been locked in a dark room listening to heavy metal music, you will have seen all the articles and notices on our exclusive Mad World VIP tickets, which are available to buy NOW! With a nod to MadPea games of old, plus the mysterious story of the abandoned theme park and the tragic tale of the Washington family, this really is an experience not to be missed. But what does it mean to be a VIPea, you ask – well read on and find out!

Mad World Golden Ticket

If you are one of the lucky VIP ticket holders you can look forward to the following:

  • 24 hours of exclusive game play to hunt, explore, play, discover and enjoy Mad World;
  • Personal guidance by Queen Pea Kiana Writer and the MadPea Crew;
  • An exclusive VIP Souvenir;
  • MadPea 10th Birthday Goodie Bag;
  • Due to early access, the sims will be almost completely lag free;
  • Exclusive Group VIP Peas throughout June 2018 with special attention and help;
  • 1000 MadPoints.

All our Peas are important to us, but as a VIPea you will obtain something very few people in SL will get to experience, so this opportunity is not to be missed! With only 15 VIP tickets going on sale, you will be one of the first in hundreds, possibly thousands, who will get to see this amazing place and experience the magic. On top of all that, we are offering an exclusive VIP gift, only available for the handful of lucky Peas with a ticket. Plus the fun never ends! Mad World is a fantastic ‘work-in-progress’, which means the theme park will never be complete; we will be adding content, twists and turns every month! It will without a doubt be the most unique experience MadPea have created to date.

Mad World sneak peek!

Mad World Golden VIP tickets are ONLY on sale on the Second Life Marketplace and cost 5,000L each. If you are lucky enough to get your hands on one of them you will be told the date your exclusive entry begins. Once you log in on this day, send an instant message to Queen Pea, Kiana Writer so that you can be transported to the start of Mad World. Golden VIP tickets CAN be given to others or re-sold, but only one person can enter Mad World with each golden ticket. Finally, on the day of entry make sure you have your ticket with you, otherwise our Pea Bouncers will not allow you inside.

Good luck to all those that seek to purchase a ticket and we at MadPea look forward to sharing this experience with you.

Mad World is here!

________________________________________

For more information click on the links below: