Tag Archives: SL

Phoenix Firestorm Question and Answer Session

by

One thing that SLers often disagree about, is which viewer to use — the SL official viewer, Firestorm, Singularity — the list goes on. Each person has their favorite, and each person’s system handles one viewer better than another.

For me personally, I was madly in love with Singularity. It did everything I wanted it to, it was user friendly, it had the best features of Firestorm and SL viewer meshed into one… I was a happy girl. However, for some reason the last time I upgraded the viewer, I’ve been having rendering problems, and sadly I’ve had to start trying out other viewers. I saw that Firestorm finally had a 64-bit viewer, so I downloaded it, albeit a bit apprehensively, since both the SL viewer and Firestorm used to make me crash like crazy.  I was hoping the 64-bit version, coupled with the graphics card upgrade I made recently, would prevent the crashies like I used to have.

I’ve been using Firestorm for about a week now, and I really like it. I still miss some of the simpler features of Singularity, but the rendering problem was just too much for me to deal with. It was impossible to view SL properly.

One of the nicest things about Firestorm, is that it is the leading third party viewer, and it has amazing in-world support, including free classes that Firestorm staffers teach in-world. Recently, they taped a two-hour session where they discussed some of the issues that Firestorm users have brought up, starting with a discussion about the problems many users have been having with Norton Anti-virus and other anti-virus software. It sometimes interfering with the ability to use Firestorm properly, because the software identifies the Firestorm coding as a trojan horse and often quarantines it before it can be stopped, and the user cannot get it out.

After doing a “flame and shame” post on Twitter, they got an immediate tweet back from Norton apologizing for the problem, and within the hour, a representative from Norton had created an SL account and logged his avatar in world, found the Firestorm sim and came over to help facilitate the problem! This was someone who had never been in SL before in his life, and they felt the problem was serious enough to create an avatar to come help. Firestorm staffers were very impressed.

The video is quite long, but you can listen to it in the background while you do other things but it addresses many of the common issues, besides the anti-virus problem. It is very interesting to get an insider’s view of the viewer creation and update process, and the burnout many support people experience after a new release is issued and the vitriol that comes at them from users who have problems with the updates. It also has many good tips on how to deal with viewer problems, especially ones that seem to crop up overnight and for which they get blamed.

Have a listen; even if you’re not a Firestorm user, it has some very good insights into the workings of the viewers and their interactions with SL.

As always I remain respectfully yours,

~ Suzanne Piers, ZI Social Media Manager

 

Bryn Oh’s Singularity of Kumiko

by

“When there is nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire”  ~ from Bryn Oh’s profile

Bryn Oh is a well-known and critically-acclaimed artist in both SL and RL. Bryn’s latest creation in SL is an incredible display called the Singularity of Kumiko. Bryn brings her art to life in SL with this interactive exhibit, where you literally immerse yourself in her art. Appropriately, she named her group “Immersiva,” an Italian word that translates to “Immersive.”

Canadian-born, Bryn’s blog describes herself this way: “Bryn Oh is a virtual artist created by a Toronto oil painter.” A biography from the Virtual Art Initiative website says that Bryn “makes her living…as a painter whose work is sold by a major galley to collectors around the world. Having received her art education in Toronto and Florence, Italy, her paintings have been exhibited in many galleries in North America and Europe. A meticulous and highly skillful landscape painter, she uses high quality oils and acrylics that she makes herself from raw materials, working the paint with a wide variety of layering and sculptural brush techniques, on large canvasses that engulf the viewer in an almost immersive experience of the human impact on the natural world. In fact it is her interest in immersion that led her to experiment with the art of virtual worlds, and over the past year she has established herself as one of the finest builders and installation artists in Second Life.”

Immersiva 1_001

In order to have the best experience, Bryn has limited access to her exhibit to 15 avatars at a time, and yet receives over 600 visitors a day! This allows you to wander the exhibit and experience it fully without worrying about lag, crashing the sim due to overload or crowding. It is a dark, stark exhibit and is best experienced with few other avatars around. Her art is not everyone’s cuppa, but it is truly brilliant, eerie and disturbing all at the same time.

Immersiva 2_001When you first land, you are presented with instructions to change your windlight settings for an optimal viewing experience. Then, you proceed to the tables where you learn how to navigate the exhibit and pick up your free headlamp. Don’t miss this step, because you will need it! It is dark in the exhibit, and while some ambient light emanates from some of the art, most of the sim is nearly pitch black. Lastly, you read about the exhibit, the 14 letters you are to pick up, and finally, how to enter the sim.

Immersiva 5_001You approach the red door, and in local, you give the magic word. As the door opens, you walk into a tunnel and it spills you out onto the scene of an accident and the story begins to unfold. As you move from place to place, looking for the bottles with letters inside them, you are immersed in the environment. It is tempting to cheat and change your light settings, but don’t do so! It is worth it to experience the exhibit the way the artist intended.

Immersiva 6_001As you progress, you may not encounter the letters in order. But as you begin to collect information, you start to realize that it is a conversation between two people, Kumiko and Iktomi, and that one is stuck in some sort of limbo, while the other encourages the  other “cross over.” The mangled bicycle and car wreck in the beginning of the story begin to take on more significance. But look out for Mr. Zipper, a child’s toy transformed into something menacing. Listen for the squeaky wheel, because if you fail to notice him, he will kill you and you will have to return and start over. It doesn’t do any good to take weapons inside there, either, because Mr. Zipper is impervious to weapons. Believe me, I tried! You simply have to dodge and weave, and run like crazy so he doesn’t kill you.

Immersiva 10_002The entire experience is something out of a nightmare, but fascinating at the same time. The sounds, such as creaking, thumping, flapping of wings, sing-songy children’s music, and buzzing of some sort of insects as you walk around will raise goosebumps on your skin. It is fun, scary, creepy and altogether shivery, but well worth the tour. Take the time to visit Singularity of Kumiko,  you won’t be disappointed!

I am as always respectfully yours,

~ Suzanne Piers, ZoHa Islands Social Media Manager

Second Life’s Oculus Rift Integration is Ready for Beta Testers!

by

Hot off the presses from the Tools and Technology blog on the SL website. check it out! 🙂

by Community Manager Linden Lab on ‎03-12-2014 11:16 AM

 

The Oculus Rift offers exciting possibilities for Second Life – the stereoscopic virtual reality headset brings a new level of immersion to our 3D world, making Second Life a more compelling experience than ever before.

Though a consumer version of the headset isn’t available yet, we’ve been working with the development kit to integrate the Oculus Rift with the Second Life Viewer. We now have a Viewer ready for beta testers, and if you have an Oculus Rift headset, we’d love to get your feedback.

If you have the Oculus Rift development hardware and would like to help us with feedback on the Viewer integration, please write to sl_oculus_beta@lindenlab.com to apply for the limited beta.

The LeFevre Mansion

by

” My home has to be an expression of eternal stability, elegance and openness” 

~ Marcus Lefevre, Oct. 2013

One of the things that I love about Second Life are the many amazing creators and builders who are residents here. One of my favorite things to do in SL is to find beautiful and unusual places to visit and just walk around in awe of the amazing builds. Truly unique user driven content is one of the many things unique to SL that isn’t available in most virtual worlds.

I was privileged to be invited to the grand opening of  the Lefevre Mansion.  The mansion is an architectural masterpiece by the famed owner and creator of the Rose Theater/ Angel Manor, Kaya Angel. The details are exquisite and the textures are stunning throughout the region.

In the words of Marcus LeFevre himself:

“Kaya has created my SL dream home with elegant interior design and beautiful landscape that literally invites you to take a walk in the park. The Lefevre Mansion is overall a stately home, a small world in itself, with a church, indoor and outdoor pools, a small hidden beach, forests, ponds, lakes culminating with the elegant mansion on the top of the hill.

The Lefevre Mansion will also feature the most amazing all men’s shop called: Pour SL Homme and a beautiful Art Gallery at the entrance of the Mansion regions. The Art Gallery will be brought to life by the well known Rose Theater Galleries curator, Kylie Angel Skyborne and will host regularly changing exhibitions from the best artists in Second Life. To top it all off the Lefevre Mansion is also honored to host the the all new Partycular Theater For the Performing Arts. ”

It is difficult to find the proper adjectives that can encompass the stately grandeur of this amazing home, grounds, and outbuildings. The church has details that far outstrip most I’ve seen in SL. The pipe organ alone has painstaking details, and the stained glass is amazing. I hope he will rent it out to brides and grooms for weddings; it’s truly a majestic, and you feel like you’re walking on hallowed ground. The pool area is large and the area behind the mansion reminds me a bit of the grounds at Hearst’s Castle in California. When you walk over to the art museum, there is a gate, and a gate keeper. The guard will open the gates for you, and greet you warmly. Take a stroll through the museum and persue the beautiful SL art by only the finest SL artists.

When you first land, you will be in front of Pour SL Homme, an amazing store with vendors for men’s clothing from different designers of only the highest caliber. In front of you will be a TP board, where you can TP to the different parts of the region. You can TP to the mansion itself, the park, the beach, the church, the forest, the lake, or the art museum. They invite visitors, but please be respectful of the living quarters. If you would like a tour of the Mansion, please contact Marcus LeFevre for permission. The grounds, art museum and store are all available for public strolling.

This is a must-see in Second Life. Here is the SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Lefevre%20Mansion/22/29/22.

I’ve made a slideshow of the pictures I took while there. I’m sorry I didn’t get more of the interior, but I was unable to stay long enough to explore the mansion.

I remain always respectfully yours,

~ Suzanne Piers, ZI Social Media Manager

 

 

New JIRA Changes Are Now Live!

by
Hot off the presses!
by Community Manager Linden Lab on ‎03-06-2014 02:52 PM

 As we blogged about last week, we’re making some changes to our JIRA implementation to make our bug reporting system a more transparent and productive experience. We just wanted to take a moment to let everyone know that these changes are now live!

One of the questions we’ve seen in the past week is how previously submitted issues would be treated – namely, will those also be viewable by everyone and open for comment prior to being triaged?

While we want to make issues visible for the reasons described in our last post, we’re not going to extend this to old issues, because at the time they were created, users knew that those reports would have limited visibility and they may have included sensitive and/or private information. We don’t want to take information that someone thought would be private and suddenly make that visible to everyone, so the new visibility settings will apply only to new issues.

Introducing SL Go from OnLive!

by

Have you wished you could access SL from your tablet, and been frustrated with the chat-only client? Have you been out somewhere, or  simply sitting all comfy in your recliner and wishing you could pick up your tablet and get in-world? Well, now you can! SL Go,introduced in beta format, is an SL client that allows you to access SL with full 3-D graphics. This is hot off the presses:

by Community Manager Linden Lab ‎03-05-2014 09:05 AM – edited ‎03-05-2014 09:45 AM

OnLive, the leader in cloud gaming, today released an exciting new service for Second Life users. SL Go, now in open beta, is a mobile Second Life viewer for Android that delivers a fully immersive desktop-like experience on tablets.

With SL Go, you can experience Second Life from anywhere you have Wi-Fi or 4G connectivity, with ultra high-quality graphics, full shaders, shadows, and the Advanced Lightning Model on Android devices. Not only can you get high-quality graphics on a low-powered device, but you also don’t have to sacrifice frame rate or draw distance for high fidelity inworld explorations. Thanks to super-fast gigabit connections with OnLive’s high-performance gaming servers, objects and textures rez quickly when logging in and teleporting. OnLive has clocked the SL Go viewer at upwards of 200 fps set to Ultra with Maximum Render Distance, allowing people to participate in events, engage in combat games, and generally enjoy immersion in Second Life at a level never before possible on a mobile device.

With SL Go, OnLive has brought touchscreen interaction to the Second Life experience, but if you prefer keyboard and mouse, you can opt to connect these devices and interact with your friends in the same way you always have. SL Go gives you access to edit menus, inventory, preference settings and chat management just like the Second Life Viewer on your home computer.

 You’ll need an OnLive account to launch the app, and then you’ll log into Second Life with the same credentials you’ve always used. To learn more, register, and get started with a free trial now, visit slgo.onlive.com.

 For the time being, SL Go is available to users logging in from the US, Canada and the UK. OnLive plans to expand the service to other locales in the future, so if you are interested in having SL Go in your region, sign up here. The company is also pursuing an iOS version of the app. You can sign up here to be notified when it is released.

Thanks, and I always remain respectfully yours,

~ Suzanne Piers, ZI Social Media Manager