No 9th birthday celebrations in Second Life for us

A year ago my sim (the 1920s Berlin Project) took part in Second Life’s 8th birthday celebrations.

It was a lot of fun, chaotic but worth it.

We rebuild a tiny 1920s Berlin street in our plot, including a cinema, common working class apartment, a gallery and of course our world famous bar ‘Der Keller’.

Every day for about a week we moved our daily ‘happy hour’ to this replica bar and had lots of fun meeting new people who would not normally visit our sim because of the theme, the strict dress code or perhaps because they don’t like roleplay.

SL8 gave them a chance to get a little taste of a sim they never heard about or never visited before, it also gave them an idea of how we use SL for something they might not know about.

This year SL is asking us to have the celebrations in our own sims, they will not organise something big and fun like the previous years.
Not a good idea.

People don’t like the idea and many won’t be interested in doing this at all.
Some may not be able to.
I know that we can’t just find a spot in our sim for something like this, we don’t have the room or prims.

Right now the only thing I can think of is organising an ‘open day’ to celebrate SL9.
Not sure how much fun that would be.

Either way, I will not be looking forward to it as much as SL8, one of the few, if not the only gridwide event our sim took part in.

What a shame.

Camera placement in Second Life

In Second life we walk around with a camera following us high above and behind our head, looking downwards.
This is the point of view we have at home behind out computers.

Generally this works fine until you visit a place like 1920s Berlin where we try to build to a more realistic scale.
Our houses are small, hallways narrow, ceilings low.
Even with the ceilings a little higher then they would usually be in reality, it is still pretty hard to see where you are going sometimes.
When you are entering a home, your camera is hanging outside or looking trough an upstairs window.
This strange camera view also makes you more distant from what is happening in SL, it makes SL less immersive.
First person view would be best in 1920s Berlin, but for some reason you lose all your buttons when you do that.

In short; the camera in SL is in a rather silly spot.
This explains why so many buildings in SL are huge, it makes it easier to use your camera.
But we don’t go for easy in 1920s Berlin, we go for realism and authenticity!
Luckily, you can easily change your camera view manually.

Personally I prefer my camera right behind my head and just a little higher then my avatar’s eyes, but you can play around till you find a camera view that you may like even more.

In the pictures below you can clearly see the difference.
I am standing in an average realistically scaled hallway in 1920s Berlin with the camera in its primary position.

In the top photo I am using the generic camera settings made by LL, in the picture below I’m using the ones I set myself.

At the top the generic LL camera settings.
At the bottom my personal camera settings.

As you can see, with changed camera views you are more part of your surroundings.
You can actually experience claustrophobia, you will feel the joy of leaving a small home to go outside for a walk in the park, you will enjoy open spaces more and feel more at home in small rooms.
It adds to the experience, it at least makes it more real.

This is how you can change your own camera settings.
Please remember, this is how I like to set my camera, you will have to experiment yourself to find out what works best for you.

These settings are for the latest viewers, if you have older viewers you can do this as well but it may be called differently and you may need to look elsewhere to find the settings.
First of all: make sure you have the advanced menu activated, you should see this at the top of your screen, next to help.
If not, ctrl+alt+d should activate it.

In this menu type the following words and change the settings.

CameraOffsetRearView (called CameraOffsetDefault in old viewers)

X: -0.800
Y: -0.00
Z: -0.300

FocusOffsetRearView (called FocusOffsetDefault in old viewers)

X: 0.700
Y: -0.00
Z: -0.300

This will give you the camera view I have in SL and in the picture above.
You can always reset it to default and please experiment and play around to see what you like best.

Warning, when you change your camera, your zoom in and out picture will change as well.

Thanks to Penny Patton who’s article introduced me to this.

Give us 24 hours

In a virtual world where everything is possible and you can unleash your fantasy, I’ve always gone for realism.
My 1920s Berlin sim tries to recreate daily life in this great city in the year 1929.
People get up in the morning, go to work, shop and visit the bars at night.
We even bring historical events to our sim as they happened over 80 years ago.
Visit us on may the first and you will witness the riots that happened on that day in 1929.

We also want Berlin to have the same time of day as in RL Berlin.
So when it is night in real Berlin, it should be night in our Berlin!
Sounds simple and should be easy, right?
Wrong.

For some reason the days in Second Life only last 4 hours.
When the world was created they did not think about those of us who want to try and mimic reality.

So just to give the people of 1920s Berlin that experience of day and night in a realistic way, one of the sim managers has to come online and manually change the time of day.
Or as we call it; “to turn the sun on or off”, because it usually is quite comical to suddenly see everything go dark.
No lovely subtle light changes for us, we are stuck with changing the ‘fixed sky’ setting.

Second Life is all about the freedom to create whatever you want, but alas, we don’t get that freedom when it comes to the days and nights.
You can set all sorts of beautiful sky settings, you can even decide on the colour of the water and create your own perfect day cycle… as long as you don’t want it to last longer then 4 hours!
What a shame and how odd.

As creators of worlds, we should be able to also have a say on how long our days lasts!
Stick with the 4 hour days, create 24 hour days or have days that last months because you live at the North pole or on another planet!
Why not?!
Surely, it should be our decision?

And it doesn’t sound like an idea that will take a bunch of Linden Lab employees countless hours of reprogramming the core structure of Second Life Software to create.

I love the idea of visiting a Japanese or American sim and realise that it is night over there.
The idea of actually visiting a far away country!

And if people don’t like to visit a sim in the dark all the time, they can easily override the daylight settings in their viewer.

Imagine being able to just set the  timezone and the sim automatically adapting the daylight settings of that zone in RL!
Maybe even follow the seasons…
It would be amazing!

If you want to get Linden Lab to look at something in Second Life, you start a so called ‘Jira’.
So there is one for this as well;
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-3893?

Sadly Linden Lab doesn’t have a very good reputation when it comes to dealing with Jira’s.
This one has been active since 2009… and it has not even been reviewed, nobody has even been assigned to it!

But we wait and hope.
Please visit it and click Watch and  Vote.
Because it may not amount to much, but doing nothing will get us even less.