Recently LL announced a new benefit for premium members, in stead of the 1 month of records for your transactions, they now can look back 3 months.
This is very handy and a great little bonus but I have to admit I can’t help looking this gift horse in the mouth a bit.
With all these servers and super computers Linden Lab has access too, that can render huge virtual worlds and send countless terabytes all over the globe, I always found it odd that they couldn’t put a side a little bit of server space to keep all these records for us.
Surely it would only take a few gigabyte to save EVERY transaction EVER made by ALL avatars?
Of course I really don’t know much about the space this takes up and perhaps effort to keep it all running, but still, I’m surprised we can’t already look back in our transaction records all the way back to the day we got our first Linden from that nice stranger who felt sorry for a noob, or from that chair we sat in for hours or that person we kept bothering.
After all, its just zeros and ones right?
Having said that, any bonus is a good thing of course.
Linden Lab just announced a few changes, good & bad.
The buying Linden Dollars & process credit fees are going up;
Effective today, the fee for buying L$ on the LindeX will be $0.99 per transaction (previously it had been $0.60 per transaction). These changes impact only buys on the LindeX, and the fees associated with buying L$’s during SL Marketplace transactions remain unchanged.
On January 3, 2018, the fee for processing credit transactions (i.e. paying real money into a PayPal or Skrill account) will be 2.5% per transaction, with a $3 (USD) minimum, and no maximum. This fee is currently 1.5% per transaction, with a $3 (USD) minimum and a $25 (USD) maximum.
This means SL is getting more expensive for most of us and those of us who (try to) make a living from SL need to find a way to balance out the extra costs.
Say you manage to make 700$ a month from SL, in the olden days it would cost you $10.50 to send this money to your Paypal account, in the future that will cost $17.50.
Luckily it is not just bad news.
There will be more improvements coming to SL, lots of money (millions of dollars!) are being put into our virtual world to make it even better.
The most interesting thing (for me anyway) is the animesh;
New creative tools. We recently released Animesh in beta, enabling creators to use skeletal animations with non-avatar objects – like wild animals, pets, vehicles, and scenery objects. Coming soon is EEP! (Environmental Enhancements Project), a series of extensions to Windlight that enable you to trade or sell your own environment settings. EEP will also allow Parcel-based environment settings and an extended day cycle too!
This could bring realistic moving NPC’s to SL that are less laggy than current options and also look better.
They can also replace bots.
I hope the EEP! includes the 24 hour day cycles!
Also very exciting;
We continue to make progress in the massive upgrade to SL infrastructure and move to the cloud (we call this project Brave New World). This move will (among many other things), help make SL more performant for Residents around the world, and may also enable us to introduce new products and more flexible pricing in the future.
SL performance and high tier is something many of us would like to see improved upon so this is going in the right direction.
Today Linden Lab released a new Sansar video, an official sort of smooth trailer/teaser for the general public.
The narrator speaks English, proper British English, which is always a good idea.
And I’m not just saying that because I’m and anglophile.
She describes Sansar as revolutionary and unlike anything the world has ever seen before, I can almost hear my Second Life avatar slamming her fists on the inside of the computer screen shouting “Hey what about this place then?!”.
Check out the video yourself, I’ll share my thoughts below it.
The narrator tells us that Sansar will take VR to the next level and that its unprecedented technology will allow everyone to create their own social VR experience and that that is no longer limited to the professionals.
This is true and the best thing about Sansar and SL, it is very good that they put emphasis on this, it is what will lure VR enthousiasts to Sansar.
It is up to the Sansar team to make sure the new users then are not disappointed when they perhaps don’t have the freedom they expected or that they need to spend money first to buy stuff or go learn blender to make things.
I hope easy inworld building tools come to Sansar but will they be there when Sansar goes public?
Anyway, I’ve written about that before.
The narrator tells us there will be easy tools to help us make these experiences and share them with everybody.
And she tells us we can use Sansar to recreate history, well that is me sold!
She also talks about all the uses Sansar will have, live events, entertainment, education, etc.
But there is one thing I miss in her story; gaming.
At the moment this is one of the biggest uses for VR and you know many gamers will see this video and decide based on it if they want to try Sansar.
Some of these gamers may have youtube channels with millions of viewers but do you think they spotted something in the video that appeals to them?
Granted there may not be many gaming tools in Sansar yet, but I know that there is a cannon shooting thingy and of course you don’t need special tools for roleplaying.
I would have at least mentioned gaming in the list of possibilities and perhaps show a little bit of gaming madness.
So far the options offered seem perhaps a bit high-brow.
Anyway, the story is sound and appealing.
The visuals are pretty good too and as someone who has been waiting to get into Sansar for ages it is difficult to see if they are also interesting to outsiders because my absorb every bit of new Sansar footage as a sponge.
But I’ll try.
As someone who has been a hardcore gamer since Pong, I try and imagine what a regular VR gamer thinks of the footage and most of the visuals are quite impressive.
We get a good look at the avatars and they look pretty good although, it really depends on the angle they are being seen in.
In some of the shots they look better than in others and the girl with the black hair looks better made than the boy with the blue and white shirt.
But compared to SL, they are all perhaps still a bit dull.
I reckon some of us can’t wait to stick wings and tails on them.
The avatars we see are of course the basic starter ones but looking at the avatars in this video it seems not many users have done a lot of customizing yet, which makes me wonder if we’re going to get many avatar customization options when Sansar opens, I know we will get those eventually, of course!
But I think it is important to get them in place for the first day as they are so important.
The creation tools look good, we know them from SL, same sort of idea, the ring around your prim that you use to rotate, move, etc.
They do make it look easy to move stuff around and well, it will be.
Uploading assets looks easier than it is though, most 3d software will make your brain cry.
Adding lights, special sounds, scripting, it all sounds and looks pretty easy and if new users can indeed easily use these, we’re onto a winner.
It is when people want to actually build things that it becomes a lot more complicated.
We see a few people putting on their headsets but we don’t see anyone using Sansar on a regular screen, well besides people who are creating and building.
As corny as it might have looked, having people also explore an experience on a desktop and maybe even a tablet or something mobile, might have calmed the people down who somehow keep thinking you’ll need a headset for Sansar.
The locations all look rather good, Sansar creators have been real busy lately and it looks like there will already be plenty to explore.
The video ends with a nice close up of a lady wearing a Sansar T-shirt while talking in sync with the narrator.
This may not seem much but for us in SL it is something we can only dream of and in many other VR experiences this is still something quite impressive.
I wish she blinked though.
Conclusion; I think it is a pretty good public relations video, something to show off to outsiders and future users.
Of course there are also things I would do differently, but I’ve been to film school and have made films & TV so I say that about everything, it is one of the reasons nobody wants to watch movies with me.
And at the very end we get a Beta release date! Spring 2017
Which technically means it could be released at any moment between now and June.
I hope I’ve got my new computer by then!
The most important question is; after seeing this, would you like to try Sansar?
Would you as someone who has been in SL for years, as a gamer, as a developer new to VR, as a random housewife, a school teacher, etc.?
Disclaimer; I am in the Sansar program but my computer is too old and I can’t try it, so my article is still written as that of someone who has not yet been in Sansar, because well, I haven’t.
/me cries.
Much to my delight, Linden Lab released a statement regarding Trump’s Immigration policy yesterday;
LINDEN LAB STATEMENT ON TRUMP’S EXECUTIVE ORDER ON IMMIGRATION
2017-02-02 00:00:00 UTC
We at Linden Lab are extremely disappointed in and adamantly opposed to Trump’s recent executive order on immigration. We reject racism, intolerance, and xenophobia.
We are proud to include immigrants among our leadership, colleagues, and customers, as well as our families, friends, and communities. We value diversity, compassion, and understanding, and we are proud that our products enable people to come together and form meaningful connections regardless of differences in their offline lives.
Trump’s order is counter to what we value and antithetical to American ideals. We join the many voices calling on the US government to remove this restriction as quickly as possible and to refrain from imposing additional barriers that threaten opportunities for immigrants, under-represented minorities, and women.
Today at 2pm SLT the “(Second) Life changing news” was finally officially revealed after days of speculations.
In a ‘Designing Worlds’ special Patch Linden confirmed that the prim allowances are going up across Second Life.
New allowances:
Mainland;
Full region -22500 (was 15000)
Homesteads – 5000 (was 3750)
Openspace – 1000 (was 750)
Private estates (Islands);
Full region – 20000 (was 15000)
Homesteads – 5000 (was 3750)
Openspace – 1000 (was 750)
Patch could not yet confirm when this limit is going to be handed out grid-wide but hopefully within a few months, as long as everything is working properly on the mainland first.
In group chat he said he hoped it could all be done before Thanksgiving.
Of course it is not very nice that us islanders do not get as many prims as mainlanders.
Patch explained this by saying that LL feels that mainland owners deserved extra benefit as we estate owners already had the tier reduction option a few months ago and generally people who own private estates get many other benefits as well.
This is of course true but that also means that we had to spend a lot of money on decreasing our tier and although living on the mainland of course has many “challenges”, we estate owners have plenty as well.
But on top of that estate owners are given an extra option;
Islanders (private estate owners) will be given the ability is to increase their prim allowance on a private region with another 10.000 prims to 30.000 but the fee to change this tier allowance will cost $30 and then a following $30 extra tier per month for this.
This is indeed huge news, effectively we estate owners can double our land impact for an, I think, very reasonable fee.
For more information check out the Designing Worlds website by clicking here.
Also check out Inara Pey’s blog who (as always) has the technical details and also more information from the horse’s mouth, click here to read.
And here it is, the official LL announcement regarding the prim allowance going up;
New Perk! Prim Limit Increase
Premium members are entitled to a Linden Home and can own parcels on the Mainland. Now, we’re raising the limit on the number of prims you can use in those spaces. This means you will have more prims and creative flexibility to decorate and customize your own space. Land impact (object) capacity on Mainland Regions will go from 15,000 to 22,500 – that’s a lot more building capacity!
In addition to this, we will further carry the prim limit increases to the private estate regions shortly. Keep your eye on our blogs for more information!
An episode of Designing Worlds comes out later this afternoon which talks more in-depth about this new perk. We’ll update this blog once it’s available.
I left out the other stuff about extras you get for becoming a premium member, make sure to read the full announcement by clicking here.
I can’t help thinking that by linking this news to the special premium member deal some people may wonder if the prim allowance will only go up for premium members.
Either way, this explains why you, poor islanders, living far away from the mothermainland, might still not have seen a change in your prim allowance.
Anyway, we’ll know soon.
Today at 2pm there shall be a special Designing Worlds broadcast possibly followed by another post by Linden Lab and Inara Pey blog.
Little bird has told me that there will be more interesting news there.
You can also try and be live at the Designing Worlds broadcast with Patch Linden, more about that can be read by clicking here.
I wanted to wait till this news was official but everybody inworld and on social media has been talking about this for days now so I thought I’d post what I know ahead of time.
Make sure to check back Thursday when Linden Lab makes their announcement.
Recently people have been noticing changes in the land in the prim capacity of their regions, some mainland regions suddenly had a region capacity of 22500 in stead of the regular 15000.
The islanders (owners of private regions far away from the mothermainland, adrift in the wild virtual seas) were getting worried because their capacity was not changing.
What was going on?
Designing Worlds also put this video teaser online;
News that will change your Second Life for ever…
What could this be?!
People everywhere were discussing the rumours and wondering what was going to happen.
On top of that Inara Pay posted a blog ahead of time by accident that seemed to confirm that indeed prim limits were going to rise all over the grid, not just mainland.
A forum post sharing screenshots of that blog has since been removed from the Second Life website.
Before you all get too excited, the information that was shared was not final yet.
As Inara explained;
PLEASE NOTE
The post referred to in this thread was a publishing error on my part, compounded by my failing to noticed that I’d hit PUBLISH rather than SAVE DRAFT,
To be clear: the article was being drafted with the intent to publish on Thursday, November 3rd, alongside an official post from Linden Lab. As such, all information within it was / is subject to change, and should not necessarily be taken as read.
The error in publishing was mine, and the article has been withdrawn whilst being completed / subject to final vetting from Linden Lab to ensure the information within it is correct.
My apologies for any inconvenience caused.
So, officially there is no confirmation yet and we probably won’t get one till Thursday.
Keep in mind that anything shared before that time may be subject to change, including this article.
Nevertheless, everything we’ve heard so far seems to suggest that indeed, prim limits are going up for everyone!
So, if, yes IF the stories are all true, the new prim limits will be as follows;
Full regions: Mainland: 22,500 Private: 20,000
Homesteads : 5,000
OpenSpaces: 1,000
This is huge news.
If this is the way things are indeed going to be, a lot of people are going to be extremely happy, including me!
For as long as I can remember we’ve had to deal with prim shortages, somehow there are never enough prims in the world to make my dreams come true the way I imagined them, and now I can at least get a little closer to how I envisioned things.
The streets of 1920s Berlin and Time Portal will become fuller with cars, rubbish on the streets, posters on the walls.
But if, yes again, IF, this story is true, I will also give all my tenants a few free prims.
The land impact increase probably has something to do with hard-and software improvements but perhaps also to get people interested in Mainland again and of course get more people to rent more land although I think this kind of improvement generally makes people happy who already have land and won’t be that tempting to people who don’t own land yet.
Because unless you own land the prim allowance is very difficult to imagine, 15000 seems like a lot, till you actually start rezzing stuff.
Anyway, go on, check your prim limit, if your region has already had its Tuesday rolling restart, your prim limit may have already changed.
Careful though, the amount is also calculated differently, I’ve heard that it now shows the capacity of the land owned in a region in stead of the overall region capacity.
If you don’t see a change, check again after the next wave of rolling restarts today and tomorrow.
Of course it is not nice for us Islanders to get a smaller increase than the mainlanders.
I’d love to know why this is.
After all, many of us left Mainland out of frustration with neighbours, lack of powers to deal with issues or the lag caused by the 324294 billion prims surrounding us.
I myself left because we had a griever we simply couldn’t get rid of and LL didn’t do much to help.
At the time LL support was much worse than it is today.
So I had to leave Mainland, it cost me a lot of money and work and recently we were given the chance to grandfather but this too cost a lot of money.
And now we get fewer extra prims than the mainlanders?
On the other hand, remembering the challenges of living there, I think the mainlanders deserve a little extra.
Nevertheless, I’m sure this difference will make a few people grumble.
For now I’m too happy with what I’ve been given to grumble myself, but I’m sure this topic will be revisited in due time.
Conclusion;
It looks like LL will announce Thursday that the prim allowances are going up everywhere.
But officially, till this announcement comes, everything you read and hear is speculation.
Remember, they may still find something that went wrong after the change on mainland and decide to postpone or alter the numbers.
Nevertheless, I’m putting virtual champagne on ice.
Well… it is my birthday but even though everyone at Linden Lab thinks I’m really cool and great (I supply them with virtual schnapps after all), this wonderful addition to the SL viewer being released today may have been a coincidence.
The ability to make 360 snapshots from within your viewer is now available for testing at the Project Viewer.
They are still working on it but they’ve added a few examples that already look pretty nice.
I think that this will eventually go beyond just a fun way to make pictures and I hope to see these 360 snapshots appear on marketplace, in the destination guide, etc.
Because they are a great way to sell something or show people what a sim has to offer.
You can read the full official announcement by clicking here.
Imagine being able to bring your 360 degrees camera into Virtual Reality, just set it up in the club, house, park or city that you’ve build yourself in Second Life, record it and then share it online with people from all over the world.
Let them get a taste of where you live in VR, let them look around and even give them the feeling they’re actually there by looking at it with their VR headset.
This is now possible!
Yesterday Electric Shepherd from Vimagine (who also worked on the ‘Virtualize it’ documentary for ‘Der Spiegel’) and Draxtor Despres came to 1920s Berlin to test out an amazing 360 degrees camera to film the, as far as I know, first 360 degrees video shot Live in Second Life in real time.
The camera rig was made by Arduenn Schwartzman (of Warbug fame), it has audio and video syncing capabilities and all recorded tracks are then aligned in post production.Even though this is still just an early test, it is already very impressive.
I can imagine short clips like these made in sims all over Second Life being used to show outsiders what life in our virtual world is like and the things that they can experience there.
Because these can also record busy events with lots of people and with many things happening at the same time!
Not only are these just fun videos on youtube, but they are very impressive when viewed through the Gear VR, the Cardboard VR or other headsets.
And not just that, it will also allow me to show off my sim in a whole new way to people who may not have tried Second Life, don’t know how SL works or who don’t have a computer that can handle SL.
And imagine making a full length machinima with this technology!
We could be making 360 films while people in RL have only just experimenting with it.
Once more the people in SL are groundbreaking.
You can see this pioneering footage here;
(not all browsers support 360 degrees video)
Some technical details send in by Draxtor;
We are simulating a goPro Rig of 6 cameras, filming each with 1080 by 1080 (which is already too low = SL can handle more but we need the screens for FRAPS to capture it that high, working on it!!)
I filmed this test myself so there is no syncing which means the Zeppelin dissapears into the cloud at one point: to do live action in SL we need to film at same time.
Syncing is no prob: we have an automated system made by Arduenn Schwartzmann which syncs the six cameras with sound and a visual cue. But again = we need to figure out higher resolution = who has the computers to make it happen, are the colors in sync as well, is the SL lag an issue when aligning the cameras later on (f.e. a dance or fast car race or airship battle etc).
I am working with spatial audio on a RL project so next step will also involve inserting some sounds and dialogue which is spatialized.
All in all the workflow we have is SUPER FAST = plop down the virtual camera rig in SL and shoot, export, stitch, correct = DONE = faster than RL 360 !!!!!!
Big benefits of SL for this = inserting virtual sequences into a RL 360 video = much faster and easier than constructing it via other CGI options because you can film it in REAL TIME and the assets are all there. Yes maybe render engine less able than Unity or Unreal but a LOT easier and ultimately not worse than RL 360 at this point in the game!
And this article wouldn’t be complete without this earlier 360 degrees video in VR experiment by Zuza Ritt;
Ever thought about meeting a SL avatar face to face in your RL living room?
Or see your SL house appear in front of you on the drive outside your RL home?
Or perhaps work on a SL dress in your RL workshop?
Thanks to Augmented Reality this is now becoming a possibility and it is only the beginning.
James Reichert has been working with Virtual and Augmented reality for years and early on experimented with Kinect, 3D tv and even building his own virtual surroundings for presentations. During his research he discovered Second Life, joined as Illiastra Ascendent, explored this virtual world, created something, sold something and, like the rest of us, was doomed hooked.
Recently James started experimenting with the Microsoft Hololens in combination with Second Life and his very first tests are already very promising and exciting.
Look for instance at this video he made, showing a SL-like avatar with a dress he designed.
He is looking at her through the Hololens, an Augmented Reality device that does not only show you a virtual object in reality but it also manages to lock it in a specific location so it stays there while you move around.
Right now you can see the avatar or furniture or whatever object you’ve created, as if it is with you in your real life, you can walk around it, see it from all angles.
But it won’t be long till you can do more than just watch, can you imagine actually building something virtual in real life?
Standing in front of an avatar wearing your dress that you then lengthen, shorten and re-texture, right there and then. But even if you’re not a creator, wouldn’t it just be fun to see your own avatar standing in your RL room? Or even have another avatar visiting you in RL and chatting with you…
And on another level, a building James made in ‘Chief Architect’, which is not that different from what we’re used to in Second Life, is, lets call it ‘rezzed’ in a parking lot. Allowing us to look around it but even go inside and check out the details.
As someone who has created lots of buildings in Second Life, I’d love to walk around them in VR and AR, and looking at the future again, imagine being able to actually build this way or at least change the wallpaper while walking around your parking lot.
I can’t wait.
James says;
These modern HMDs aren’t VR, they are merely the conduits– the summoning circles– through which our avatars will finally be unleashed upon the waking world. The neo-VR industry built them thinking it would get them into the metaverse… they never considered what would come out.
James’ bumper sticker
James will be a guest on the Draxfiles Radio Hour soon and we’ll talk more about his experiments and the future possibilities of this technology.
The camera rig was made by 
Even though this is still just an early test, it is already very impressive.
Jo Yardley's Second Life 