If someone vanishes in Second Life

Tags

contact, death, email, emergency, leaving, left, personal, private, profile, social media, stay in touch, vanished, vanishing

If you’ve been in Second Life for a while, sooner or later someone you know and/or care about will vanish from your virtual life.
They don’t say goodbye, they don’t leave a note, they don’t cancel their rent, they don’t clear their land, they simply never log on again.

There can be many different reasons for someone to just vanish like that, it could be something as innocent as being stuck somewhere during a holiday without internet and losing their rental and deciding they don’t want to return, maybe their computer breaks and they cant afford a new one or maybe they have gotten themselves into some drama in SL and decide that simply staying away is the best solution.
But it could also be something rather serious, they may be very unwell or even have died.

People sometimes don’t realise how much they mean to their virtual friends and community and have no idea how worried the people they leave behind may be.
And besides friends who will miss them dearly, there are also landowners, sims, shop managers, club managers etc, who are waiting for them to renew their rent or don’t know what to do with their stuff, upcoming events, etc.

So, after yet another person in SL simply vanished, I decided to write this blog with some tips, hoping it may avoid a few of these painful and confusing situations.

Please make sure there are is more than one way for people in SL to get in touch with you.
Get a facebook/twitter/other social media account and share your email address with a few of your friends, this can be an avatar only email address of course.
But also, if you can, find someone in SL you trust enough with some RL information.
Even if it is just one friend.
Having someone in SL who knows how to get in touch with you in RL can avoid so many problems.
And the more this one person knows, the better.
If you trust them enough, befriend them with your RL social media accounts or even agree with a close RL family member or friend that this SL friend can email them as well or befriend them on Facebook, just in case of emergency.
If something bad happens to you, your RL friends will probably leave messages on your RL facebook wall, telling you to get better or writing how sad they are you died.
If a SL friend sees this, they know enough.
If this is not the case, your RL friend or family member will still know what is going on.

And finally put all this in a tab in your profile.
Yes it will take up one of your very few Picks (let us have more Linden Lab!), but it could be worth it.
It would be even better if Linden Lab gave us an extra tab in our profile that you could use to fill in this information.
Of course you can also choose to use the ‘1st life’ tab for this, but most people like using that space to tell a little bit about themselves in RL.

Here is the tab in my profile, as an example.
At the moment it only has one name in it, my friend who also is connected with me via my RL Facebook account, who knows my RL email address, has my RL sister’s information, etc, etc.
I’ll add a few more friends, but I want to check with them first if they are ok with it.
If anything serious would happen to me, or something stupid like dropping my computer in the sea while sailing, my sister would know about it.
And once my SL friends got worried and contacted my sister, they’ know what had happened.
And if things were really serious, my sister also knows what I want to happen to my sims if I have died in a freak sword fighting tin opener accident during one of my RL time travel adventures.

Of course it is completely up to you how much you explain about why you can’t be online in SL, sometimes it is nobodies business.
But I think you owe it to your virtual friends and landlords to at least know you’re not dead and if you’re planning on returning.

So folks, please remember that even though you may not realise it or underestimate it, there are people in SL who very likely are desperately trying to figure out why you’ve vanished.
Be a pal, give them a way to find out!

Second Life Oculus ready viewer released, fails to impress

Tags

"second life", Head mounted displays, htcvive, ocolus rift, virtual reality

Linden Lab has released a viewer that supports the Development kit 2 version of the Oculus Rift but also the consumer version.
This is something many people have been waiting for.

Unfortunately I can’t test it myself, I don’t own a VR headset nor a computer it would work with.
Any sponsors out there with some spare money?
Give me a call.

When you visit the Second Life website you still see an artist’s impression of what the Rift might look like, not a picture of the actual current headset and when you click for more information you’ll be taken to a blog post from 2014.
So Oculus users joining SL today, will not know they can use their headset till they try.

The viewer was much anticipated, but once tried the experience left several users less than impressed.
According to some users, it seems like performance has gotten worse compared to the dk2 viewer.
Of course we all know that Second Life is not perfectly suitable for VR headset experience, but you’d at least hope that it would still be working just as good or better than it did with the DK2 even though the commercial Oculus may be more demanding.
The viewer also lowers your graphics settings so even if you have a super computer that technically could handle SL at ultra settings in your Oculus, you wouldn’t be able to try it.

Check out the forum thread here (click) to see how people are experiencing it.

Jim Reichert, who does a lot of work with new VR technologies, uploaded the first (as far as I know) video showing the new viewer;

He was rather disappointed by his recent experience.
He writes;

I took a leap of faith on my part to update my Oculus drivers to the latest drop.
After an hour or two of laboring through latest Oculus installation and sorting out its ideosyncrasies, I finally got everything working– and by “working” I mean limping along like something from 2003.
Comparatively speaking, it’s a far worse Oculus experience than I’d had on Linden Lab’s previous attempt from 2014. Not only is it far choppier from a frame-rate perspective, but it’s rendered on the lowest settings– a far cry from the smooth experience that I’d grown used to.
More frustratingly, it’s not even good for taking stereoscopic screenshots since the render settings seem to have been pulled down as far as they could go. Setting them to Ultra had no effect whatsoever.
The real kicker, however, is that there is currently no way to go back to the original attempt– the one from 2014. I can no longer shoot videos to showcase how amazing Second Life is to my neo-VR friends.
It’s very frustrating development because I’m finally drawing a crowd.
What do I show them now?”

On twitter people have also been sharing their experiences;

Mr Tate writes;

Testing with various settings it seems HMD view colours are washed out, transparency & plants missing, HMD UI settings seem to have no effect. HMD UI can be across middle of screen, light blue squares on sea.
My setup is Windows 10, Xeon processor, 32GB memory, SSD drives and Nvidia GTX980 GPU.
Comparison shot of normal 2D view and HMD view with many missing items, sea patch, etc.;

Making more progress by turning “Atmospheric Shaders” off. Transparency okay then

On the Second Life VR Facebook page and the Second Life VR Facebook group people have also been commenting;

Mr Claesen;

I tried, works with CV1, well it works as badly as it did with the SDK2. Massive latency, bad shading, no AA, … . And it’s overcomplicated AGAIN.

Ms Lorentzson;

Wow that must have been the worst VR experience in a long time. All the old errors and a few new ones are still there. It is like pre Alpha.

Ms Millar;

Well yes, it works, and I’m so glad that it does, BUT it looks absolutely bloody terrible. Is there any point in me using something that makes my virtual environment look so appalling, just so I can move about it in a limited fashion anyway? I’m sad to say that it’s just not what I’d hoped it would be, and for that reason alone, I’ll stick with Firestorm. What I’ll take away from this whole experience is that it’s clear that it can be done, but as far as LL/official viewers go it’s with limitations.

Mr Mikula;

I was running it today on my rig which is driven by dual titan X’s and yeah its certainly a stripped back viewer. I actually enjoyed first person view more on my monitor than on the oculus “CV1”. Seems like many objects weren’t rendering even if I cranked it to ultra.
I mean my expectations weren’t too high, but I figured it’d at least show me what I can see in desktop mode! Definitely can’t wait for project sansar lol.

The discussion is also going on at SLUniverse (click).
There, Ms Cortes reported;

I only briefly tried the first viewer long ago with DK2, the new one is better from what I recall of it. As for the experience with the current viewer and the release version of the rift? It’s… okay I guess. Not being able to change the graphics settings to look better really hurts the experience. If it’s there I couldn’t figure out where, so no shiny ALM, shadows or any of that .

A lot of objects vanish or become 100% transparent when they shouldn’t be, scene loading in general seems very blocky. It reminds me of new chunks loading in Minecraft.

The head tracking could probably use improvement, but it’s not bad. Disabling seeing your avatar in mouselook is probably a good idea since you’ll see your own head clipping into your viewpoint on occasion, I imagine this is worse with people who have idles that move all over the place.

Here’s some videos I took (although not very good ones), I cropped it to only show the main center area of my screen (it’s quite a bit larger otherwise), and keep in mind that while the video looks jittery, it seems more natural with the actual headset on your head, since it’s your own subtle head movements and you looking around making all the motion.

This first small area is made to 1:1 RL scale (along with my avatar), which is key for any kind of immersion. Most of SL fails this terribly, and it is one of the reasons why VR in most of SL is bleh. The start of the videos where it’s all weird and shaky is me putting on the headset and recentering the view, and I do a few back and forth comparisons with HMD vs normal mode to show the massive graphical differences at different points in both videos.
https://streamable.com/wgys

This second area is a lot more spacious:
https://streamable.com/jcjh

All that said, it is still fun to play around with, and being able to see things in 3D is really nice, the videos don’t capture that sensation of depth. As it stands though, SL in VR sadly doesn’t compare well to a proper game made for VR.

Make sure you check out the videos Ms Cortes shared in the quote above.

So in short the main issue appears to be that the viewer forces you to lower your graphics settings, which makes SL look real ugly, real fast.

Also downloading the new viewer may cause your firewall and protection software to alert you because of an outdated security certificate, and the new viewer is Windows only.
A HTC Vive viewer is not being worked on at the moment, a shame as the Vive seems to have pushed the Oculus to the side as the leading VR headset.

But it is early days.
These problems may just be temporary bugs.
So although Lindens read my blog, make sure you file bug reports so the right Lindens get to hear about your issues asap.

Have you tried it?
What is your experience, let us know here in the comments section below.

On a side note; there is apparently a service called Vorpx that will allow you to enjoy Second Life with your firestorm viewer and at higher graphics settings in the CV1 AND HTCVIVE.

Grid dips below 25.000 regions for first time since 2008

Tags

"second life", facts, figures, statistics, traffic, Tyche Shepherd

Tyche Shepherd, who has been keeping an eye on all the numbers, facts and figures of Second Life, yesterday announced that for the fist time since 2008 when she started keeping these records, the amount of regions on the Second Life grid dipped below 25000 for the fist time since June 2008.

We all know that the amount of sims in Second Life has been declining for a long time so this isn’t really a surprise.
But still, it must be unwelcome news at Linden Lab.
Or maybe extra motivation to keep making Second Life and Project Sansar better.

Of course 25.000 areas of land the size of 65,536 m², is still a gigantic virtual world.

Since December 2014 there were a few small signs of growth, but generally we’ve just seen decline.

You can read the full report on the SLUniverse website by clicking here.

Make sure you also check out her excellent website; http://gridsurvey.com

Why the banning of Second Life by Twitch is nonsense

Tags

"second life", gaming, online, streaming, twitch, video

Twitch is a website that allows you to broadcast video of whatever game you’re playing and when a while back a few people decided to start streaming (thats what kids these days call it) Second Life, the company was shocked and horrified.

Because apparently there is nudity in Second Life.
Did you know that?
It’s news to me.

They banned Second Life because it violates their Terms of Service / Rules of conduct.
They also prohibit all versions of games rated Adults-Only according to the ESRB’s Rating Guide.

Now lets see how this applies to Second Life.
I think SL has not been rated by the ‘Entertainment Software Rating Board’, I can’t find it there yet.
Maybe if Linden Lab could get it classified and if they have competent staff there, we could get a sophisticated and sensible rating.

If ESRB would rate it adult, it, according to the ESRB website this would classify the game as;

ADULTS ONLY
Content suitable only for adults ages 18 and up. May include prolonged scenes of intense violence, graphic sexual content and/or gambling with real currency.

Maybe it is just me, but that is not my Second Life.
Except for a riot on Mayday, there is very rarely intense violence in 1920s Berlin and as I never visit the local brothel (the action happens on another sim) there is no graphic sexual content in 1920s Berlin (as long as you don’t spy on people in the privacy of their bedroom) and there’s no gambling to be seen, honest gov’nor, I never touched those dice.

These things are also not part of the sims I visit.
Sometimes someone’s clothes don’t rez, but Twitch writes;

Sexually explicit acts or content: Nudity can’t be a core focus or feature of the game in question and modded nudity is disallowed in its entirety. Occurrences in game are okay, so long as you do not make them a primary focus of your stream and only spend as much time as needed in the area to progress the game’s story.

Someone’s clothes not rezzing to me is a glitch, a lag related issue, not something someone does on purpose.
And outside our nudists corner at the beach in a neighbouring region, seeing nude people is rare.
Either way it is not the core or focus of the “game”.

You may mention griefing, sure that still happens in Second Life although generally it is rare, at least as part of my Second Life.
The sim I live in has capable managers who eject or even ban someone, often before they even get to the actual sim.
The last time I was seriously griefed by someone is years ago and the only reason I couldn’t do anything about it was because I had a duty towards my tenants to keep an eye on this person, otherwise simply muting him would have solved it.

I know that videos about griefing and adult entertainment in Second Life has flooded sites like youtube, but that simply does not represent SL as it is to many of its users.

In short, I could easily stream Second Life directly to the internet without there being a risk of nudity, kinky hanky panky, graphic violence, etc.

If I wanted to, I could make a SL video with all those naughty things in it, true.
And I wouldn’t mind Twitch not allowing that.
But I could make videos like that with a lot of other games Twitch does allow…

So not only does their ruling on Second Life not make any sense, it is hypocritical.

Just look at the games they do allow; Minecraft, Counter Strike, The Witcher, GTA 5, etc, etc.
These games CAN have nudity and sex in them, if the gamer wants to.
In GTA 5 it is even a pre-programmed part of it, you can hire a prostitute for a bit of action in your car and then violently murder her.
Which, apparently is fine.

To me some of these games are also a school example of containing “prolonged scenes of intense violence”.
Trust me I know.
I am the equivalent of a 42 year old soccer mum (even though I luckily don’t have kids and if I did I wouldn’t let them play soccer and by the way it is called FOOTBALL), one of the least likely people to be a hardcore gamer.
Yet I regularly play violent games, just the other day I was sniping Hitler in the face.

So, in short, they allow plenty of games that allow adult content in one way or another and banning Second Life for those rules, makes no sense.
They could and should ban individual users who stream such SL content or stuff like that from the games they do allow.

Do we care?
No not really, I never even heard of Twitch till very recently, I don’t really see the entertainment value of streaming game videos and there are other options out there.
Personally I prefer edited videos that show the interesting bits of games or virtual worlds, not just gameplay.

Nevertheless, Twitch is being hypocritical, and I’m allergic to that.
I’m also annoyed when the reputation of Second Life is being dragged trough the dirt again.
Sorry to disappoint everyone but there is no adult content, nudity, griefing or hardcore violence EVERYWHERE in Second Life.
I’ve only witnessed particle griefing once in the last couple of years and people from all over came to have a look.
But seek and ye shall find.

Just because it CAN be part of SL, doesn’t mean it ALWAYS IS part of SL.
And that is the same with some of the games they do allow.

The only thing that should matter is;

Can you easily stream SL onto the internet and avoid nudity, hanky panky and graphic violence?
Yes.
Can you easily stream SL onto the internet without breaking the Twitch rules?
Yes.
Ipso Facto; Twitch is talking nonsense.

Massive griefer attack across the grid

Tags

"second life", alarm, alert, attack, griefers

It’s just like the good old days!

Griefers managed to annoy thousands of people in Second Life today by rezzing rather ugly spirals that make noise and cause a hell of a lag, making life in these sims practically impossible.

According to unconfirmed reports a huge part of the grid has been taken over by these spirals, LL knows who is behind them, I won’t name them or their group here, because they would probably like it, but it is also all unconfirmed.

It seems the guilty party has not yet been banned from SL, or at least they still appear online.

One of the (many) sims to suffer is the well known Caledon sim collective, thanks to SLGo I managed to visit, fly around and even take a picture before lag became too bad.
With my regular viewer I doubt I would have been able to even take a single step.

When your sim is under attack there generally isn’t much you can do, but here are a few tips;

• Alert Linden Lab (if live chat support happens to be online…)
• Go to a place in your sim that is HIGH up, most attacks don’t reach very high and with your draw distance set to very low, lag might be a lot less at high altitude, from here you can take further steps without drowning in lag porridge.
  It is a good idea to create a landmark for this spot so you can teleport here from outside the sim.
• In the region/estate window turn off ‘Allow Public Access’, this will remove all visitors and keep new people from arriving, giving you some peace but also keeps the griefers from returning.
• In the debug tab disable everything, this may bring down lag as well and may stop the griefers toys from working.
• Return the griefers objects.
• Restart the region(s).

In most cases this will help, but of course it depends on the situation and the type of attack.

Let’s hope this one is sorted soon.

If you have any other tips, ideas, suggestions or just want to share your griefer attack story, please do so in the comments.

Caledon under attack