New tools for region owners in Second Life

Tags

"second life", improvements, manager, region, tools

Many years ago, in 2012 to be exact, I wrote a blog about how it would be a good idea to give region owners some offline tools to help them manage their sims.

You can read it by clicking here, but in short;
I suggested some tools accessible on the SL official website that allowed region owners so do some things inworld without actually having to start up the viewer as that isn’t always an option.
One of the tools I suggested was to allow us to restart a region from the website.

Linden Lab has now given us this option!
This is very handy, not just because you can’t always go inworld because you’re too busy in RL, the computer you’re on doesn’t handle SL or maybe your sim is under attack by grievers and you can’t even get to it.
And of course, by being able to do this via the SL website means you can also do it on your mobile phone while in traffic and nowhere near a computer.
Click here to read the official announcement.

Region owners can now simply go to their land manager page and restart all their regions from there, you can also restart them in safe mode so with scripts, physics & collisions disabled.
Effectively making griefing impossible.

This is a very handy and some day it may save your bacon.

But I hope this is just the first of more tools to come!
Because I can think of a few more improvements that would be most welcome.
Here are a few ideas for SL website tools (not just for region managers) I wrote about in my blog back in 2012, if you can think of more, please share your ideas in the comments section.

• Be able to send an message to the region.
• Have access to your groups so you can send a group message, join group chat (for instance to explain what you’re doing about the griefer attack) but also give and take away permissions to make things harder for that troll who pretended to be a tenant or to give that new tenant rezing permissions without them having to wait till you get home.
• See who is currently visiting your region and eject someone if need be.
• Have access to detailed visitor logs.
• Change the windlight.
• Allow everyone, not just region managers, to chat, live, with anyone in SL from the SL website.
  Allowing you to talk to your friends but also fellow administrators in case of an emergency or just to check if everything is in order.

In short, all those little jobs that only take a few seconds to do but because you have to do them inworld, can take minutes, even hours if you have to wait to get home to take care of them.

UPDATE;

I’ve contacted Linden Lab and asked them if they are planning any improvements and additions to these tools.
I was told;

Yes, we do – we have a project viewer with an update to estate management tools coming very soon. The simulator changes have just rolled out to support those. We think these are going to be a very welcome addition.

New SL feature; Place Pages

Tags

"second life", improvements, places pages

Linden Lab just announced that they are rolling out yet another feature for Second Life, one I’m very excited about and have been, in parts, suggesting for a while; Place Pages.

They basically give every region and parcel in Second Life a page on the Second Life website where you can find out more information about them.

It is a bit like the information page you see when you use search inworld before you teleport to that sim, but bigger & better.
And all you have to do to visit these pages is click ‘visit this location’ and the teleport window in SL opens.
No more visiting the, if I may say so, confusing map first.

To make such a page your parcel and/or region needs to have “Show in search” activated in the land setting.
Go to https://places.secondlife.com/places to see a list of all these pages and click “my places” to see a list of your sims that you can make a page for.
The rest is self-explanatory.

And rather exciting; you can use 360 degrees photos and even stream LIVE via youtube from inworld!

But it gets better.
Place pages right now is still in the Beta testing phase, so it will get better and how we are going to use these could influence what will happen next with them.
Linden Lab promises future improvements and features, such as an event calendar!

I’ve written before (click here to read) about making more use of ‘my-sl’ profiles and perhaps creating pages for groups in SL.
Finding a way to allow us to stop using Social Media for all these things and start using the official SL website more for this.
Giving us online events calendars for our sims is a huge step towards this.

I hope that in the future the Place Pages for communities will include perhaps also a forum or place where people can chat with each other, an online photo album (or widget that allows us to show our Flickr pictures there),  contact options that allow you to chat directly with admins and managers or at least send them a message, etc.

But above all; an events calendar.
Right now we have to send reminders, have a Facebook calendar, google calendar, etc.
I’d love to have a calendar for a sim that shows you right away ALL the events in that sim, region, all parcels in that region or just selected parcels in that region but that also gives you the option to subscribe to this calendar so you get IM’s when these events are about to begin.
And please, also the option for us to create recurring events so we don’t have to create a new calendar event for those daily or weekly events.

Can you think of more improvements and additions?
Let Linden Lab know, you can follow their forum post by clicking here and file a Jira about bugs or for your ideas and suggestions.

Either way, I’m getting busy making pages for all my parcels and sims!
Starting with this one for 1920s Berlin.

Official LL announcement regarding Prim allowance changes

Tags

improvements, land impact, prims

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.

See you on the other side.

Prim allowance going up by a LOT for everyone!

Tags

improvements, increase, land impact, news, prims

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?

Eventually Patch Linden responded on this forum discussion;

Inara Pey blogged about the prim change as well, promising more information when the official announcement would be published;

https://modemworld.me/2016/11/02/2016-sl-project-updates-441-server-viewer-land/

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.

Happy Primsmas everybody!

New Project Sansar Screenshots

Tags

collision, ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, improvements

At the Collision conference Ebbe Altberg (CEO of Linden Lab) had a presentation which included some short images of Project Sansar.

The video is not yet online so if you’ve missed it, you’ll have to wait.
The Collision team will put the video online but it may take a few weeks.

Luckily for us all, Maddy Gynoid was on standby, watched the live stream and took a few screenshots.
With his permission I share them here, you can also visit his personal blog to read the actual article he wrote in German by clicking this link.

This first picture shows us a science fiction type of post apocalyptic world.
It looks wonderful but perhaps most interesting about this screenshot are the buttons, or lack thereof!
We only see a few small buttons at the right of the screen, their function we can only guess, but let’s take a closer look;

Sound, controller, help and escape?

Chat, map, build and avatar?

This next picture got me very excited as it shows a theme I love; archeology.
I’d love to dig up some virtual ruins.
But it is also interesting to note that the shadows, clearly from some sort of grid or skylight above, doesn’t seem to work on part of the ruim that is sticking out.

Another wonderful picture, as a history addict, it makes me very happy to see subjects such as these, I can’t wait to go explore some ancient locations like these.
Interesting detail is the bit at the top of the passage there, looks like the 3D scanner didn’t quite get that corner scanned properly.

The last picture here shows someone building within Sansar with an Oculus and the Oculus controllers.
It looks interesting and I for one look forward to building within world while using a VR headset… as soon as I can afford one that is.
From the screenshot we can’t conclude that much, can we actually build inworld like this or is it just a matter of moving bits around that we’ve bought on marketplace or build in Blender or Maya?

As soon as the video is online I’ll probably share it here and let’s see what else we can learn from that.

 

Second Life avatars get their biggest change in years

Tags

anouncement, avatars, improvements

Today Linden Lab announced ‘Project Bento’, the biggest change in Second Life avatars in years.

One of the things Second Life offers like almost nobody else is the freedom to change and personalise your avatar pretty much without limits, now they are making this easier and are going us even more options.

I quote from the Second Life website announcement;

We are introducing extensions to the standard Second Life Avatar Skeleton that give you dozens of new bones to support both rigging and animation, and accompanying new attachment points! This extended skeleton, which is fully backward compatible with existing avatars, rigging and animation, gives creators the power to build more sophisticated avatars than ever before. The skeleton extensions include:

• 11 extra limb bones for wings, additional arms, or extra legs.
• 6 tail bones
• 30 bones in the hands (all 10 fingers!)
• 30 bones for facial expressions
• 2 other new bones in the head for animating ears or antennae
• 13 new attachment points associated with the new bones

We’ve developed all this in collaboration with many expert Resident content creators and with the developers of the most popular tools for creating avatars and animations, so there will quickly be versions of those tools you can use to help take advantage of these changes. There is also some demo content already available.

I think this is interesting news, quite a few people seem to think Second Life will be neglected now Linden Lab is working on Project Sansar, but this clearly shows they are still putting a lot of work into improving their first-born.

Another thing I like is that they aren’t releasing this yet, but first want us to testrun these new features and let them know what we think.

I quote again;

The avatar skeleton changes introduced by Project Bento are not yet final because we want your feedback, either in the Creation Forum or in JIRA. To experience the changes, you’ll need to download the Project Viewer and upload any content using the new skeleton extensions to the Aditi Beta Test Grid (most regions on the Beta Test Grid will allow this; some may be in use for other testing and not yet have these updates). Once we have finalized the skeleton extensions, we will enable uploads using them to the main Second Life grid and the real fun can begin!

You can read the entire announcement by clicking here.

And check out this enticing video made by Gaia Clary;

New classic starter avatars for Second Life now available

Tags

"second life", avatar, changes, improvements, news, virtual reality

Linden Lab has just given us 16 brand new classic starter avatars for Second Life.
I’ve written about the starter avatars and some of the problems involved here; “The ongoing trouble with the new mesh avatars” and here; “An alternative to starter avatars”, also suggesting that they replaced and improved the old starter avatars in stead of those full mesh avatars.

Last year brand new full mesh avatars were released but many users (especially noobs) soon discovered that they looked nice but sadly were a bit static (no mouth opening when talking for instance) and it was very difficult to adjust them or  even change their clothes.
Full mesh avatars are something even advanced SL users sometimes have problems with so you can imagine that they didn’t make things easier for people new to our virtual world.
And of course making sure they feel at home asap is very important to keep them from leaving.

So these new avatars are the good old ‘system avatars’ we know and love (and hate) but with mesh attachments.
In a way, the best of both worlds…?

I think these new avatars look pretty good, especially the one in the 3 piece suit, even though he needs a haircut.
He is ready to start exploring 1920s Berlin, maybe I’ll even put a box with that outfit as a freebie at our teleport area.
Sadly none of the ladies have 1920s suitable clothes.
Seriously though, of course there are a lot of people who’ll find that a certain type or kind of avatar is missing from this selection.
The one thing I dislike about these new avatars is that they are all young and pretty.
I would have liked people a little older, a little fatter and perhaps a little uglier.
You know, like real life 🙂

Anyway, quite an improvement on the old system avatars, at least at first sight.
I haven’t tried them yet.
But it is a shame that after all these years apparantly it is still so difficult to create avatars that look good, are all mesh, are animated and not so complicated to modify or dress.
Something that seems so easy in games.

But I still think that it would be even better to allow new users to create and already personalise their avatars right there on the website before they even enter Second Life, letting them have some fun and giving them an avatar they’ve already started bonding and identifying with before they’ve even put virtual feet on the virtual ground.
I’ve written more about that idea here; “Starting your Second Life” and here; “Starting your Second Life is still not easy”.

You should be able to try out these new avatars now.

You can read the official Linden Lab announcement here; “New Classic Avatars are Now Available in Second Life!”.

Experience Tools NOW available but only for Premium Members!

Tags

announcement, Experience Tools, improvements

This morning Linden Lab released the following message in a blog post;

As of today, this exciting creative power is available to all Premium subscribers, and every Second Life user can enjoy participating in these seamless experiences with a new Viewer that makes it easy to manage all of your experience permissions.

This project has already helped bring a more immersive experience to The Cornfield, Linden Realms and other Second Life experiences you can find through our Portal Parks. Don’t forget to check out all the Resident-created experiences in our Destination Guide too!

Make sure you’ve updated to the latest Viewer or visit our download page to get it. This latest release allows you to manage all of your experiences whether you’re a creator or participant.

If you’re a Premium member and would like to begin creating with Experiences, check out this Knowledge Base article to get started. We can’t wait to see what you create!

I am not sure if the idea to make this something for premium members only is a permanent thing or just something just for now.
So I can’t tell you if eventually all users will be able to start using these tools.

Of course we’ll all be able to experience them.

In 1920s Berlin we’re experimenting with them and we hope to eventually hope to give you some experiences that will make your visit to 1920s Berlin more realistic.
Such as getting drunk, sick, having to go to the toilet, eat, drink and end up with a suspicious rash and itch after a wild night at the “Herrenclub”.
I’m not joking.

On the other hand, simply no longer having to ask guests permission to animate them every single time they sit on a chair or want to dance, would be wonderful.

We’re not ready for that in Berlin yet though, but I’ll keep you updated.

I think the experience tools are rather good fun and hope to see more of them.
Recently I got to try them at Loki Eliot’s excellent display at SL12B and it was a lot of fun.

So lets start creating some wonderful experiences!

24 hour day cycles are coming to Second Life

Tags

"second life", 24 hour days, day cycle, improvements, windlight

I’ve been nagging, bribing and begging for a 24 hour day cycle in Second Life for a very long time.
You can read my first blog about it from 2012 by clicking here.

Every opportunity I’ve had I brought it up, bothering poor Lindens with it everywhere I could find them, even Ebbe himself.

But I realised that this was something only of interest to a few people and thus, rightfully so, Linden Lab we’re not that interested in putting a lot of time into it.

Nevertheless I kept asking about it and I am sure so did others.

And I kept changing the windlight setting in 1920s Berlin twice a day… by hand!
In 4 regions…
You can imagine that this is quite a pesky job!
And when I had a hangover after a wild RL party… Berlin wouldn’t see sun till in the afternoon!

After all I want to mimic reality in my sim and in RL Berlin days just don’t last 4 hours, as they do now if you turn on the day cycle option.

So today I went to listen to Oz Linden talk at the SL12B event and couldn’t resist mumbling something about the 24 hour day wish again.

Oz heard me and said that I’d convinced Ebbe and that 24 hour day cycles are indeed coming to Second Life!

Jo, you’ve convinced Ebbe that we need to do 24 hour days!
I can’t give you a time line but one of these days it will happen for sure.
It’s one of the things I want to make part of environment settings, whats the dateline.
So right now the 4 hour second Life day, the whole setting cycle is always 4 hours, is kind of baked in and it wouldn’t be hard to change it so that is a variable.
I’d like that myself, its one that really irritates me because I hold lots of inworld meetings at various places and I’d like it to be true that whenever I’m holding a meeting it’s day time and the way things are right now unless you just use a fixed setting its hard to make sure a particular setting always lines up with a particular time of day in real time.

I can’t wait to experience my first 24 hour cycle in Berlin, actually seeing it get dark in SL as it gets darker in RL.

Maybe we can even link the daylight setting to a timezone!
Imagine that, never having to tweak the windlight again and see it change as seasons change.
Or even better… a windlight system that is linked to the weather… so we can have windlight mimic RL even more…
But maybe we should save that for another day or Sansar.
I want my 24 hour days first, so I can finally stop tweaking the windlight twice a day…

I just want people to visit Berlin and experience the time of day it is in Berlin in RL at that moment, of course if they don’t like being there at night, they can always turn the sun back on in their own viewer.
Second Life offers us so much freedom, we can do pretty much whatever we want and we can build anything our imagination can come up with.
So its a bit odd that we’re limited to 4 hour day cycles!

See the interview here;

Group limit in Second Life raised to 60… if you’re a premium member

Tags

"second life", groups, improvements

As of immediately Linden Lab has raised the group limit for Second Life members with a premium account from 42 to 60!

A gift that is actually useful and will be welcomed by most premium members and may even entice a few people to become one.

Linden Lab announced this today in this blogpost.

I am one of those ‘power users’ Linden Lab speaks of and I’m very happy with this improvement.

For 1920s Berlin alone we have over a dozen groups!

Of course, if Linden Lab followed my advice we wouldn’t need this many groups.
In a previous blog post I suggested adding more functionality to groups, adding subgroups, more roles, selective group messaging, etc.

And as far as I know, the official Linden Lab viewer still does not allow you to turn certain group chats or notifications off, some other viewers do.
So having 60 groups and using the official viewer may mean you’ll get flooded by group chats and spam, even more than before.

Nevertheless, this is a good step forward and I hope Linden Lab gives us more gifts like these that make it actually interesting and worth our while to be premium members.