Singularity Viewer hiccups in Second Life

On July 2, Second Life users using the release version of Singularity Viewer started experiencing bake fails (avatar as cloud), inventory issues and other problems. Turns out Linden Lab formally turned off access to some server-side APIs grid-wide that had long been scheduled to be shut down. Apparently Singularity had some leftover code tstill using those APIs causing the issues.

At first the Singularity devs recommended switching to one of the nightly development builds but that turned out to create new problems (those things are generally alpha releases and not suitable for primetime). A couple of emergency roll-outs later and things are more or less back on track. Assuming you want to mess with nightly releases, here's the link: https://virtual-nexus.xyz/down/

For a more complete (and technical) write-up about what happened, read Singularity Goes Sideways from Nalates Urriah's blog. (If you aren't subscribed to her blog you should be!)

Now if you're like me and don't really enjoy messing with alpha releases there is an alternative -- Cool VL Viewer. It's lightweight and easy on lower powered systems, uses the classic interface and is actively maintained and updated reliably. For more details and downloads, visit: http://sldev.free.fr. When I need better framerates and want to run more than one avatar at a time, I use Cool VL Viewer. It's been very solid for me.

Yes I can hear you yelling "BUT SNICKERS! IT'S NOT ON THE THIRD PARTY VIEWER LIST!" No it's not. The developer, Henri Beauchamp, states that it is TPV compliant but he doesn't want to release his private info to Linden Lab AND he believes the laws in France say that he shouldn't have to. That's fair and to his credit, I have never heard another developer EVER question whether Cool VL Viewer was safe or not.

I really do hope Singularity can get back to having a solid release version since the more lightweight, capable viewers there are, the better.

UPDATE: If you do want to continue using Singularity, UNINSTALL your current version completely and (as of this writing) install version 7685 from the link above!

NOTE: Users are reporting issues with the Android Lumiya Viewer that sound somewhat similar to the Singularity problems. Since Lumiya hasn't been updated for over a year, it wouldn't surprise me if the two were related.

The death of Flickr?

Since Flickr (the online photo sharing service) was purchased by SmugMug, a lot of people have wondered what the new ownership would do with its new shiny toy. Well yesterday, the other shoe dropped and here's what Flickr users are now being greeted with:

While 1,000 free photos sounds like a lot, the longtime integration between Second Life and Flickr (with Linden Lab having an official presence on Flickr) means that it really isn't. Many Second Life users have Flickr accounts with TENS of thousands of photos. Per Flickr, come February 2019, anyone OVER the 1000 photo limit who does not upgrade to Flickr Pro at $50/year, will have their photos deleted. It's not clear from Flickr's blog how they'll determine which photos get ditched.

Another worry is that a LOT of work available through Creative Commons is hosted under free accounts at Flickr. It's not clear what will happen to that content although Creative Commons is said to be working with Flickr on solutions.

Second Life users have long had another outlet for photo sharing called Snapzilla. It's a sister site to the virtual worlds online forum site, virtualverse.one (previously SLUniverse.com). I reached out to the owner/developer of both, Cristiano (aka Cristiano Midnight) who had these observations:

"I have been following what's going on with Flickr - there's an active thread here (virtualverse.one) about it. While I think their 1000 image limit is still fairly generous, SL Flickr users are definitely looking for alternatives. Snapzilla has always been focused on SL (though I'm expanding it right now to include other worlds including sinespace, Sansar and OpenSim grids), so it's a good fit for SL bloggers and photographers. It already has 13 years of SL history on it. 

I just recently moved Snapzilla to new hosting and split the actual image hosting off from the main site to make it more manageable and scalable (web hosting can be expensive, while image storage is fairly cheap). Transferring 600k images was a challenge, but it all worked out well. 

I think there may be an influx of some new users to Snapzilla from Flickr - I'm not concerned about the impact really. The site could handle it if they do decide to switch, even if it is a large volume of new users."

I'm am personally not someone who feels compelled to document every moment of my existence -- either in Second Life OR in real life. So it's hard for me to imagine accumulating tens of thousands of photos in the first place. But for those that do, I'm sure there's some very real angst involved. After all, Flickr did promise everyone a free terrabyte forever. Storage is cheap, user retention is harder. We'll see how it all shakes out.

InWorldz dead! ....Or is it?

I have an account on InWorldz but I've never spent much time there. However, many people have full sims and playgrounds there because, well, it's hugely less expensive to have a million prims there that it is in Second Life.

So I was shocked to see a note from one of my SL groups (Underground) that they were facilitating migrating template purchases made InWorldz to SL. What??

Turns out that a royal mess-up of some sort is indeed potentially sounding the death knell for InWorldz. Which is so sad. It really was a decent alternative to Second Life.

I've read through all the various posts and I'm not sure exactly where the whole thing stands. There's a GoFundMe campaign -- which seems to have raised the requisite $$ to restart Inworldz but there's also no update from the owner if they are going ahead. Anyway, here's some reading for your weekend. :(

From the owner:

https://inworldz.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360007381013-State-of-InWorldz

And the GoFundMe page:

https://www.gofundme.com/inworldz-in-trouble

You figger it out.

Linden Lab reduces Second Life land prices, doubles free tier

It's rare that you hear good news from Linden Lab these days. Usually I'm logging onto "Server maintenance do not rez valuable junk" or "Concierge & billing support are down due to too much booze." But today I was greeted with a notice in the SL Commerce Group that Linden Lab has lowered tier prices by 10%! But even cooler is that they've DOUBLED the amount of "free" tier included with Premium accounts from 512m to 1024m.

For me personally, that's really helpful. I was about 1 month away from selling 1/2 my land due to that extra $5/month charge. I really wasn't getting a lot of benefit from it other than the extra prims. But now I don't have to! YAY!

Thanks Lindens!

For details see: Mainland tier allotment and pricing changes (March 2018)

InWorldz goes open source

From the InWorldz blog...

InWorldz and Halcyon

Over the past year, InWorldz has released source code to the greater 3d simulation and virtual world community in an attempt to make quality solutions for common problems available to the masses. This has been done deliberately to raise the bar of expectations for users coming from larger more well funded companies to smaller grids like ours. 

Last week we released the core of the InWorldz simulator source code on GitHub. 

As well as being a community oriented virtual world, this release makes InWorldz an open source software company specializing in performance and stability oriented 3d simulation.

 I don't pretend to know what impact this will have on anything. That's for my techie followers and friends to tell me. :)

Link to complete article here: http://blog.inworldz.com/techblog/2015/09/19/inworldz-halcyon-3d-virtual-world-simulator/

Virtual Reality: Still Goofy

Short piece from Information Week. Doesn't really say much except what most people already know -- the reality part of virtual has a long ways to go. Personally, I'm holding out for when I can buy a cheap holodeck at Best Buy.

http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/virtual-reality-still-goofy-after-all-these-years/d/d-id/1319350

Second Life's Radegast Viewer needs a developer - UPDATE

I guess I've been living in a pixel cave or something. I hadn't realized that Latif Kalifa, the developer of the excellent "lightweight metaverse client" Radegast was in failing health and had announced his retirement from further work on his open source projects. He will be missed since much of the libopenmetaverse library code that enables other non-Linden dependent viewers (like Metabolt) was his.

I use Radegast all the time when playing HUD games where I need to log in an alt or two OR when working in some resource heavy program like Photoshop. Radegast doesn't bring my computer to a crawl and it's light touch on graphics is hugely appreciated. It has a few issues but most of them can be worked-around.

Here's what appears to be Latif's final post: http://radegast.org/wp/blog/2014/11/roads-end/

Radegast is definitely worth saving. Hopefully someone will pick it up.

UPDATE: A number of people have responded to my blog post on Twitter including @vrhax who has now duplicated the current code repository, @SignpostMarv (love that handle) who was originally listed as a contributor on Radgeast but hasn't been on SL for awhile and @RobinCornelius, also listed as a contributor to Radegast. There is talk of a fork for Radegast to continue it. Yay!

How dangerous are inventory backups?

Interesting article by Maria Korolov over at Hypergrid Business. It's a discussion about copybotting, making personal backups of inventory items and open grids. Worth a read. I learned some new things including a grid system I'd never heard -- Kitely.

'METAVERSE' PORN: DANGER AHEAD

Ooooh catchy title right? Sort of like that robot on Lost in Space ... "Danger, Will Robinson!"

Actually the title is from a blog article on WND (honestly not something I read at all) that I found via Google Alerts for anything to do with Second Life or other virtual world topics.

 It's really a fairly rational commentary on virtual worlds and online porn. Utherverse, Second Life and Jiggler get mentions from the author who points out that a generation is at risk of abandoning real life responsibility, problems and relationships for online alternatives. Well, he's right. There I said it.

Now back to your poseballs.

http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/metaverse-porn-danger-ahead/

Linden Lab building new virtual world

Per Wagner James Au's New World Notes,
"Linden Lab Confirms It's Building New Virtual World "Far Beyond What is Possible with Second Life" 

The Lab's official statement reads in part:

"Linden Lab is working on a next generation virtual world that will be in the spirit of Second Life, an open world where users have incredible power to create anything they can imagine and content creators are king. This is a significant focus for Linden Lab, and we are actively hiring to help with this ambitious effort. We believe that there is a massive opportunity ahead to carry on the spirit of Second Life while leveraging the significant technological advancements that have occurred since its creation, as well as our unparalleled experience as the provider of the most successful user-created virtual world ever.

For the complete text, go to the link at the top of this article.

I have always felt that the biggest improvements to SL from a techy standpoint would be a better avatar mesh (more detail + maybe optional realistic naughty bits that aren't "tack-ons"), smoother sim crossings, less lag and the ability to get more "stuff" into a SIM. Maybe even the concept of a SIM is just outdated. I dunno.

Facebook buys Oculus VR for $2 billion

They cannot be serious! Call me crazy but I don't think Oculus is worth $2 billion. There are too many barriers to wide adoption with this stuff and lots of other players in the same space. I guess the developers can retire rich now while Facebook share owners may start thinking where is the value.

What next? Facebook buying Second Life for $4 billion? Meh.

News article here: http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/25/technology/facebook-oculus/index.html

Official blog post here from Oculus: http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/oculus-joins-facebook/

Utherverse: online porn starts taking itself seriously

There seems to be a bit of self-promotion and I'm very suspicious of the numbers offered up. Still, it's an interesting read.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/jamiebartlett/100012821/utherverse-online-porn-starts-taking-itself-seriously/

Sort of shows what Linden Lab might have done if they hadn't messed up the Adult re-rollout with the whole Zindra fiasco.

Spies infiltrate online games including Second Life

From the New York Times....

Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents.

So all those avatars with the last name "SecretSpy" may really be -- secret spies. But seriously, how much money can you really move through WoW or Second Life? Most people have a hard enough time getting their money out of SL into Paypal legitimately let alone doing it on the sly. :P

Full story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/world/spies-dragnet-reaches-a-playing-field-of-elves-and-trolls.html