New World Notes

Firestorm's New Alt. Cloud Maps Make SL Skies Awesome

So this is not a realist painting, but an untouched screenshot from Second Life -- yes it is, yes it is:

The artist known as Whiskey Monday sent it to me, because it's the original of this image she posted on her blog right here, which is much more dramatic, because she ran it through the Photoshop paces. But don't you agree, the original looks great too? This is because she's not using the standard Second Life viewer to take the screenshot. For as she tells me:

"Firestorm introduced Vincent Nacon’s alternative cloud maps in this last release. There are four cloud tga files to choose from, and they're far more realistic and robust than the normal viewer clouds. Ziki Questi did a great blog post with examples of each type of cloud.

She's using these clouds to create a new series which is on-view in-world soon:

I Like the Singularity Second Life Viewer Because It Likes Me

I'm liking the Singularity third party viewer for Second Life, which is what I'm running in the screenshot above (at Rose Borchovski's "Arrival" installation, which I blogged last week). Pretty good frame rate and crash-free so far, certainly moreso than the official viewer. (And I'm having trouble with my AlienWare laptop battery, which is making it tough to even run my web browser, let alone a 3D client, but Singularity still performed smashingly.) Displaying dynamic shadows is still a no-go, but I've learned to give up on that for now.

Users of Free Non-Mesh Phoenix Viewer Enraged at Volunteer Team for No Longer Supporting It (for Free)

Oh Internet: The developers of Phoenix, once a very popular third party Second Life viewer, are no longer supporting the client, because it's not compatible with recent updates to the official SL viewer codebase (including mesh). That's understandable. What's somewhat confusing is that many Phoenix users are enraged by this rejection, and angry at the Phoenix team for walking away -- even though they're still working on third party viewers (the mesh-enabled Firestorm), they're a group of volunteers working on an open source project, and, you know, they gave Phoenix away for free. As team lead Tonya Souther blogs:

Ever since we announced the end of Phoenix support, people have been bitching and moaning about it... There have been a few comments recently from folks claiming to fork - or even "take over" - the development of the Phoenix viewer... One thing I don't understand is the fetish some of our haters have for accusing us of lying. We don't lie. We tell the truth as we see it. That's exactly what I've done in every posting I've made publicly, both here, on Google+, on SLUniverse, and on the LL forums.

The whole rant is worth reading if you're a Phoenix user past or present or if you're just interested in the social dynamics around open source software, but three takeaways stick out to me:

Student Creates Code Which Generates Second Life/OpenSim Avatars... Based on Simulated Genetics!

Game developers and artificial life creators, pay attention to this: Uruk is a historical city simulation project being developed in Second Life by the University of Western Sydney and the Federation of American Scientists. I wrote about it a couple years ago, and now thanks to Tomas Trescak, a postgrad student working with project lead Anton Bogdanovych (shaqq Korobase in SL), the simulated city has something else: Avatars created via simulated genetics. Watch this demo video to see what I mean:

"[U]sing this method," Anton tells me, "one can manually design a small number of Second Life avatars… then hit a button and automatically generate a crowd  of any size. All avatars in this crowd will look different, but will also have genetic resemblance with the initial population." You can read more about it in this academic paper Bogdanovych co-authored: "Generating Diverse Ethnic Groups with Genetic Algorithms" (.pdf link), and Anton recently e-mailed me about some other crucial details:

Since Firestorm's Now Second Life's Top Viewer, Shouldn't Its Developers Have Access to SL's JIRA?

Firestorm is now the most popular viewer among Second Life users, Linden Lab's Director of Open Development Scott "Oz Linden" Lawrence recently told Firestorm's team leader Jessica Lyon, responsible for more total user hours than any other third party viewer, and more than Linden's own official viewer (which trails far behind). This Linden Lab announcement makes another recent Linden Lab move, replacing its JIRA reporting system with a simplified bug tracker, seem even more strange. As lead Firestorm developer Tonya Souther wrote, "It makes it much harder for us to know whether the bug we're hunting is a LL bug. It also makes it harder for us to realize that we just fixed an LL bug and contribute the fix back to them." If viewers like Firestorm were just niche products, that might be a bearable cost. But since most of Linden Lab's most active users depend so much on the folks who work on projects like Firestorm, shouldn't the company be trying to make their job easier, not harder?

How to Create a 3D Joystick to Use in Second Life

Using an arduino hooked up to an accelerometer, a dude called CJ Davies created a device that's something of a 3D joystick or mouse, which he can now use to control his interactions in Second Life -- watch:

Go here to Mr. Davies' blog for the full-on geek exegesis on how to do this for yourself.

Citing Havok License & Lack of SLer Usage, Linden Prohibits Viewer Log-in Option to Second Life's Open Source Spinoffs

Linden Lab has removed the ability to log into OpenSim grids from official, authorized versions of the Second Life viewer, Hypergrid Business reported last Friday, a move that will effectively fork SL from its open source spinoff. There's a lot of debate in the OpenSim community whether this move will benefit or harm its users, but according to Linden Lab, it's a win for Second Life's users. I just got this official statement on the subject from company spokesman Peter Gray:

The Second Life Viewer is still open source. The terms of our license to use Havok in the Viewer limit it to connecting to our services, so we removed the -loginURI option from the official Second Life Viewer in order to comply with that license requirement. Very few Second Life users ever have a need to login to anything but Agni or Aditi, so to reduce confusion, we've also simplified our Viewer to display only those grids that we expect our users to use.

Emphasis mine. As I understand that passage, he's saying few SLers have expressed any interest in using OpenSim, so to offer that option, as, for instance, the Imprudence third party viewer does (see image above), is not needed.

Future Phoenix Viewer Development in Peril?

Tonya Souther, a leading developer for the Phoenix Viewer, a third party viewer for Second Life that's far more popular than the official SL viewer, on her blog suggests that future development of Phoenix may be in peril. This is due to some recent technical changes Linden Lab is making to future viewer development, which she also explains in the post, but the upshot for her is this:

[W]hat I'm about to say is my own personal opinion, and not that of the Phoenix Viewer Project. The group has not made any decisions yet. To me, it's time to say that we are not going to put any more effort into Phoenix... As far as I'm concerned, it's time to put Phoenix to rest. The developers don't like working in the codebase, as in many ways it's an unmaintainable tissue of hacks, the support team barely remembers how to run it, and Firestorm now provides essentially all of the function Phoenix has and much more besides.

Read it all here. If I'm reading right, Phoenix fans will have to transition to Firestorm, the most updated version of the Phoenix Viewer Project viewers, which may make some Phoenix fans' phlegm fly.

The Phoenix Viewer Project is a Non-Profit Corporation Registered in a US State

The Phoenix Viewer Project which develops the extremely popular third party Phoenix and Firestorm SL viewers is a registered non-profit corporation based in a US state listed with a registration address and the real name of the company's president, Jessica Trinity, who's known in SL as Jessica Lyon. (And is the rare person whose real life name is more metaversey than her avatar handle.)

I mention this fact for at least two reasons:

Second Life Usage Dominated by Third Party Viewers -- Linden Lab's Own Software Only Used by "Minority" of SLers

Third party viewer developer Tonya Souther recently pointed out a very important March interview on Treet TV with Linden Lab's Open Development director Scott "Oz Linden" Lawrence, which includes a crucial passage I initially missed. It's so important, it needs to be highlighted here. At about 33 minutes into the conversation, Lawrence says this in relationship to the official Second Life viewer as compred with Phoenix and Firestorm, which are third party SL viewers made by The Phoenix Viewer Project team, a large consortium of SL users (none of whom are well known by their real names):

"Our own viewer users are a minority. A significant minority -- we're the number three viewer behind, behind the two... Phoenix is far and away the number one viewer, although it's quite steadily losing market share these days, has been for some months now. And Firestorm is the newer technology viewer from your project, is the number two, and it's gaining market share... And our viewer is number three behind Firestorm."

This admission came in March, as I said, so I checked with Linden Lab if it remained true:

"The 'market shares' of various Viewers isn't a data point we're currently sharing," spokesman Peter Gray told me. Still, it's unlikely the shares have changed drastically in two months, and based on what Oz says, along with what some SL insiders have suggested elsewhere, I think the following is a very plausible estimate: