New World Notes

Unity for Second Life Project Launches Discord Featuring Live Dev Streams - Starting Today at Noon PT!

Click here to join the Discord server for Crystal Frost, the Second Life viewer on Unity project I blogged last week and the brainchild of longtime dev Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord). Starting today at Noon PT, Bunny's going to livestream her development of Crystal Frost there, an eventually announce the release of a usable client:

"I will be posting screenshot highlights to the public areas of the Discord after I finish each coding session," she tells me. "Basically the Discord will have daily updates and screenshots Mondays through Thursday, and once I get a somewhat usable client going (even if it's not ready to replace other viewers), which I hope to do by the end of the month, I'll be posting weekly binaries."

She also launched an optional Patreon for the project:

 

BREAKING: Veteran Developer Creating New Second Life Viewer... for Unity!

Above: "Vastly more realistic lighting. This is a sunset in Crystal Frost."

SLer Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord) is a longtime developer who's been working on various Second Life projects for well over 15 years. Along with some impressive in-world games, she's done mixed reality projects for Italia Telecom and a nursing school experimenting with Second Life as a distance learning tool, among others.

Her new project, however, is somewhat more ambitious:

Crystal Frost, a new third party Second Life viewer that runs on Unity.

Yes, that means Crystal Frost should (eventually) work on mobile, displaying Second Life on a smartphone. 

If she succeeds, Crystal Frost would also offer a substantial leap in graphics quality for Second Life. (See the images in this post, courtesy Bunny, including the comparison with Firestorm below.) But Bunny has even greater ambitions than better graphics:

"Having a modern graphics engine that's multi-threaded, easier modability, implementing ray tracing and proper VR is super easy," as she explains. "I have ideas about how to implement VR and make it feel like VRChat. But I need to make the client stable and get rigged meshes working before I even attempt it. Also, theoretically better performance than the Linden Lab-based viewers, if I do it right." 

VRChat is actually a large part of her motivation for taking on this project: "'[I'm] wanting to see SL become better, and wishing that VRChat had something comparable to SL's robust inventory and modular avatar system." (And also she's bored and wants a fun challenge.)

Above right is a pic via Bunny showing off another feature: "Local light support, translating SL's old school lights to real world physically based material type lights, specified by lumens, via Unity's HD Rendering pipeline." 

How is this even possible, and what does Bunny need to get this project hopping along faster? (Sorry.) Read on:

Second Life's Source Code Is Finally on Github!

In case you missed it (and I sure did during the Thanksgiving run-up) Second Life's source code is finally and officially on GitHub here.

I'm surprised this wasn't the case before, but hopefully it gives the viewer codebase much more visibility to GitHub's huge and highly creative developer community. Who knows, maybe someone will finally make a stable mobile TPV client. (Pour one out for Lumiya.)

Background from Signal Linden on the SL blog:

Open Forum Question: Could Second Life Work on a Touch Screen / Tablet Optimized for Seniors?

We know that many seniors like the late Fran Serenade (above) have found great value in using Second Life, both as a social/creative platform and (as in Fran's case) even finding therapeutic value in them. However, many seniors have difficulty learning or using the SL viewer for Mac/PC.

But what if the virtual world was accessible via a touchscreen? 

Caltech astronomy professor George Djorgovski, director of the university's Virtech campus in Second Life, recently put it to me this way:

Many seniors who would benefit from the social opportunities in SL are not very computer-savvy.

They may be comfortable with an iPad, but not a standard laptop/desktop. iPads and similar devices simply do not have the hardware power to deal with something like SL, and whatever apps do exist (and are still available or maintained) are little more than messaging apps.

There are, however, notebook/laptop machines that have a touch screen, which someone who is used to a tablet may find easier to use than a laptop proper. Also, I know that it is possible to boot Linux on at least some Chromebooks, and use a Linux SL client, but I don’t know about the performance thereof. Any experiences or recommendations along these lines would be greatly appreciated.

Yes, George and I discussed the late-lamented Lumia app for Android devices, but that's no longer officially supported (far as I can tell), and as great as it is for established SLers, wouldn't work well for the target audience he's talking about:

Farewell to Oz: Linden Lab's Open Source Director Retires, Leaving Position's Fate Unknown -- And Hole in Second Life Community's Heart

Emphasizing that his upcoming departure from Linden Lab "has nothing at all to do with the change in ownership of the Lab" (the long-running startup was recently sold to the Waterford Group holding company), the veteran technologist Scott Lawrence, known by tens of thousands of SL users by his avatar name, "Oz Linden", just posted a retirement notice to the Second Life user community:

The Black Dragon SL Viewer Has a New Update So Watch This Photography & In-Game Poser Tutorial For Adjusting Your Avatar's 130+ Bones

There's a new update to Black Dragon, the SL viewer with a cult following for making Second Life look like a AAA game and for giving users great features for virtual photography and machinima.

Speaking of which, here's a new Black Dragon photography tutorial from SL YouTuber and apparent Fleabag cast member Boston Blaisdale. It comes to me via NiranV, the tireless sole creator of Black Dragon who has a Patreon for developing the viewer that could seriously use more patronage for all the work he does on it. Niran recently added a $10/month Patreon level for store owners who want a link to their shop -- an extremely good deal, seeing as Black Dragon has roughly 5000 active users.

Niran gives this tutorial a thumbs-up, especially the part around 4:00 minutes in, when Blaisdale gets into using Black Dragon's highly valuable in-game poser:

Looking for Alina Lyvette, Creator of Lumiya, the Android App for Second Life

Update, September 21: Added some explanation for why Lumiya was removed from Google Play and is only available for authorized purchase on the SlideME app store (bottom of this post).

I'm trying to reconnect with Alina Lyvette, the Russia-based developer who created Lumiya, the wildly popular Second Life app for Android which is officially available only on the SlideME app store. (Well over 100,000 people already own a copy.)

I haven't been able to communicate with Alina for years, and she has not updated Lumiya since 2017. I recently asked the Lumiya group in SL if anyone had seen her lately, and someone immediately replied:

"Every single day someone asks that question and gets the same answer."

Important point: Her absence does not mean anything is wrong, necessarily. In fact, last May, her lead technical support person in SL suggested she's in contact with Alina:

How to Run the VR Version Of Second Life For Firestorm With a Pretty Great Frame Rate (If You Got a Great PC)

Just got a cool little update to Tuesday's post about installing and running Peter Kappler's VR version of the Firestorm viewer for Second Life from Austin Tate: In response to my suggestion that the frame rate might be too low for this to be usable, Austin did some test runs and some tweaks.

"I tried the Drune IV area on the Second Life Ravine region you mentioned. One other user there (or maybe it was an NPC).

"On Ultra quality and 256m view distance it was a bit too low frame rate and was a bit choppy, but it worked fine at 'High' quality settings and 128m draw distance. On my rig I was getting 40 frames per second in VR mode.  Images attached for 
you." (See above.) 

So those look like the settings for optimal results. To be sure, he got them thanks in great part to very good hardware (see his specs below), but the bottom line is this VR viewer is more or less WYSIWYG compared to the PC-based Firestorm:

How to Use the VR Version Of Second Life For Firestorm & Steam VR

Austin Tate has a very useful, in-depth tutorial for installing and running Peter Kappler's VR version of the Firestorm viewer for Second Life (which I blogged earlier this year), with bonus points for a how-to on installing an XBox One/360 controller to run with the Oculus Rift installation.

While Second Life isn't social VR per se, it remains the largest, content rich social virtual world space with (relatively) high end graphics that can be explored in a VR rig.

As you might expect, Austin tells me/warns me that graphics performance does take a hit in virtual reality:

Lumiya, Popular SL Viewer Recently Removed from Google Play, Still Available on SlideME Android Marketplace

While Lumiya, the popular SL viewer for Android devices, was recently removed for unknown reasons from Google Play, it's still currently available on SlideME, a curated market for Android apps. I'm not too familiar with SlideME but it's recommended by some Android news outlets as a popular alternative to Google Play. More key, Lumiya creator Alina Lyvette herself recommends SlideME as a Google Play alternative, especially for people who to want to purchase a copy from her using PayPal. Some SLers have pointed to alternate sources for Lumiya which might be unauthorized/ripped copies, and of course, it's far better that Alina get the sales: Go here to buy it on SlideME.