The Call…to Mobile and a note on Unity

On Friday night I was in a Zoom conference call between a collection of bloggers and Linden Lab Executives.

If you’d told me that 5 years ago when I started my little blog, I wouldn’t have believed you. So thank you Linden Lab for the opportunity. Brad Oberwager (CEO of Linden Lab) did say that they wanted our honest opinions, so here it is.

The focus was on the Second Life Mobile App and what’s on the horizon. There’s a lot to go through, so please bear with me.

I’ve addressed these not in the chronological order that they’re going to arrive, but roughly the order I think they should have, with their ETAs.

  • Address Bar – Q1 2025
  • Notecards – Not on the slides but Grumpity Linden said “Three Months Plus”
  • New account creation – December 2024
  • Persistent chat logs & Group Notice Push notifications – December 2024
  • Item level avatar editing – Early Q2 2025
  • Lobby – Q1 2025

Franky I think the app shouldn’t have gone to Public Beta until the first three were added, but they’re finally coming. Simply because if you told someone about the App, they’d go try it and find they couldn’t do much and delete it. Maybe a New Year big splash release with these features might have been better.

Address Bar: One of the major missing features in the mobile app is getting around. Currently in both the Alpha & Beta versions, you can only go to the Mobile Showcase locations and your Favourites (the ones stuck at the top of your desktop viewer). Fortunately this feature coming soon that will allow you to enter SLURL location addresses and also Share them using your device’s native Sharing system.

Notecards: One of the bloggers raised a question about notecards, particularly for CSRs (Customer Support Representatives) for creators. If a customer has a problem, they may send a notecard detailing the issue.

However on the mobile app there’s currently no way to open them,so the CSRs are tied to a PC in order to read the notes and respond. Grumpity Linden revealed that they are working on a way to read them. However it’s likely to be in a different way. Since there’s no access to avatars Inventory on mobile, the in-progress solution is to have the notecards read out in a chat dialog. This will be a great step forward for this group of Residents, but sadly they’ll have to wait a little longer. The timescale for this ability is estimated at three months or more.

Note: this was right at the end of the call, past the official end time, so several attendees had left and not many people will have heard the above.

New Accounts: Pretty self explanatory, despite the app not being targeted at new signups, this needed to be here at Beta Release. If people see screenshots or hear about there being this cool new app and they weren’t an existing Resident, they’d have been stuck.

Persistent chat logs: Peviously on the mobile app, if you log out and back in your conversation history will be lost. In an update this month, the chat history will be stored locally on your device.

Item level  avatar editing: Something that wasn’t mentioned much, but is featured on the presentation slides is individually worn items adjustment.

Lobby: Basically a holding screen showing you stuff while the world loads. They probably spent ages on it (speculation) but I don’t see it as a big deal. The only tempting point on the slide image is “Reach mid-tier and lower end devices”, perhaps this needs a little more emphasis, if the intention is to attract users with older tech.

Comment on Unity

A last point made by Philip Linden regarding a pre-submitted question. Paraphrased: “Now that Linden Lab have a working visual rendering engine on the Unity platform, will the desktop client move to Unity?” In short, no.

The reason for this is fairly simple, according to Philip: “The Unity engine can’t render as many avatars in close proximity.”

I know for a long time people have been harping on about this at Meet the Lindens events, now they have an answer and a reason.

Summary:

Well done Linden Lab, your mobile feature set is nearly level with the Lumiya Viewer (2012-2017 RIP), except with additions of Mesh & BoM but minus Inventory. I’m sure they’re sick of that comparison, but it was ahead of its time and is an unavoidable benchmark.

The Zoom call on Friday is likely to be the first of several to come. Perhaps this process of reaching out and connecting with Bloggers & Vloggers, allowing early previews, should have started before the Beta public release. That way the Lab may have been dissuaded from releasing an under-developed product.

So as I said in my previous post on this subject, do give it a go, but don’t expect too much yet. Then come back in a month and try again, it is after all still a Beta version.

Cocoa at Christmas Expo

I found some much warmer footwear than in my first Expo post, defintely more suited to the cold. I’m not so sure about the warmth of this lovely dress though, a hot drink will also warm me up.

Credits:

Thankyou to Evangeline Arcadia for allowing me to include them in the photo, an empty adjacent seat just didn’t feel very festive!

Expo Landing Point: Welcome Region

Expo Website: https://slchristmasexpo.com/

The Claus Family

Back from the seasonal festivities of the Expo, Ms Claus lies back on the bed resting. She watches the sugar-filled hyperactive youngster trying to wake Santa. Good luck, she thinks, he’s worn out and had far too much sherry.

Keeping warm by the Fire
A better look at the boots & Tattoo

An adorable animesh of a youngster nervously trying to wake up Santa by Dench designs!

Credits:

Christma Expo Landing Point: Welcome Region

Christmas Expo Website: https://slchristmasexpo.com/

Christmas Expo 2024 Opens!

Here’s me waiting for the excited masses to descend on the Wonderland of the Christmas Expo. The trees are lit up, decorations are everywhere, hot drinks and snacks are ready. So I’m here juggling a pine cone as I wait,in my cozy new outfit. Thankfully the paths have all been shovelled and swept, so I can wear my new heels too without getting stuck in the snow!

The regions are themed from the 1900’s to 2020 and cover all your shopping needs.
Visit the 150 merchant shops, find an Exclusive Christmas tree in the tree lot, build a snowman, enjoy 130 hour of Live Music, LE Breedables, Auctions and sooooo much more

Come along one and all, explore the regions of shopping and festive fun.

Expo Items Credits:

Location: Picnic Table area

Expo Landing Point: Welcome Region

Expo Website: https://slchristmasexpo.com/

Selling your Virtual soul for others gain

Back in 2021 I wrote a piece about Avatars as Brands, I’ve a few more thoughts on the subject.

With some input from Draxtor Despres, I came to the conclusion that the term “Brand” only applies once money is involved. However increasingly these days people are making “brands” of themselves in an attempt to promote themselves and be popular, but is that the right word? Maybe it is, but not in the same way as I previously meant it. While people mindlessly create social brands in an attempt to be noticed, they’re usually not receiving any financial gain for them. So what’s being sold, who’s gaining? The social platforms on which they promote themselves. I would say that what people present online as their “brand” is more of a “persona” than a brand, if it’s not an actual business. They just need to read a dictionary. I don’t mean that everyone creating personas are in the wrong, it’s the marketing industry that has led people to be using the wrong terms and encouraged them to become a brand and maybe even  an “Influencer” , where they sell their metaphorical soul to promote products they never use that they feature in their content.

Blogging is a bit like this sometimes,depending on your platform. Lately I’ve done several posts featuring a particular Second Life creator’s products. I’m not affiliated to them (or any stores) as regular readers will know. I purchase the items myself, which is fine. Although after the fourth post in a month, I did start to question myself. Then on top of that something happened that made me reconsider this approach and my blogging practices. If you think about it, I purchased items from that brand, spent time on staging photos and a credits list, to show off that brand’s merchandise. So the creator actually benefits twice, the item cost and free advertising. Put like that it sounds kind of daft. In this case it’s the brand and ultimately Linden Lab that benefits not the prompting platform, this blog. Although obviously I do have some more nice clothes too.

The Second Life economy and technology has changed over the years however. Whereas once you could have brought a full outfit, made of clothing layers and prims for about $400L, that amount might now buy you a part of the outfit, like a set of Mesh PBR-Textured gloves or shoes (the more time and skill required to make modern clothing items raises the prices). So whereas once the price of an outfit could have been shrugged off because the equivalent amount of cash wouldn’t buy you a cup of tea in real money; now it’ll cost you two expensive coffees and maybe a piece of cake. Which is why I didn’t purchase a number of recent releases from that store and will be a lot more selective in my purchases generally going forward.

Read the previous post on this topic: Avatars, Brands & Personas

Header image via MidJourney (AI has occasional uses.)

Second Life Mobile for All

Last year I signed up for the Alpha Testing programme for a Second Life mobile app, restricted to Premium Plus subscribers. It was pretty flakey back then. But fast forward to Thursday 14th November and it’s now been made available as an open Beta for every Second Life resident and works pretty well.

So should you download it? I’d say Yes, but limit your expectations. This is not a desktop equivalent or replacement, more a companion app. You can walk about, change between saved Outfits and Teleport to your set Favourite locations and a few specific places. Chatting in groups and nearby chat works well enough and you can pay items such as rent boxes or shop vendor boards(making a use-case). Streaming music as you may find playing in a club is a feature too, but I’ve not tried visiting such a location on the app yet.

I have been giving the latest version of the Android app a go and it’s a great improvement on the early Alpha builds. One thing I’d definitely recommend when first trying it out is make sure you have a lot of space! It can take a while to get used to the controls and you don’t want to be stuck in the corner of a sky box while you experiment.

I used my homestead Bloodrose Bay simply because that’s where I happened to have been last. It turned out to be quite a good choice. The buildings I have set out are spacious inside and there are some with and without doors to enter. There’s also what’s often the bane of SL exploring..spiral stairs, indoor and out.

While this all looks pretty good for a mobile viewer, nothing apart from the trees have PBR (Physically Based Rendering) textures. Hopefully Linden Lab will get their shiny new texture system to work in their shiny new app.

The unrezzed white things down there are trees with PBR textures.

Screenshots taken on a Google Pixel 7 using default app settings.

The aim of the app is to try and bring back old residents that have left SL, because “It’s not on mobile” is apparently a reason many no longer log in. I wasn’t amongst the bloggers invited to a Zoom call with Linden Lab executives (Edit: turns out they sent the invite to a different email address, so I’ll be watching out for the next one!) to discuss/announce all this, so I’m going on quotes from a couple of people that were:

I’m impressed with what Linden Lab have created and would have been great all round, if it weren’t lacking PBR support. However the target audience (old users that haven’t logged in for ages) are unlikely to have any PBR clothing in their inventory anyway.

PBR clothing is just blank without any fallback textures. Which is the way many creators are going.

Link: Official App Promotion Page with Downloads

What’s PBR: Second Life Wiki

What’s in another Name ?

I just changed my Second Life Last name, from Bloodrose to Nightwish.

I may have got a little carried away at the fact one of my favourite band names became available to choose from. I’m now sitting thinking more about how this will impact things.

I updated my Display name to show “Ava Nightwish Delaney” inworld, as per my previous post on this subject. Most social platforms let you update such things fairly easily (except Meta,so I don’t use theirs) thankfully and I don’t use too many, compared to some bloggers.

How long will I keep the name, I’m not sure yet.

The Last name I really want is Delaney, but I can’t see that happening.

Update 17/11/24 : I kept it for about 48hrs. Fortunately having Premium Plus allowed me to change back pretty painlessly. Another lesson learned.

The Gathering

Saturday 9th of November was the opening night of The Gathering, a post-apocolyptic themed event at a dance club. That’s quite an over-simplification, but to the point. I had a wander around the venue a few hours before the event and it looks great. I was able to attend part of the opening event which had drawn a crowd of 101 avatars at my last count. The Gathering is running for 21 days until 30th November, so you have plenty of time to go check the place out and maybe make it to some of the scheduled Flagship Events. The event is taking place at The Basilica, a dance club that I’m not familiar with that has been around for some years.


There was quite a crowd for the opening event.
Scene from promo video.

Website Homepage : https://www.thebasilicasl.com/the-gathering

Landing Point: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Bloodlands/132/200/56

Recording of Opening Event:https://www.youtube.com/live/TblYx4ADXYQ?feature=shared

Outfit Credits:

Foam Party at Cornerstones

Now Halloween has passed I’m going to try and refocus my blog on its original intention of what I’ve been up to in Second Life.

So I’m starting with last nights antics; I went to a Foam & Bikini party at my friend’s club, Cornerstones.

The party was also a RezDay (Second Life Birthday) celebration for a couple of the regulars so there was a really good atmosphere. 2pm SLT onwards is a good time to drop by, particularly towards the end of the week and over the weekend.

Location: Cornerstones.

Off-White Witch – Halloween 2024

So no more Orange. Which means more Black and dark stuff, yay!

You’d think it’d be great having your own creepy castle and lots of spooky stuff, right? Well yes, but heating all those drafty corridors…a lot of wandering travellers and local peasants need to be sacrificed to keep the insulation wards in place.

Credits:

  • Dress: Luas Aradia Fatpack – Mainstore
  • Hat: [Cubic Cherry] {The Watcher} witch hat BLACK – @ Panic of Pumpkins
  • Skin: Dae SKULLPTURE SKIN EVOX BOM BONE – Booth @ Shop & Hop
  • Lip gloss: +KP+ Slick Lips // Lel Evo X 3 – Knife Party Store
  • Throne: DRD – Bloodcroft Castle – Throne – DRD Mainstore

Location: Bloodrose Bay.

This is my private Adult-Rated Homestead. There’s a Tavern with some prop market stalls separated from my (barely-furnished) Castle by a small strip of woodland. The place is a little barren, but do have a wander if you want. Please be nice and you won’t be one of the sacrifices.