Second Life
- Gacha Policy Changes for 2024: What You Need to Knowcommunity.secondlife.com Gacha Policy Changes for 2024: What You Need to Know
We’re excited to announce an important update to our policy regarding the use of gachas and similar mechanisms in Second Life. Effective October 7, 2024, our community will once again be able to create and enjoy gacha-style purchases inworld, with some important new restrictions to ensure complia...
Key Highlights:
-No Transferability: Gacha items and their containers must be set as “No Transfer” to ensure that they can only be used by the buyer. This applies to both the object inside and any packaging used for delivery.
-Breedables: Breedable pets and other life simulation content are exempt from this policy and can continue to operate as they have before.
-Games of Skill: If a game of skill (like throwing darts or spinning a wheel) is used to win a prize, it is still permitted as long as the prize and its container are marked as "No Transfer."
-Subscription Boxes: Subscription boxes are unaffected, as long as all participants receive the same content. Different items distributed to different subscribers based on chance are now allowed but must also follow the “No Transfer” rule.
-Warnings and Enforcement: Violations of this new policy will result in warnings or removal of items and vendor systems. Repeated violations can lead to account suspension, termination, or loss of land.
- The Improved SL Camerapennycow.blogspot.com The Improved SL Camera (Revisited)
My old guide to improving the SL camera contains a lot of information about older viewers which is no longer applicable, so I'm making a tou...
A guide for improving the default SL camera placement, very useful and was often the first thing I would refer to after installing a viewer.
- Megapahit viewer 7.1.10.52662 release!
Changelog:
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Parity to DeltaFPS 7.1.10
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Texture thrashing fix
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Fixed noisy image upload
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Stream notification custom channel
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WebRTC enabled on all versions except for FreeBSD
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Model upload parsing error fix
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Odd network behavior on Ubuntu fix
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Broken 360 snapshot fix
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Internal browser on Ubuntu fix
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- How to make mirrors in Second Life
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
Here is a tutorial I made some time ago explaining how to make mirrors using mirror probes!
- Favourite communities and hangout spots?
What are some of your favourite places to hang out? Be it clubs, sandboxes, etc. I had been hanging out at Animal House a bit lately, a neat little sandbox for furries and content creators.
- Navigation in Second Life
Since a lot of people here don't seem to know about Second Life I figure some introductory materials can't hurt in case anyone decides to try it.
Second Life is made up of so called regions, each of them is a square 256m to a side and 4096m high as far as building is concerned. In theory the water level can be set to different values in each region but the most common is 20m, especially for the connected mainland regions where it has to match for the water to look connected between adjacent regions.
Inside a region there are coordinates x (low=west, high=east), y (low=south, high=north) and z (low=down, high=up).
Each region runs on a separate simulator (modern servers might host more than one simulator but it is separate processes) so crossing or teleporting into another region requires a handover. If regions are crossed in quick succession, especially with high latency connections, this can lead to crashes or falling off a vehicle.
The regions themselves are placed on a grid with x (again, low=west, high=east) and y (low=south, high=north) coordinates. The first region Da Boom around which the mainland grew has coordinates 1000, 1000. The coordinates can be shown in the viewer but the regions are more commonly addressed by their region name.
Spots on that coordinate grid that do not have a region show as an endless ocean (even if there are regions behind it you can not see them) and you can not enter them.
This coordinate grid has lead to Second Life expressions like "on the grid" for things happening on SL.
There are different types of regions with different performance characteristics, agent (avatar) limits and land impact (LI) limits for building and other objects. LI is often also referred to as prims by old time SL users since it used to be a limit in the primitives (cubes, spheres,...) that used to be the only way to build but since mesh objects were added the more general term land impact is used.
The Second Life mainland has a number of continents, almost all of them are part of a continuous area of connected regions. The major exception is Zindra, the adult continent.
Since this post is already quite long I will perhaps introduce the continents in a future post in detail. Hopefully this information will be helpful to some people.
- Summer Sailstice in SL from Saturday the 24th of June to the 7th of July
This year's Summer Sailstice event is coming up this Saturday with lots of events. This link contains an event calendar among other things.
- Second Life Activities - Sailing Cruises
Since some people here do not seem to be very familiar with the many activities we use to fill our time on SL I am going to start a new series of posts, introducing some of them.
There are many different vehicles on SL, bicyles, motorbikes, cars, trucks, mechs and many other land vehicles of course, planes, helicopters, paramotors, blimps and others up in the air and of course sail- and motorboats of many different types.
Of course it is possible to just take some friends and make your own fun with these but there are also some organized group activities. Some are races and others are cruises where people just sail together on a route provided by some cruise director in the group. For some groups it is the same person every time, for others the role is shared by a couple of people.
These cruise groups are a great place to learn sailing since there are a lot of people to ask for help and there is always someone who has a moment to answer your questions.
If you don't have a boat of your own you can also ask and usually there is someone who has a free spot on their boat.
It is usually a good idea to take off any HUDs or attachments you don't need to make region crossings smoother. You also want to avoid crossing twice in quick succession since crashes or falling off your boat is quite common when you do (usually 3s is a good number to aim for). This is particularly important when crossing close to corners.
It is also helpful to enable property lines on the minimap (not supported by all viewers) which helps seeing the sim corners and also the open waterways (or roads for land vehicles).
There are many groups who have regular cruises during the week, this is just a small selection, feel free to mention more in the comments if you know any others.
(links go to the SL groups, you need an SL viewer installed to open those)
Leeward Cruising Club Phoenix Rising Yacht Club Rainbow Sails Yacht Club Tradewinds Yacht Club Topless Sailors Cruising Club Topless Cruisers
This post is already quite long so I won't explain in detail how sailing or navigation work or the SL continents and waterways but maybe I will add some posts about that soon.
- SL20B Lab Gab Live Events - Submit your Questions!community.secondlife.com SL20B Lab Gab Live Events - Submit your Questions!
Are you ready to celebrate Second Life’s 20th birthday with us? The festivities begin on June 22nd and will run through July 11th. During the celebrations, there will be a series of Lab Gab events, held live at SL20B, where you can meet the founder of Second Life, Philip Linden, and Executive Cha...
If you have any questions for the Lindens at the SL20B (Second Life's 20th birthday) Lab Gab events you have two more days to submit those.
- SL20B Music Fest Lineup & Calendar of Eventscommunity.secondlife.com SL20B Music Fest Lineup & Calendar of Events
Photo by Semiiina Are you ready for this year’s SL20B Music Fest? From June 22nd to the 24th, go on an interstellar journey through sound and emotions, as the crème de la crème of Second Life's live musicians set the SL20B Mandala Stage ablaze with spellbinding performances! In the middle of Musi...
With Second Life's 20th birthday event coming up on the 22nd (next Thursday) the artists for the music fest might be something to have a look at
- What are your favourite annual Second Life events?
For me Fantasy Faire is definitely the one I am looking forward to most. They just have the best mix of stunning regions and avatars, great stories and music on the radio, amazing events for the whole faire and they somehow even manage to integrate the Relay for Life donations and remembrance of those we lost into the event without spoiling the mood of either the sad or the happy parts of the event.
In the past I was also looking forward to Mario2 Helstein's seasonal light shows but sadly he stopped doing those.
Since Linden Labs is notoriously bad about letting us know what is going on, what are your favourite events that others might not even know about?
- What are your favourite Second Life activities?
Personally, apart from spending time with friends I do enjoy sailing and motorboats, dancing, live concerts, flying my planes, blimp, paramotor/trike, Shergood Aviation helicopters.
In the past I have also roleplayed in various medieval fantasy, urban fantasy and sci-fi regions but that activity, while fun, always took up a bit too much of my time to leave much for other things I enjoyed.
For sailing and motorboat use, apart from doing so on my own, I like to go on cruises with groups that design routes in advance. It is a good way to get to know the grid better and see how it all fits together and it is a fun way to get to know people in the group over a shared activity.
I don't like land vehicles as much because the roads often cross through sim corners or go close to banlines and security orbs I would like to avoid.
- Which viewer do you use?
Personally I have been using the Firestorm Viewer for about as long as it existed and it offers a nice set of additional features over the default viewer but I regularly hear that others use a different third party viewer. What do you use and why?
- Which Second Life Blogs do you read?
Personally I sometimes read the ones below.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld
Owl is a good friend on Second Life who is always busy organizing live concerts and music and art events.
- Welcome to the SL community on the threadiverse
In this post you can introduce yourself, mention your avatar name(s) and favourite activities in Second Life if you want to, remaining anonymous as far as your SL identity is concerned is perfectly fine too.