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Hypnotic Romance, an SL sim with secluded spaces for couples. Click here to teleport.
Bad Unicorn, proud purveyors of creative chaos with Second Life friends (and an awesome sponsoring partner to NWN), has a new Discord server: Join the fun plus SL weekend specials, giveaways, and a L$20K raffle.
Speaking of specials, Bad Unicorn just released several sweet holiday-themed decor items in the mainstore (click here to teleport), with a discounted price of L$60-99:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Who doesn’t love a good hat? Nekotto’s LookBook No. 1402 features a delightful beret with hair to fit. You can wear just the hair alone, but why would you? And that dress. It was at the Warehouse Sale, but the event closed on the 18th, so check out the store.
For more, click here:
Now that the first wave of Premium+ subscribers are getting to try out the private Alpha version of the upcoming Second Life iOS/Android app (and didn't have to sign an NDA to do so), I'm excited to share one of the first-ever published hands-on looks, courtesy longtime SLer TavishBrock Resident, who helps manage the Rosehaven Estates.
First off, here's what the iOS app looks like on TavishBrock's iPad (right). Some more screenshots below, taken directly from the iOS device. And before reading and looking further, bear in mind that this is the app while still in a private Alpha, so expect many fixes and additions in the final product expected next year.
Now to Tavish's full assessment of the current iOS build:
This is very early in the development process and anything that I write, especially any observations about where it's lacking should be read with that in mind. It's so unfinished that I literally have no complaints, only observations.
I'm running it on these devices:
- 2018 11" iPad Pro with keyboard
- iPhone 15 Pro
- M3 Max 14" MacBook Pro
First impressions:
If you enjoy reading New World Notes and have some Amazon holiday season shopping to do, I'd be grateful if you consider these recommended affiliate offers we can personally recommend:
The Logitech for Creators Blue Yeti Nano USB Microphone is what I use for podcast and broadcast interviews, and it packs impressive pro-level audio quality into a mic that costs just $80. (Here's a sample.)
The ASUS ROG Zephyrus is a good laptop to consider for Second Life power users/content creators, recommended by none other than acclaimed metaverse artist Whiskey Monday.
The 2020 Dell G5 15 Gaming Laptop is my own device, and I highly recommend it. While it runs Second Life pretty well — I'd give it a solid B for graphics quality and performance — it's great for AAA games. Especially at the current price of $748!
And of course, there's Making a Metaverse That Matters, now on sale for $25.30. Plus if you send me your mailing address, I'll happily send you an autograph plate with a custom message and my sig!
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Hilaire Beaumont has such a fascinating Second life. One day he’s an enforcer in the modern era, the next he is a general invading Russia, and then he is a cowboy, and here he is surrounded by ravens, perhaps in Central Park in 1845. He really should join Poe-Try and add this picture. It’s a perfect fit. .
For more fabulous iterations of Hilaire Beaumont, click here:
A short paragraph in Linden Lab’s “year in review” wrap-up of 2023 and sneak peek for Second Life in 2024 was so surprising, I had to read it a second time:
Second Life turns 21 in 2024… and, to celebrate, we are turning attention to the spicier side of Second Life with some bold and innovative new adult-friendly initiatives. Something wickedly wonderful is coming soon… We’ll be taking the sheets off this mystery initiative and sharing more bedroom secrets soon… so stay tuned!
Spicy! This brief aside probably rated scarce a shrug for most people, but it’s quite a milestone.
For Second Life’s first 20 years, Linden Lab has had a challenging relationship with Adult-rated content in the virtual world — struggling to enable the user community to create whatever sexual simulations consenting adults wanted to enjoy with each other, while also attempting to downplay that content, hoping to avoid Second Life from being further branded/pigeon-holed as a “weird sex world” unappealing to outside brands/organizations. (Not to mention the majority of consumers who just aren’t into frisky pixels pinging them in the face unprompted.)
And now… Linden Lab is just up and offering spicy bedroom secrets as official content!
It’s quite a sea change. Given the vast, graphic, often biologically impossible variety of user-made sexual content that already exists in Second Life, it is a bit like Netflix uploading an R-rated movie to Pornhub, but OK.
The fact that this is happening now probably has less to do with Linden Lab as a company, but rather, reflects the degree to which global popular culture has shifted over the last couple decades:
Time to come clean about my 2023 predictions from last January:
Final score: 2.5 out of 5 right. Not great! I let my excess bullish-ness on VRChat and bearish-ness on AI hype cloud my predictions.
Reader predictions from January 2023 rated below. Speaking of which, start thinking up your 2024 predictions for next week!
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
🎵Christmas is coming and the tree is getting trimmed.🎵So, those are not the real words, but I bet tree-trimming is more relevant to today’s Christmas celebrators than fat geese. Geese are mean. Leonard Holden’s “My! My! How Time Flies” gives us some tree-trimming magic that sure would have come in handy when my mom made me trim the top half of our 17’ Christmas tree. Christmas is coming. Have you decorated your tree?
For more Christmas fun across the Second Life community, click here:
PBR before/after comparison from the official Firestorm blog
The addition of PBR to Second Life greatly enhances the virtual world's graphics. According to our recent survey, however, the plurality of Second Life users are waiting to use physical based rendering when it's added to Firestorm, the highly popular third part SL viewer (or TPV).
One small problem with that, says Firestorm developer Beq, writing in Comments — PBR and Firestorm aren't yet playing well together:
PBR breaks a number of features our users love, and we need to fix those or find alternatives where necessary. We also need to be sure that it fits our user base, the full breadth of which runs the gamut of hardware, from high-end gaming machines to very low-end bargain laptops. In fact, our lead developer, Ansariel, has spent months trying to pin down a performance issue that many would not have noticed. It affected only the "lower-end" machines, those who, one could argue, could least afford that performance loss.
When LL released their PBR viewer, we were still gathering data points from our testers; the good news is that Ansa has not only identified and fixed the issue, and it can be tested by anyone in our preview group, but it will soon be part of the next Linden Lab Maintenance release, benefitting the wider community. We are not there yet, but we are getting there.
So PBR integration with Firestorm will have to wait awhile before it exists for the vast majority of Second Life users who prefer TPVs. Then again, there's also been problems with PBR in the official SL viewer, which is to be expected. As Beq writes:
Linden Lab released what they themselves have said was not entirely as ready as they'd have liked in an ideal world, but in doing so, they have opened up the space, and raised the profile of the project. It was the right thing to do; they have the product live, and the feedback is coming in where perhaps it had plateaued in the enclosed pre-release audience.
In any case, as I noted last week, it remains mind-boggling that a major graphics improvement to Second Life, a highly profitable virtual world, is effectively waiting on the efforts of Firestorm, which is serviced by a voluntary development team.
Beq writes that the Firestorm is quite cognizant of that paradox — and that it still falls to Linden Lab to address these underlying issues:
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 