New Exhibit in =IcaruS= Art Gallery

December 12, 2011

Our new photography exhibit opening today features the work of LeonTubrok Beaumont, owner of =IcaruS=, highlighting Winter Scenes in RL and SL. High resolution digital files are available on request.

=Winter Gallery

Blackpool Illuminations

These images highlight an internationally famous lights festival held every autumn since September of 1879 in Blackpool, a seaside resort in the North West of England. Sunset on the beach builds anticipation for the impending light display. The tramway (one of the first in the world) runs along the promenade and features a fleet of brightly decorated trams in a variety of themes.

Eden Project

The Eden Project is a charity and social enterprise in Cornwall that provides a variety of social and environmental projects geared to transform the world through education and demonstration. The photographs show the biodomes, including the world’s largest greenhouse that contains thousands of the world’s plant species. Visiting tropical and Mediterranean environments in the deep of winter in the UK is a treat.

York Minster – Winter Night

A Gothic cathedral found in Yorkshire, UK, York Minster is one of the grand cathedrals of the world and a destination for visitors from all across the globe. The site has housed a church there since AD 71. It evokes an eerie awe when viewed against the inky tapestry of a winter night.

Snowy Walk

These images depict rare scenes of natural beauty in deep snow on the public walks of the Greater Manchester area of Lancashire, UK.

Relay for Life of Second Life

In the Second Life component of Relay for Life which is held every year in July, hundreds of thousands of dollars (US) have been raised for the cause by participants hailing from 30 countries. Here we feature selections of images from the winter portion of the 2011 RFL of SL.

To display your photographic art in your virtual setting, get one of the fine image display products from =IcaruS=:

When you visit the =IcaruS= Art Gallery in Avalon Town in Second Life, you will land just outside the main entrance. Simply walk through the open gate; the gallery entrance will be on your right. Afterward, we hope you’ll take a moment to note the Art Galleries of SL and rate us. We also have a b-places kiosk on the opposite side of the main entrance – we’d appreciate a vote as well. Enjoy!

=IcaruS= House Main Entrance=IcaruS= House Gallery Entrance
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Firestorm Viewer Release and OpenSim Use

December 2, 2011

This week, the Phoenix-Firestorm development team announced the full release version of the Firestorm Viewer. Encouraged by how well it works with our computers in Second Life, we were eager to test it in our OpenSim, =IcaruS= RealmS. To our joy, we could use it in our grid with surprising ease. Be sure to tick the box next to “Allow login to other grids” on the “Advanced” tab in the Firestorm viewer preferences. You will see a list of grids on the login screen. If your desired grid is not there, you can use a workaround in Windows – create a shortcut to the Firestorm Viewer and add ‘-loginuri’ with the grid web address on the client shortcut target. Please note, as shown in the viewer preference screen, that not all grids are listed on the Firestorm Viewer.

When installing previous generations of the Firestorm viewer for testing in both Second Life and =IcaruS= RealmS, we didn’t bother with a “clean install” but with the advent of the full release, it is definitely worth the extra faff of re-tweaking your settings, waiting for inventory to load and so forth. Please be sure to completely uninstall any previous iterations of Firestorm first.

In our opinion, one of the very best features of Firestorm is the choice of interface, or mode, on the login screen. There are three: Phoenix, V3 and Hybrid. The first two modes will give you the look and feel of those viewers; the third choice is a blend of the two, which is most useful for OpenSim grids.

Firestorm Mode on Login Screen

As is the case with all viewers, there are some variations in the specific allowed capabilities – and quirks. Here is a quick run-down as pertaining to Firestorm in OpenSim Grids with add-on Modules (profiles, groups etc):

  • We’re still testing the Map feature. At this writing, the land appears correctly, but instead of showing sea regions, it shows SL’s land (may need a tweak in the .ini file).
    • While you may find an in-grid region to teleport to, you may not be able to teleport there via the map, you may crash, or some regions may not be found at all
    • Direct teleports work using landmarks in Inventory
    • We were able to teleport other avatars in our grid to our location
  • The Search feature brings up SL’s search page
  • Some items in the viewer, like Account in the Avatar menu (“Me” in SL Viewer), still go to the SL web interface – is there a way to change this?
  • The “About” grid option under Help brings up a “grid_about” uncreated wiki page on the Phoenix Viewer site
  • Profile and Groups features work properly In hybrid mode
  • The Mesh upload option is available in OpenSim 0.7.2 and later grids; for previous versions of OpenSim the viewer does not show it.
  • In the build menu, while you can select “grass” or “tree”, but you can’t select the specific type of grass or tree (Imprudence Viewer has choices available)
  • When building with a torus, you CAN use hole sizes smaller than 0.05
  • You cannot link more than 256 prims in a set

With a few changes and fixes to the above, Firestorm could be an ideal viewer for OpenSim Grids, with features such as shadows working well. We’re obviously continuing to test the myriad options. What has your experience been with Firestorm in OpenSim?

Further Recommended Reading about the Firestorm Viewer:

The Second Life Technologist

Nalates’ Things and Stuff

Living in a Modem World

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“My Viewer’s Torus Is Bigger Than Yours”

November 22, 2011

The title of this week’s post refers to an oddity we noticed when we looked at the same things with different viewers in our grid. Items that appeared normal to us when we were using the Imprudence viewer, looked bigger or distorted with the SL Viewer 3 or a Third Party Viewer (TPV) like the Dolphin Viewer 3.

Torus as seen in Imprudence 1.4
Note the rope hanging in the foreground
Torus as seen in Dolphin Viewer 3
The same rope – see the difference?

0.05

As you may know, in addition to the official Second Life Viewer in its current iteration (which is version 3.2.1.244864 as we write this), a number of TPVs based on the SL codebase are also available with various features that appeal to different groups of users. We thought a few interesting quirks of the newer viewers were worth a mention. We double-checked using Imprudence, a 1.23-style viewer, and the Viewer 2-based Dolphin Viewer.

In one case, we noticed some weirdness with a torus to which we’d applied a rope texture; the torus was over 10 meters in length and hole size was 0.03 (in Imprudence) but in slV2/V3 the hole size defaulted to 0.05 which caused the rope to appear thicker and distorted. The same texture on other large prims didn’t exhibit this quirk.

So there are some new limitations with the SL V2/V3 Viewer and related TPVs – editing tori larger than 10 meters will give strange results. Keep this in mind also, if you plan to give a torus a hole size less than 0.05.

LinkSet

There is another thing to keep in mind when building with one of the newer viewers: you cannot link more than 256 prims together. With Imprudence, we were linking more than 300 prims with ease. We were going to test further, but – oops – we’d unlinked a primmy object with one of the V2 viewers and found we couldn’t link it up again, at all, unless we switched back to Imprudence. Hmmm.

While pondering our 300-prim linkset problem, our thoughts went off on a tangent. We didn’t want to think it, but a nagging concern kept pushing its way to the surface in our minds. Could these new restrictions in the newer viewers be part of a trend of removing advantages of building in OpenSim? These new limits – maximum linkable prims at 256, torus holes no smaller than 0.05, and others – are almost like nudges. Linden Lab may say their viewer code is designed to reduce lag and improve efficiency in world, but this seems to reduce our OpenSim capabilities.

We shall see.

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