The 2024 Raglan Shire Artwalk in Second Life is now open through until Sunday 16th June 2024. This event showcases amazing art throughout the Shire for everyone to see with and many will have copies for sale.
This year there are over 120 artists that are participating. Everything from 3D art to real life photos, paintings, and drawings, to SL sculptures will be displayed on the hedges. Artwalk features weekly games, poetry slam, a kite parade, DJs, and live music.
Since the start of May 2024 the overall Second Life user daily concurrency levels have dropped slightly again. The highest so far this month was 50, 084 on 6th May 2024 however during the past week or so the peak concurrency has struggled just to reach 47, 000.
There is no cause for alarm yet as this could be a short temporary thing (annual yearly trends). I will be watching the concurrency numbers for the rest of May 2024 into June 2024 then I will blog again if the concurrency has improved or declined.
Here are the current Second Life user daily concurrency levels below as of Saturday 18th May 2024.
Maximum: 42, 000 – 46, 000 < (45, 000 – 51, 000 in April 2024)
Median: 34, 000 – 36, 000 < (34, 000 – 40, 000 in April 2024)
Minimum: 27, 000 – 29, 000 < (27, 000 – 30, 000 in April 2024)
27, 000 (min) – 46, 000 (max) is the current Second Life daily user concurrency levels as of Saturday 18th May 2024. It would be great to see these levels rise again before the end of 2024.
Do you think the Second Life daily user concurrency will decline or improve soon ?
On Thursday 16th May Linden Lab announced the first Second Life Community Roundtable with the current Second Life Leadership. It’s scheduled for 9.30am SLT to 11am SLT on Monday 20th May 2024. The lab are excited to “begin a new initiative that allows Residents to share their thoughts and interact directly with top executives at Second Life”.
In this Second Life Community Roundtable everyone will have a chance to meet and talk directly with Linden Lab. Oberwolf Linden (Executive Chairman) and Grumpity Linden (Senior VP of Product) will be hosting the event.
The first Community Roundtable will take place at the Linden Estate Services regionson the grid. I would imagine the regions will be pretty full when the meeting starts so it’s best to arrive early (4 regions featuring the main stage). Hopefully someone will record the whole Community Roundtable as this is a major inworld gathering.
Submit Questions Here – “Here’s your chance to ask questions or provide feedback directly to the Second Life Leadership team. All feedback and submissions will be reviewed by executives for consideration and discussion at a forthcoming Community Roundtable”.
On 15th May 2024 Linden Lab announced an update on changes to Voice which is coming to an Agni region near you. The lab have made “great progress” over the past two months since they shared the news on plans to support WebRTC Voice in Second Life.
Linden Lab plans on working on the WebRTC Voice Project Viewer and promote it to Release Candidate status in early June 2024. The lab are looking forward to WebRTC Voice being available grid-wide and supported in our default Viewer and TPVs very soon.
What’s New
Second Life WebRTC Voice Project Viewer is now available: Download
Second Life WebRTC Voice support deployed to Agni channel “Pop Rocks”
To experience spatial audio on this WebRTC Voice Beta region, you will need a WebRTC Voice-enabled Viewer. The WebRTC Voice-enabled viewer can also use voice on non-WebRTC voice-enabled regions. It is our goal that WebRTC-Voice-enabled Viewers can still communicate with all other viewers via P2P, conference and group calls.
You should immediately notice the higher quality audio for voice as well as the following benefits:
Improved security
Removes external dependency on third-party provider for voice
Simple setup from behind firewalls and private networks
Enables greater control of voice operation in the viewer
WebRTC features including audio device selection, stereo audio, noise reduction, automatic gain control, and echo cancellation
There are some known issues:
Conference/Group/P2P in WebRTC is not yet available on the WebRTC Voice regions.
An occasional popup regarding voice server incompatibility can appear. Restart voice if you see this.
The viewer may crash if you connect/disconnect headphones or enable/disable voice.
Voice morphing is not available in this WebRTC-Voice enabled region.
As many know the first generation Linden Homes first appeared on the grid back in 2010 and consists of roughly 1, 100 regions. There are four continents south of the grid containing old Linden homes featuring sandboxes, protected underwater areas, parks and some interesting attractions.
Today on the land selection page you can still claim first generation Linden Homes and pick from four LH themes. There is still alot of active residents that still have old Linden homes and are pretty happy staying there. There are a lot of empty homes and areas on the four old Linden Home continents that need sorting out asap.
Timeline
In early December 2021 Patch Linden confirmed that the old Linden Homes will be phased out/repurposed.
Back in early May 2022 the plan was for the old Linden Homes to “mostly go away”. Patch mentioned he hopes to save some of them for historical purposes and hopes to keep areas online for those that may still want one.
Back in early March 2023 Patch Linden said that they are slowly dying a natural death and that the lab still has to pay for all the empty space the unoccupied homes maintain. Patch said that at some point the lab will determine the future of the old Linden home continents.
Last year at SL20B there was a brief mention of the old Linden Homes in terms of the hubs. Patch Linden mentioned that possibly they may get updated and the lab/moles will give them a freshen up a bit. I think the lab are still trying to get the right balance on available new Linden Homes vs the old Linden homes. Having enough supply to meet the demand of shutting down the old Linden Homes is the overall goal.
As of mid May 2024 the lab have not announced anything new about the future of old Linden home continents (still deciding).
Old Linden Home continents on the map – 16th May 2024
I think the most active areas should be saved for historical purposes with empty areas should be closed down because it saves money for the lab. The regions not being used very much could be used to build up other continents in Second Life.
If the lab goes ahead with any big revamp or major closure then there needs to be plenty of advance notice (some kind of upgrade package to move to Bellisseria) and there be likely some level of disruption which will be unavoidable. I’m sure the lab will announce something before the end of 2024/2025 about the future of the old Linden home continents.
I will blog again when the lab makes a decision or gives another update.
Daniel Voyager 