Today is the last full day of the BURN2 Fire Moon event happening now in Second Life. The live music entertainment continues until midnight tonight. Congratulations to all the event organisers, builders, volunteers, DJs and everyone else who has made this event successful.
Personally I have been impressed by the amazing builds this year for the fire moon event and I think the theme has worked very well. The live music has been really good over the last few days with plenty of attendees.
The 2017 BURN2 Fire Moon event opened yesterday in Second Life and hundred’s attended the event throughout the day. The BURN2 Fire Moon event runs until tomorrow evening so come on over and have a great time.
Here are some of my Day 2 snapshots I have taken today – (28th January 2017)
Live Entertainment For Saturday 28th January
4am – 6am: Daphne
8am – 9am: Miss ChillyMilly
9am – 10am: FirstBreath Firestar
10am – 11:00am: Markus Davidov
11am- 1pm: Maia Antarra
1pm – 2pm: Mania Littlething
3pm – 5pm: Lunna Darwinian
5pm – 6pm: Mario Zecca
6pm – 8pm: DJ Vivienne
8pm – 10pm: DJ Rocky
10pm – 12am: DJ Keli
All times are SLT
For more 2017 BURN2 Fire Moon snapshots, check out my Flickr stream. Stay tuned for Day 3 snapshots which will be published tomorrow. 🙂
This year’s BURN2 Fire Moon event in Second Life opens officially to the public on Friday 27th through until Sunday 29th January 2017. The first new moon of 2017 will be on 27th and this inworld special event coincides with the Chinese New Year on the 28th. This year marks the year of the Fire Rooster and this event reflects the Fire Moon theme.
This event is open to everyone on the grid to participate and enjoy. There are free gifts around the region to collect plus there are tons of amazing live performance acts & live DJs planned over the course of this weekend. If you have wanna have fun and enjoy live music then head over to the BURN2 region this weekend and please spread the word. 🙂
First preview of the Main Stage
The pairing of the moon on fire and the fire rooster, the new year, a new beginning…such an exciting time of year! No one shall be a mere bystander; everyone participates in some way, by exploring, driving an art car, joining the Lamplighters as they walk the playa, witnessing the burning of the Fire Rooster, grooving to the tunes emanating from the stage, marveling and experiencing the creative builds scattered throughout the playa. You become the event, with us!
Wide view of the BURN2 Fire Moon event region
BURN2 is an extension of the Burning Man festival and community into the world of Second Life. It is an officially sanctioned Burning Man Regional, the only virtual world Regional out of more than 100 Regional groups worldwide, and the only Regional to burn the Man!
CONTACT: Marianne McCann Bay City Alliance marianne.mccann@gmail.com
BAY CITY’S 7th “MOLE DAY” ANNOUNCED
Members of Linden Department of Public Works to be celebrated
BAY CITY, SL (22nd January, 2017) – Bay City will once again come together to celebrate the hardy Moles of the Linden Department of Public Works on the 4th of February. The event will be held in the Bay City Fairgrounds in North Channel. As in past years, the invitation is open to all Second Life® members to join in the fun.
This will be the 7th such event, set aside to show appreciation for The Moles and their many contributions to Bay City and the rest of the Second Life™ Grid.
Normally held on the same day as Groundhog Day, this year’s event will be observed two days later, taking advantage of the weekend. The event will feature a performance by DJ GoSpeed of KONA Stream at 11:00 a.m., followed by a live performance by Oblee (Obleoinkment Wrigglesworth) beginning at noon.
“Moles” are members of The Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW). The LDPW is a program focused on improvements related to the experience of living on, or visiting the Linden Mainland. The LDPW is a team of Resident builders, scriptwriters, and others to create new content on Linden Lab’s behalf and to the benefit of all. These Residents all have Second Life accounts with the last name “Mole.”
Moles build the infrastructure of Second Life: the public roads and railways, items in our coastal waterways and protected lands, and even larger scale projects like the Linden Homes regions, premium content and experiences, and much more.
Bay City is a mainland community, developed by Linden Lab® and home to the Bay City Alliance. The Bay City Alliance was founded in 2008 to promote the Bay City regions of Second Life and provide a venue for Bay City Residents and other interested parties to socialize and network. It is now the largest group for Residents of Bay City.
For more information, or to participate in the event, please contact Marianne McCann.
On 22nd January Maria Korolov who is the editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business posted up a new OpenSim Viewer Survey. The aim of the survey is to find out what OpenSim viewers the OpenSim community use the most, what favourite features they like and what they’d want to see fixed in the future.
Apparently one random respondent who completes the survey will get a free virtual reality headset for their mobile phone which sounds awesome. Woooot! 🙂
On 15th January there was a new article posted on Sansar on the Road To VR website saying that Sansar will open to all in the first half of 2017. Sansar was planned to be open to the public in Q1 2017 and it was targeted for January 2017.
On Twitter on the same day the article was retweeted on the official Sansar Twitter page and in the replies section Ebbe Linden replied to a few comments. It looks like the lab are still inviting more creators into Sansar currently and that Sansar is not yet ready for public launch by the sound of things.
The public launch of Sansar could be pushed back as far as June 2017. Hopefully it will be open for everyone sometime between February 2017- June 2017. For those interested in Sansar the wait continues and I’ll post more updates when I hear more.
2017 Latest Sansar Updates
Sansar invites being sent out at the moment and the lab are inviting more into Sansar now.
We will invite more and more. Just make sure you signed up.
On 11th January Linden Lab announced Place Pages Beta a new feature that gives every region and parcel a generated page on the Second Life website where you can find out more information about that specific location. This new feature aims to finding places inworld more faster and more easily than before.
New Insilico Place Page
Here are some examples Place Pages that have been already created by Linden Lab. For the FAQ about Place Pages see here.
To activate the new Place Pages feature make sure “Show in search” is ticked under the land settings. Place Pages is currently in the beta testing phase with more future improvements and features like a events calendar planned soon. After the testing has finished all of the features worked on will be rolled out to everyone.
New Place Pages
Here are some of the things that is being worked on now..
Custom welcome message
Place description
Tag line
Image
Video support
Events calendar
Advertising parcels for sale/rent
And more
It’s worth pointing out that Place Pages that are rated General will be visible to everyone, Mature or Adult will be subject to the Maturity controls.
Here is the full blog post…
Place Pages are a new feature aimed at making the huge variety of awesome places in Second Life easier to find by creating web pages for each inworld location that opts to show in search.
Today, we’re starting a beta for this feature. All regions and parcels that have elected to Show In Search now have an automatically generated Place Page that’s visible on the web, you can check them out and share them today! Places rated General will be visible to anyone, and those rated Mature or Adult will be subject to the usual Maturity controls.
We’re beta testing additional capabilities that will make Place Pages even better. Invited testers will have access to an admin panel that allows them to add a custom welcome message, place description, tag line, image, and video support to their place pages. That’s not all – we’re working on other features like an events calendar, advertising parcels that are for sale/for rent, and more. Of course, all of the region/parcel stats like size, maturity rating, etc. will be available front and center too. After the testing period, we plan to roll these features out to everyone – so stay tuned!
For now, our beta is focused around customizing these pages, and planned future improvements include making sure these pages are optimized for search engines to be sure your inworld places can be easily found by people searching for relevant terms. Keep up with the most recent developments by checking out our public forum post on it. Thanks and enjoy!
If you have suggestions to improve Place Pages go to the Feedback forum thread here. It’s going to be interesting to see how Place Pages develops in the months ahead and there will be further announcements on the official Second Life blog soon.
Looks very neat at first glance so far but I’m wondering what do you think of the new Place Pages ? Feel free to comment below. Thanks! 🙂
Today Linden Lab released a new Sansar Creator Preview video showing more impressive footage of Sansar featuring Loz Hyde of Meshworx fame who tells his story on the testing side of things in Sansar. Loz has been working on a cool location called The Grand Hall and it looks incredible. The detail in Sansar in terms of the reflections, the effects and lighting looks really good so far.
The video runs for 1 minute and 33 seconds and it was filmed by Draxtor Despres. Stay tuned for more Sansar videos in the weeks/months ahead.
Loz mentioned in the video that Sansar rending is amazing and he thinks Sansar is very realistic. Loz goes on to say that in Sansar you will be able to create video games, he thinks that education & medical science is going to be amazing. If you want to build a business or build furniture you can do it like building a city from scratch. This sounds very interesting and exciting for those that can’t wait to get started.
Over 12, 000 creators have registered to access the platform and roughly 500-600 have been invited on the platform already. Sansar is due to launch to the public sometime during January 2017 if the all goes to plan. If you are interested you can still apply for the Creator Preview.
New Sansar Dollars
The Sansar currency is now in operation and according to Linden Lab the Sansar Dollar will have an exchange rate of 100 Sansar dollars to 1 US dollar. Creators will be able to buy and sell their creations with one another. See below for more info on the following links – pretty interesting reads there. 🙂
Weekly net change in number of regions since 3rd January 2016
On 2rd January 2017 Tyche Shepherd posted up the first grid statistics update for 2017 via the SLUniverse Forums. I was hoping for something more positive this year to reflect on.
Tyche mentioned in the forum thread that 2016 saw a slow decline in private estate regions in Second Life with surprising small growth for Linden Owned regions (+109 regions). The total net loss for 2016 was much higher than 2015 was in terms of net losses.
So another year gone and another year of a slow decline in private estate regions – total net loss for 2016 was 992 (5.6% down on the beginning of the year) – higher than 2015’s net loss of 825 regions(4.4% down). Overall the whole grid was down by 884 regions, the drop in private estates mitigated by a smaller growth in Linden Owned regions (+109 regions)
As you can see from the graph above for 2016 almost every week there were region losses with only a handful of weeks where there was small positive net growth for private estates. To be honest it was a bad year for region losses during 2016 and I really hope 2017 will not end the same way.
2015 vs 2016 Total Net Loss Comparison
Total net loss for 2016
992 regions down
5.6% down since the beginning of 2016
Total net loss for 2015
825 regions down
4.4% down since the beginning of 2015
2016 Vs 2017 Main Grid RegionsComparison
On 3rd January 2016
Total number of Main Grid regions: 24, 886
Private Estates: 17, 775
Linden Owned: 7, 111
As of 1st January 2017
Total number of Main Grid regions: 24, 002
Private Estates: 16, 783
Linden Owned: 7, 219
Sansar 2017 Impact
As many know already Sansar will open to the public sometime during January 2017 and the big question is will Sansar have any impact of the Second Life grid region numbers during 2017? or will it continue to go steady this year ?.
The lab needs to come up with workable solutions to stop the decline happening because 2016 saw a huge loss in regions. For many land pricing is one of the top concerns residents have right now.
I would love to know what you think about this in the comments section below.
My next update on Second Life statistics will be published in March 2017 and I will be keeping a closer on Sansar to see how that impacts the numbers in the weeks/months ahead.
Hopefully there will be more region growth in Second Life during 2017 and it will be great to see more great improvements made to Second Life to make it even better.
Useful Links To Keep Track of Second Life 2017 Statistics
Daniel Voyager 