Tag: Firestorm

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: Free Gifts to Celebrate the 12th Anniversary of the Firestorm Viewer!

Second Life is probably unique among metaverse platforms in that the most popular viewer software is not a product of the company that makes Second Life, Linden Lab! That would be the Firestorm viewer, created by the community itself by a non-profit company called the Phoenix Firestorm Project:

The Phoenix Firestorm Project Inc. is a non-profit, incorporated organization whose mandate is to improve the user experience in Second Life and other virtual worlds by providing an advanced open source viewer with greater features, options and interface flexibility than the standard offering by Linden Lab. The project has approximately 80 volunteers working for it and are managed through departments divided up as Development, Support, Quality Assurance and Gateway. We provide live support 24/7 in nine different languages inside of Second Life through our support groups and on the web via our issue tracker.

And to celebrate its 12 anniversary, Firestorm threw a big party yesterday, Saturday, September 3rd. And in a circle around the four-sim event stage are free gifts from Firestorm and other Second Life vendors for you! All gifts are free and you do not need to join a group to pick them up.

The present from Firelight Hair is a new unisex fatpack of hair called Glen/Gwyn, which comes in both male and female versions, rigged and unrigged, plus a HUD with 32 different textures:

Firelight is also generously giving out the same gift to SL users that it put out a year ago, for Firestorm’s 11th anniversary! This shorter unisex hairstyle is called David/Davina, and also comes in male and female versions, both rigged and unrigged, with a texture HUD as shown below:

Next up we have a casual outfit featuring three more free gifts:

The T-shirt is the present from Addams, and it comes in a wide variety of sizes to fit most female mesh bodies, and in two colours: white as shown above, and black. (Note that there is also a men’s T-shirt gift, which also comes in black and white!)

The gift from Firestorm is a fatpack of this unisex baseball cap featuring the distinctive Firestorm phoenix logo, with comes the the HUD shown below, where you can mix and match the colours of the cap and the logo as you please. There are two versions of the baseball cap, one for smaller heads and one for larger heads, and both can be resized simply by clicking on them, which pulls up a menu. It’s the perfect accessory for any fan of the Firestorm viewer as your avatar strolls the grid!

Finally, there’s a very nice gift from virtual shoemaker Versov, these wonderfully detailed sneakers, which comes in sizes to fit men and women! These special-edition Firestov sneakers come in sizes to fit feet for the following mesh bodies: Maitreya Lara, Signature Gianni and Geralt, Legacy (male and female), Belleza (male and female), and Slink (male and female). There’s also an unrigged pair in the folder, which you can adjust and resize to fit other brands of feet. They are a keeper!

There are also many gifts for you fans of breedables (which I am not). Here’s the blogpost on the official Firestorm blog listing all the free gifts. I’m not sure how long all these gifts will be available, but I seem to remember that the Firestorm 11th anniversary gifts were available to pick up for at least a month after the events held at the stage. As I said, the event stage is a circle covering four adjoining sims, with the same gifts available around the perimeter of the stage in each sim. According to the event listing:

SLURLs: LOAD BALANCING! If your first initial starts with…click a corresponding SLURL:
A-J http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Firestorm%20Ghost%20Town/14/240/3902
K-R http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Firestorm%20Aerodrome/238/15/3901
S-Z http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Firestorm%20Dow%20Forest/237/238/3902

Since the big party was yesterday, you could choose any of these SLURLs and you shouldn’t have any problem getting in! I wouldn’t wait too long to pick these wonderful presents up, though.

PRO TIP: Did you know that you can pick up many other free gifts at the VERSOV main store, including three fatpacks of high-quality unisex sneakers of various designs and colours? Join the VERSOV group for free to pick up the fabulous freebies, which are located on panels at the front counter of the store…here’s your taxi!

Happy freebie shopping! 😉

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: End-of-Year Freebies for Male Avatars

Well, Advent calendar season is almost over, and I have spent most of it focused on fabulous freebies for female avatars, but I wanted to blog about some men’s freebies that you can pick up today.

First, please meet Silver Quick, my handsome male alt who will be modeling today’s finds:

Silver Quick is wearing:

  • Head, Eyes and Eyebrows: the recent group gift of the Alain Bento, Bakes on Mesh head from LeLutka
  • Body: Romeo by Altamura (a Valentine’s Day group gift a couple of years ago; to use Bakes on Mesh skin on this body, you must first purchase an Omega system kit for Altamura for L$99 at this exact SLURL, and obtain the free Bakes on Mesh kit from Altamura (at this exact SLURL in their in-world store)
  • Bakes on Mesh Skin: Delphinus by Altamura (included with the Bakes on Mesh kit mentioned above)
  • Hair: Jamie by Firelight, a free gift available here
  • Shorts: Alejandro shorts from the starter avatars in the Library folder of your SL inventory
  • Animation Override: Tuty’s Daily sLIFE Free Bento AO (free from the Tuty animations store)
The Altamura Bakes on Mesh kit includes a BoM Omega relay and the Delphinus skin

Our first stop today is NERO N7 menswear store, where (if you join their store group for free), you can pick up a free L$500 gift card, good for anything in the store:

Next, we hit a couple of Advent calendars that are still up!

Donni’s Dollies has an Advent calendar where the odd-numbered dates (plus Dec. 12th and Dec. 24th) have gifts of menswear as well as womenswear (no group is needed). Here is the black and gold tuxedo from December 24th:

No Shot still has their 12 Days of Christmas calendar up, too. Here is one of the 12 menswear gifts you can pick up, a camouflage outfit with boots:

Here’s another nice outfit from the No Shot calendar, which also includes the shoes:

And here’s a business suit outfit from the same calendar, with shoes:

The ACCESS shopping event has many lovely gifts for both men and women (you have to join the ACCESS group for free to pick up these gifts).

Here’s a pro tip to help you quickly find the gifts you want at this and at other events: if you are using the Firestorm viewer, select Area Search under the World menu, then enter a keyword you are searching for (e.g. “varsity”). Then, from the list of search results, right-click the one you are interested in, and select Zoom from the pop-up menu as shown here:

Your camera will then zoom in on the specific giftbox you have selected! All you have to do is click on it and it’s yours! This tip can save you a lot of wandering around at crowded sales events where there are dozens and dozens of vendor booths.

Do a keyword search for “GRAILED” to get this Zion hoodie fatpack by GRAILED, which includes a HUD with 30 different colours and patterns:

And do a keyword search for “Varsity” to pick up this Randon jacket and long sweater combo from Varsity, with two HUDs to change the colour of both the jacket and sweater. You’ll need to alpha out your arms and hands for this hands-in-pockets look!

Our final stop is the Shop and Hop event, where there are a few men’s freebies to pick up. The gift from Etham is this shirt-and-hoodie combo, which comes with a HUD to change the colour of both the shirt and the hoodie individually:

The gift from Mossu is this cheerful Christmas cardigan:

The present from Lapointe and Bastchild’s SWEAR store at the Winter Shop and Hop are these wonderfully-detailed tundra patrol boots, in a camouflage snowflake pattern:

Happy freebie shopping!

The Firestorm Second Life Viewer Now Supports Bakes on Mesh

The latest version of the popular Firestorm viewer for Second Life, released on October 1st, 2019, now supports Bakes on Mesh!

The Bakes on Mesh release from Firestorm has been long awaited; apologies for that. This should be considered by all in SL a MAJOR UPDATE, and it is important that all our SL users upgrade to it. This update contains a lot of rendering-related changes from Linden Lab, without which you WILL be running into avatars that look badly broken to you. Even if you don’t intend to use or purchase anything with BoM, you will still need to be able to see BoM items in your viewer. Please take the update. I can assure you we have put this through a rigorous QA process; it’s a great build!

You will need to get free Bakes on Mesh relay HUDs for the mesh heads and bodies you use. In my case, I picked up a Bakes on Mesh relay hud for Catwa heads from the Catwa store (at this exact SLURL), and a Bakes on Mesh relay HUD for the Maitreya Lara body on the SL Marketplace (here’s the listing).

If you want to get up to speed on how to use these HUDs, here are three videos by NovataSecondLife to help you get started:

The best part of Bakes on Mesh is that I am now able to wear old system skins that I thought I would never be able to use again with my mesh head and body! Here is a French court look, using an old Marie Antoinette-style powdered system skin from Xtreme Reality on my Maitreya Lara body and Catwa Kimberly head:

C’est parfait!

You can download the latest version of the Firestorm viewer here.

Photographs were taken at the Château de Versailles sim.

Why Second Life STILL Has 600,000 Regular Users at 16 Years Old

“Peace? …” by Alice Buttigieg
(Second Life Pic of the Day 07.22.2019)

In the December 2017 issue of The Atlantic magazine, Leslie Jamison wrote an article about Second Life. The webpage for that article has the original article title, Second Life Still Has 600,000 Regular Users (which you can check for yourself by doing a Google search):

However, it would seem that Leslie’s editor at The Atlantic wanted a somewhat punchier title, and so we have The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future, which shows up when you click on that link. (I’m pretty sure that Linden Lab is less than pleased with that particular editor.)

There’s a quote from that article which is, to my knowledge, the most up-to-date statistic we have about how many people still use Second Life:

Of the 36 million Second Life accounts that had been created by 2013—the most recent data Linden Lab will provide—only an estimated 600,000 people still regularly use the platform.

“Only” 600,000? That still makes Second Life, far and away, the most popular virtual world. And yet, somehow, the mainstream news media continues to portray Second Life as quaint, outdated and underused.

Well, today, Jessica Lyon, the founder, CEO, and project manager of the Firestorm viewer project, posted an editorial about their recent decision to separate the Firestorm viewer into Second Life and OpenSim versions, titled OpenSim: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Now, I am not going to dissect all the gory technical details of that announcement here. But one statistic did happen to catch my eye:

Let’s get this out of the way first:  542,967 unique users across 9.9 million sessions spending 17.7 million hours logged into Second Life on Firestorm over the last 30-day period. 

That is our most recent set of metrics regarding Firestorm usage in Second Life, directly from Linden Lab. Those are mind-blowing figures. Although we don’t have metrics for how many OpenSim users run Firestorm, it is safe to say it isn’t anywhere near that. My estimate would be somewhere around 2,000 users. But still… THAT’S NOT WHY!

It is because of those numbers that we prioritize Second Life, but those numbers are NOT why we struggle with OpenSim.

So, in other words, over the past 30 days, 542,967 unique Second Life account holders used the Firestorm viewer to access Second Life. Now, Firestorm is by far the most popular viewer. Let’s assume that all the other viewers combined (including Second Life’s own native viewer) have only 10% of the market that Firestorm occupies, which I think is a fairly reasonable assumption.

10% of 542,967 is 54,296. Adding 54,296 to 542,967 (or just multiplying 542,967 by 1.10) gives us…597,264.

Which means that Second Life, still, has approximately 600,000 regular users in the past month.

Why are people still so committed to Second Life after 16 years? As I have written before:

What is the secret to Second Life’s “stickiness”? In a word, it’s investment: investment of time, investment of money, investment in an avatar representation, and investment in community.

Until a social VR/virtual world platform comes along that can offer everything that Second Life does, it is going to continue to be the most commercially successful and most popular virtual world around, and a reliable cash cow for Linden Lab.

One day, one of the newer social VR platforms like Sansar, VRChat, Rec Room, or perhaps even Facebook’s upcoming “Metaverse” project, will steal that crown. But not today. And not tomorrow.

Whether you like it or not, and whether the news media admits it or not, Second Life is still relevant and still rules. Competing metaverse platforms would kill to get the level of usage Second Life still gets, even after 16 years of continuous operation, even as it has been all but written off by mainstream media.