Anyone heard of "Speed Light Web Viewer?"

[bigmoe Whitfield]

Just now, Cesartje said:

then i think Bright Canopy happen. I say... brring back SLGO .

SLgo will never return, Sony killed onlive to use the technology in one of their projects,  everything onlive had,  sony took control of, so no viewer or such exists from that.

[Ardy Lay]

Might as well be renting a computer to run SL on.  It won't be cheap because the hardware isn't cheap.  People looking for a cheap alternative to owning and using their own hardware will be disappointed either soon, when it doesn't meet expectations, or later, when the hosts find out it's a money-losing business model to buy expensive hardware, run elaborate software on it, feed it power, keep it cool and connected to the Internet.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

40 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

Might as well be renting a computer to run SL on.  It won't be cheap because the hardware isn't cheap.  People looking for a cheap alternative to owning and using their own hardware will be disappointed either soon, when it doesn't meet expectations, or later, when the hosts find out it's a money-losing business model to buy expensive hardware, run elaborate software on it, feed it power, keep it cool and connected to the Internet.

I know this all to well,  running the hosting company I have since 98, which I think you know about, not 100% but think you do,  and I can tell you, some one comes to me wanting this, they best have a chunk of change ready, I do not have an unmetered connection at the datacenter.  50gb a month,  is what we get, it's the cheapest we can get still, but it's what we have.  1500 sites, 4 remote desktop rentals and trust me, 150 bucks extra every month comes out, all because of that limitation.    people think "oh you are hosted a data center you have all the bandwidth" yeah tell that to my upstream provider lol.

[Qie Niangao]

11 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

Might as well be renting a computer to run SL on.

10 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

some one comes to me wanting this, they best have a chunk of change ready, I do not have an unmetered connection at the datacenter.  

I realize this it talking about server-side rendering options such as BrightCanopy and SLGO, and those are orders of magnitude more computing and bandwidth than what SpeedLight is currently doing, but I'm trying to get a handle on how much it really needs to do, server-side, if anything. I mean, they must be capable of significant SL-related computing and bandwidth because SmartBots must run quite a few server-side bots to supply all the 24x7 services, and I gather the minimal network traffic to keep a bot connected to SL is non-trivial. So that needs to be (and is) a paid-for service.

But could a web-based viewer be all browser-side, all javascript libraries, say? Something would still serve up the client javascript, but does there need to be any running server component at all? Does it need accounts? Can it scale without needing to charge for anything? Is that the current approach here?

Apparently they contemplate some sort of 3D: the pitch for Patreon membership is "get a 3D view a bit faster ;)".  My hunch is they mean for that 3D view to be "browser direct to grid" not server-side rendering, and maybe not real-time streaming, but of course I could be wrong about all this. (I started an account for an old alt but I lost confidence part-way through, so I'm not sure how much of this is obvious to an actual user.)

[ItHadToComeToThis]

Boomers....😞

[Alyona Su]

21 hours ago, DanielWolfsong said:

An advertisement for this web service just popped-up on Facebook's Second Life Group - I suspect it is a scam to obtain SL account information. Does Linden Labs KNOW anything about this? I have seen no notices of it posted.

Hello there 👋

After long time of research, development and negotiations with Linden Lab our famous SmartBots team can proudly introduce the beta version of first-ever 100% web & mobile-friendly Viewer: https://speedlight.me 🙏

SpeedLight is a professional commercial Second Life viewer:

• 100% browser-based, no downloads required
• 100% mobile and tablet ready
• Allows switching between devices without logging out
• Allows keeping avatar online 24/7
• IM history always available (even offline)

 

We've launched just recently, so more functions will be added overtime, such as 3D World View (Yes, you will be able to see SL from a browser!) and much more.

 

Check it out & try it out 😊

If it's not in this list, treat it at phishing: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory

[Alyona Su]

1 hour ago, ItHadToComeToThis said:

Boomers....😞

Careful, you could be sued for using that word. LOL

https://apple.news/AhitRufHOR2SvpJyQpciSKg

[Wulfie Reanimator]

3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

But could a web-based viewer be all browser-side, all javascript libraries, say?

JS/WebGL/UnityWeb, no. They're just really slow for real-time 3D rendering on their own, but especially when considering how badly optimized SL content is.

Rendering in a browser is just magnitudes slower than anything else.

http://www.fishgl.com/
http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/
https://airtightinteractive.com/demos/js/cubes/
https://hki.paris/xp/

1 hour ago, Alyona Su said:

2 hours ago, ItHadToComeToThis said:

Boomers....😞

Careful, you could be sued for using that word. LOL

https://apple.news/AhitRufHOR2SvpJyQpciSKg

That article isn't about somebody getting sued for that phrase. The case doesn't involve that phrase.

That article is just highlighting how hip-with-the-kids the chief of justice is, for making a joke using that phrase.

The very point of his joke was that someone saying "ok, boomer" offhandedly is not discrimination.

Edited February 2, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Alyona Su]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

The very point of his joke was that someone saying "ok, boomer" offhandedly is not discrimination.

Certainly, Your Honor. I wasn't aware you were privy to the Bench. LOL

I posted that more on the "Here's some funny news" aspect than actually to plonk anything anyone says. We all know how the courts like to legislate from the Bench. My purview: There is no constitutional right to be not-offended. LOL

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Rendering in a browser is just magnitudes slower than anything else.

Right, but I was starting from the premise that the "viewer" would be primarily a chat client, which is what I understood Speed Light to be at the moment. I was taking the future 3D objective to be on a par with the ill-fated Lumiya's 3D view on a modern high or midrange Android phone -- which was somewhat better than successive snapshots, but not by much.

Meanwhile, I'm curious:

3 hours ago, ItHadToComeToThis said:

Boomers....😞

As a Boomer myself I'm accustomed to apologizing to successor generations for the effrontery of not having died-off yet, but in the case of this thread specifically I'm unclear how our collective obsolescence offends. Is it that we're unfashionably out of phase with the perpetual pendulum swing between web and app?

[Wulfie Reanimator]

5 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Right, but I was starting from the premise that the "viewer" would be primarily a chat client, which is what I understood Speed Light to be at the moment. I was taking the future 3D objective to be on a par with the ill-fated Lumiya's 3D view on a modern high or midrange Android phone -- which was somewhat better than successive snapshots, but not by much.

Oh, that is a more interesting question. Obviously I don't have the answer to that one, I haven't been able to write my own code to log myself into SL in any language though I've tried... If I could figure that one out, trying it with JS shouldn't be too different.

[LittleMe Jewell]

22 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

3 hours ago, ItHadToComeToThis said:

Boomers....😞

As a Boomer myself I'm accustomed to apologizing to successor generations for the effrontery of not having died-off yet, but in the case of this thread specifically I'm unclear how our collective obsolescence offends. Is it that we're unfashionably out of phase with the perpetual pendulum swing between web and app?

I think it was a slam simply because some of us are, heaven forbid, actually worried about security and expressed such at the beginning of this thread. 

[Solar Legion]

2 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

If it's not in this list, treat it at phishing: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory

CoolVL Viewer is not on that list and is a legitimate Second Life Viewer/client.

There is no listing of official/safe viewers - we already had a TPV in the past that proved as much.

Those are simply the ones that self-certified their compliance with the TPV policies.

Edited February 2, 2020 by Solar Legion

[ItHadToComeToThis]

Contrary to what some might think, I am very much for people being more security conscious on the web. My comment was just a playful poke really. About the only third party viewer I really trust is firestorm. I was really into the idea of Alchemy as it seemed to run better on my system than FS but sadly that is dead in the water and hasn’t been updated in a long time (tho the developer would convince you otherwise).

[Lindal Kidd]

Golly, this thread is the wildest example of people reacting to Old News I've ever seen.

• Yes, I was initially concerned about the SpeedLight web-based viewer announcement being a phishing scam.
• Yes, I did initially think it was asking for your SL user name and password.
  • If you read down a few posts, you would see that I admitted that I was wrong.  SpeedLight was asking for my SPEEDLIGHT credentials (which I had not yet created).
• Yes, we know that simply being on the LL TPV list is not a guarantee of safety.  I brought this up early in the thread.
• Yes, SLGo has been discontinued.  For a long time.
• Bright Canopy has been discontinued too.

To summarize:  Move along now, nothing to see here.

Except that SpeedLight looks to be a nice text-only way to access SL when you're on a mobile device and can't use a real viewer.

[Pamela Galli]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

As a Boomer myself I'm accustomed to apologizing to successor generations for the effrontery of not having died-off yet, but in the case of this thread specifically I'm unclear how our collective obsolescence offends. Is it that we're unfashionably out of phase with the perpetual pendulum swing between web and app?

Ooh well said Qie!

[Alyona Su]

2 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

CoolVL Viewer is not on that list and is a legitimate Second Life Viewer/client.

Legitimate and endorsed+vetted are not the same. Just saying.

[Solar Legion]

3 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

Legitimate and endorsed+vetted are not the same. Just saying.

You would have a point in that distinction if any of those in the directory were actually endorsed or vetted by Linden Lab.

[Ardy Lay]

5 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Golly, this thread is the wildest example of people reacting to Old News I've ever seen.

• Yes, I was initially concerned about the SpeedLight web-based viewer announcement being a phishing scam.
• Yes, I did initially think it was asking for your SL user name and password.
  • If you read down a few posts, you would see that I admitted that I was wrong.  SpeedLight was asking for my SPEEDLIGHT credentials (which I had not yet created).
• Yes, we know that simply being on the LL TPV list is not a guarantee of safety.  I brought this up early in the thread.
• Yes, SLGo has been discontinued.  For a long time.
• Bright Canopy has been discontinued too.

To summarize:  Move along now, nothing to see here.

Except that SpeedLight looks to be a nice text-only way to access SL when you're on a mobile device and can't use a real viewer.

Heh, not that old.  See some ongoing baits and debates in this forum for examples.  You were not wrong, just premature.  The site in question does indeed need your Second Life user name and password to perform the login process.

I see Oz Linden added SpeedLight to the Third Party Viewer Directory.  What I don't understand is why SpeedLight is currently in the Active Full Viewers category when it does not, currently, provide a view into the virtual world of Second Life.

Maybe 3D rendering can be optional if it does get added.  Some users might not need it and 3D rendering is resource intensive, thus an unnecessary burden on the service for those sessions in which it is not desired.

[Glaznah Gassner]

Hello everyone,

I'm Glaznah Gassner, the creator of SpeedLight, the web Second Life viewer.

I'm sorry I was not able to respond to this thread on weekend, let me answer all the questions mentioned above. You can ask me your question here, too. I promise to give a fair response to any kind of question.

[Glaznah Gassner]

On 2/1/2020 at 7:12 PM, DanielWolfsong said:

An advertisement for this web service just popped-up on Facebook's Second Life Group - I suspect it is a scam to obtain SL account information. Does Linden Labs KNOW anything about this?

SpeedLight is an officially approved viewer for Second Life. We follow all requirements of Linden Lab, especially the most important one: do not send the SL account credentials anywhere except SL login servers.

Actually, this was the tricky part. We login avatars right from a browser and send SL password directly to Second Life login servers (XMLRPC protocol if you are curious about it). There were some major issues with this. We were working with Linden Lab through December 2019 to make the necessary adjustments to SL servers and our software.

On 2/1/2020 at 7:45 PM, Lyssa Greymoon said:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory/SpeedLight

LL must know something about it since it’s in the TPV directory, but the home page listed in the TPV directory is speedlight.io not speedlight.me

Oh, this relates to Facebook only. Somehow FB decided that https://speedlight.io "violates the community standards", while the mirror domain https://speedlight.me is ok. Their support did not responded to my numerous inquiries, so we use speedlight.me at FaceBook for now.

However, only speedlight.io is approved by Linden Lab, so you will be directed to the correct domain when you try to log in. I believe we should clarify this on the landing page, thank you.

On 2/1/2020 at 8:51 PM, Pamela Galli said:

Much as I fear and loathe the prospect of learning any more  new technology of any kind, I would do it if it enabled me to pay discounts or give inventory on my iPad, so I don’t have to drag a laptop with me when traveling. Can bots do that? They have always been a mystery to me.

SpeedLight has been created to perform all the necessary tasks using a regular browser: desktop, iPad and mobile. I hate dragging a laptop to reply to my IMs, and don't want to launch a full-scaled viewer to send a notecard. That's why SpeedLight does exist.

However, we still missing the very important part: the 3D world view. We know it is possible to show 3D, we have a working SpeedLight prototype which allows seeing the static objectin-world. Now we are adding avatar and animations support to it.

This is not an immediate process (we also have to develop other features like IMs, groups and parcel management... a lot of features), but we'll get 3D view working in browser.

On 2/1/2020 at 8:55 PM, DanielWolfsong said:

Public Service Reminder - NEVER give your Second Life Password out to anyone or any software claiming to be connected to Linden Labs without first verifying directly WITH Linden Labs. This is an age old scam and is how accounts get drained.

That's true. I hope that TPV approval of SpeedLight helps the most of people to trust our viewer.

For those who need to see more proofs, each browser provides the network activity log. One can check it to ensure that credentials are being sent to SL login servers only.

On 2/1/2020 at 10:57 PM, LittleMe Jewell said:

I like the idea of being able to do some inventory management without having to run a full viewer.  Granted, a lot of my inventory sorting would require being able to rez the item or try something on, but some organizing can be done just by seeing folders/items and being able to move things around.

Rezzing the inventory items is what we do have in our backlog. I'm not sure this could be handy without a 3D world view though, so you may need to wait until we release a 3D view.

10 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

Heh, not that old.  See some ongoing baits and debates in this forum for examples.  You were not wrong, just premature.  The site in question does indeed need your Second Life user name and password to perform the login process.

I see Oz Linden added SpeedLight to the Third Party Viewer Directory.  What I don't understand is why SpeedLight is currently in the Active Full Viewers category when it does not, currently, provide a view into the virtual world of Second Life.

Maybe 3D rendering can be optional if it does get added.  Some users might not need it and 3D rendering is resource intensive, thus an unnecessary burden on the service for those sessions in which it is not desired.

3D view is a highly-demanded feature. We will definitely implement it (at long last, you can't call yourself a "viewer" if you are not going to show the "view"). Currently we allow seeing the local map with nearby avatars. You can teleport to the necessary location. An ability to walk, turn and possibly interact with nearby objects is planned to be added, too.

The social and communication features are all implemented: IMs, local chat, group chats. Inventory works but sometimes glitches (we are going to publish a fix release this week). Money transactions work with a payment history available (the payments made/received while being in SpeedLight indeed).

We are implementing all the essential features of a viewer... and, possibly, a bit more:

* thanks to the architecture of SpeedLight you can seamlessly switch between desktop and mobile
* you can keep your avatar online while your browser is closed
* we already have a simple autoresponder, and going to add rule-based replies to it

[Glaznah Gassner]

On 2/1/2020 at 7:12 PM, DanielWolfsong said:

An advertisement for this web service just popped-up on Facebook's Second Life Group - I suspect it is a scam to obtain SL account information. Does Linden Labs KNOW anything about this? I have seen no notices of it posted.

Daniel, I appreciate if you add the link to my reply to your post (https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/448931-anyone-heard-of-speed-light-web-viewer/?do=findComment&comment=2054193 )

 

Some people may miss it among the discussion. Thank you!

[Glaznah Gassner]

On 2/2/2020 at 3:19 PM, Qie Niangao said:

But could a web-based viewer be all browser-side, all javascript libraries, say? Something would still serve up the client javascript, but does there need to be any running server component at all? Does it need accounts? Can it scale without needing to charge for anything? Is that the current approach here?

Apparently they contemplate some sort of 3D: the pitch for Patreon membership is "get a 3D view a bit faster ;)".  My hunch is they mean for that 3D view to be "browser direct to grid" not server-side rendering, and maybe not real-time streaming, but of course I could be wrong about all this. (I started an account for an old alt but I lost confidence part-way through, so I'm not sure how much of this is obvious to an actual user.)

Oh, I did missed this one - a pretty interesting and important.

1) The web-based viewer can be all browser-side. I am working enough with SL viewer code, and it is theoretically possible to implement everything in JS (partially convert, partially port, a lot to rewrite). However, this would require a lot of resources: people, knowledge and time.

At SpeedLight, we host the part of the code on the servers (using our experience with SmartBots). The other part (mostly the user-interaction logic) is running in a browser.

Our 3D view will be working browser-side, on a client. Server-side rendering approach is way too heavy to host more than a hundred online avatars (this is how much we've reached today at SpeedLight). In our scheme the server supplies the rendering data (prims, animations, textures) and browser renders them in real time.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

43 minutes ago, Glaznah Gassner said:

Oh, I did missed this one - a pretty interesting and important.

1) The web-based viewer can be all browser-side. I am working enough with SL viewer code, and it is theoretically possible to implement everything in JS (partially convert, partially port, a lot to rewrite). However, this would require a lot of resources: people, knowledge and time.

At SpeedLight, we host the part of the code on the servers (using our experience with SmartBots). The other part (mostly the user-interaction logic) is running in a browser.

Our 3D view will be working browser-side, on a client. Server-side rendering approach is way too heavy to host more than a hundred online avatars (this is how much we've reached today at SpeedLight). In our scheme the server supplies the rendering data (prims, animations, textures) and browser renders them in real time.

Are you concerned about the performance of browser-based rendering at all (low FPS for the user)? Or does it not matter since it isn't using your resources?

[Glaznah Gassner]

31 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Are you concerned about the performance of browser-based rendering at all (low FPS for the user)? Or does it not matter since it isn't using your resources?

I do concerned about the performance indeed because this is the impression, the user's experience of my product. We are trying to make it light and configurable (to be able to reduce the view distance for example).

Each user also uses some of the server's resources. Server receives the raw world data from SL, optimizes it and prepares for the browser.

We've decided to concentrate on releasing the working 3D renderer first. Then check how does it work on various devices, and then optimize the performance.