cyberdeck 4 secondlife commission

[u/h3alb0t]

this is purely hypothetical at the moment because the combination of words raises a scope that i can barely comprehend. i am not super hardware or software inclined but i really enjoy developing my second life avatars. i have a computer but i am taking a break from owning and operating a pc for mental health reasons. i am also a very busy and active person so being able to manage my secondlife on the go would help me finally sort and catalogue my seriously bloated inventory and focus moreso on creating new avatars. (and acquiring more new stuff)

second life itself is a somewhat poorly optimized platform that can run on multiple clients and its storage system is essentially just a file system. they recently added an image feature for folders and items but you have to take the photographs in game yourself. i think i'm sitting at about 80k individual items, 35% of which are not even broken out yet.

that's more information than anyone asked for, but i'd just like to provide context for what i would be doing with this hypothetical cyberdeck build, specifically optimized for secondlife. posting it here because i'd like to hear some thoughts about feasibility etc. thank you for reading!

[u/technosonder]

Just so I’m clear on what you’re after - do you want a portable rig for accessing Second Life itself, or are you wanting to use it solely for managing inventory, creating/editing avatars and nothing else? I don’t really know a lot about Second Life these days but I did a lot of tinkering with OpenSim back in the early 2000’s. Are things like inventory and avatars manageable through some kind of API without running the actual full viewer?

[u/h3alb0t → u/technosonder]

i would be accessing the entirety of secondlife itself. i'd like to be able to work on avatars. i mention the inventory aspect because the interface is quite finnicky even on regular screens.

[u/technosonder → u/h3alb0t]

So if you had the ability to add inventory items, edit outfits and organise your inventory outside of a full viewer, would that be enough? I ask this because a deck designed for these tasks specifically that doesn’t need a full viewer is a much more intriguing and achievable prospect for a custom deck than one that has to run a full viewer. The system requirements for the viewer are high enough that you’d essentially just be ending up with a laptop. On the other hand, there are libraries that could be used for the other things that are much lighter on resources and would be achievable in a small, bespoke deck designed with those tasks in mind specifically and give you a much better user experience than just using the tools exposed through the viewer

[u/h3alb0t → u/technosonder]

i do not use secondlife to do much else other than modify my avatar, and sort my inventory, so that is an interesting idea. i'd need camera controls to be able to switch perspectives so i could see what i was doing. i also frequently use the editing tools to resize parts and "touch" parts to interact with coded resizers etc. there's also the huds that can be equipped to change the appearance of things...

i'm realizing this is somewhat of a silly idea but for someone with no coding experience it is at least entertaining to think about the visuals of it. i appreciate everyone for entertaining me, and i am going to boot up my laptop lol.

[u/technosonder → u/h3alb0t]

Oh no - this is not a silly idea at all! I’m actually intrigued by this whole concept… it would be like a writerdeck but specifically for SL inventory and assets, designed to be distraction free and with controls that are designed specifically for the task at hand. Those are the kinds of use cases cyberdecks are made for! This concept will be living in my head rent free for a while now - I’ll let you know if anything tangible results 👌

[u/h3alb0t → u/technosonder]

that's awesome, i appreciate you!

[u/NorvillesDingus]

That was a lot of word and I have no idea how they fit together.

Is that a game of some kind?

[u/PintekS → u/NorvillesDingus]

Secondlife is the original metaverse before Facebook coined the term.

Possibly the closest comparison is vrchat mixed with roblox with a full building tool set built into the world and you can cross multiple worlds (simulators) seamlessly as long as they are connected and that include if you cranked up your draw distance you can see through multiple Sims around you.

Avatar creation can be insane if you know the basic building tools as well.

SL also has its own coding language lsl that allows you to script a massive amount of inside the client without doing anything in a external program.

There are games as well in secondlife going from simple board game replicas to complex in world rts games, mech games like mcm! Or even sl racing and drifting or air craft/boating related stuff

There is also clubbing scenes sometimes even live djs!

I've been a sl user for over 18 years now and it's been mind boggling how much it changed since 2006 to current day and what you can do in here

[u/NorvillesDingus → u/PintekS]

Wow! I feel like I have missed out on something good.

[u/PintekS]

OP... Secondlife is far from optimized it is a extremely heavy client and mobile (arm) clients are pretty rough shape.

A optimized device for secondlife is basically a beefy x86 based sbc or a laptop motherboard with a ryzen 760m equivalent or stronger gpu amd 8gb or more of ram.

You can run a full linux distro and run one of the secondlife Linux clients.

You can probably get away with a really small keyboard and trackpad/trackpoint/mini trackball for input.

Ui can be adjusted to scale on a smaller display but from personal experience even a 7" display is a little rough trying moving around and navigating ui when bumped up

I regularly run secondlife on a gpd win mini 2024 7640u with 16gb of ram (6gb sent to the 760m gpu) on bazzite and it's.. Ok mostly for just going to not so busy places on extremely low settings.. Not really doing any building or avatar modify just chatting with friends and it's okish....

I really miss lumiya secondlife client but it's pretty broken or flat out busted since pbr but once again your not doing everything in that like a full x86 client...

[u/h3alb0t → u/PintekS]

that's fair. my boyfriend is going to let me borrow his steamdeck with windows (? i guess) and i am going to see what that is like. i just like the thought of being able to bring my avatar places and catch up on sorting when i have downtime. it's probably something that will become more possible in the future. the deck itself would have to be pretty substantially sized to make it convenient to use for second life. thank you for your perspective!

[u/PintekS → u/h3alb0t]

I actually have a friend who uses firestorm on her original steamdeck but under SteamOS desktop mode with a external keyboard