Bits and Pieces

I found several interesting articles out early this morning and from late yesterday. These are worth checking out.

Wigs For Kids

Hair Fair

Hair Fair runs from July 14 to 29. This is a huge event and a great opportunity to help out the non-profit Wigs for Kids. This event is usually crowded and lag is a significant problem. A number of things have been done to alleviate lag. Most everything in the regions is non-physical, meaning you can walk through shop walls and fly through the ceilings/roofs.  The idea is to reduce the collision information the regions must calculate.

This year they have ideas for personal reduction of lag that I have not heard before. One is to set the Debug Setting: RenderAvatarMaxVisible to 5 rather than the default 35. Press Ctrl+Alt+D to add the ADVANCED menu item to the top menu. You will find the Debug Settings in Advanced. Type or copy RenderAvatarMaxVisible into entry field and change the value. At some point after leaving Hair Fair you will want to change this value back to the default 35.

You can read more tips for reducing lag in: Hair Fair Info. They also explain how they built the regions to reduce lag. So, be sure to check your script weight and prim count before teleporting in.

SLURL’s into Hair Fair’s

News on Shinning

Inara Pey has information from an Open Source Developers meeting on how the new Shining Project will be implemented. Shinning is the 3 part improvement to Second Life; HTTP Library, Avatar Baking, and Improved Caching.

Project Shining: what it means for the viewer

The short take-away is we are not going to see much if any change for a couple of months.

Another point I find a bit disturbing is these changes are going to make the SL Viewers even less compatible with OpenSim. The Firestorm-Phoenix Team is already planning to have two versions of their viewer, one for SL and one for OpenSim. The current version is the last single version for use on multiple grids.

It is hard to know how OpenSim will proceed and what changes they will make. For me there are several unknowns. The Lab plans to make viewer code available to Third Party Developers, but does their NDA keep that information from OpenSim developers? I’m not sure. If it does, it may be a couple of months before OpenSim dev’s have something they can work with to begin figuring out a compatible change for OpenSim.

So, we may see some periods where there is less compatibility between SL and OpenSim or we may see them diverge farther. Or we may see more dual edition viewers.

I also wonder whether all the changes to SL that use the HTTP are solely to take advantage of the error correction in HTTP or whether some future browser based viewer for SL is in planning.

It would be interesting to see a Third Party Viewer maker build a WebGL based viewer that would work with OpenSim…

3Di Cloud

Maria Korolov has an article out on her experience in 3Di Cloud. See: 3Di Cloud no threat to Cloud Party.

I think the article title says it all. Maria describes the problems with 3Di and the reasons it is unlikely to be competition for Cloud Party or Second Life.

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