Wind

Andrew Linden has been working on Second Life™ Wind. You may not know it needed some help, and may still. Wind is rather random and quickly changes direction and speed. Andrew did some work on it. It should change less often now.

Sever-Scripting Meeting September 2012

Andrew Linden told us, “While working on the interest list stuff I spent some time optimizing how updates to the terrain and wind are prepared for the viewer. While I was at it I decided to see if I could tweak the wind, which has been described here at these user groups as “useless”.  So that it might be a little more what people are looking for.

[It is still] probably not useful for the sailing community, but I think I’ve managed to slow down its variation, so that it doesn’t get so wild sometimes. It will eventually be up on ADITI for people to play with if they like. I know wind isn’t really used for much except for some flexi prims that bend to the wind.”

Simon Linden asked, “Will that change how flexies behave?”

Andrew answered, “Only the wind variation rate, so fundamentally flexies will still blow in the wind, but perhaps not so wildly. At least the wind speed and direction will vary at a slower rate.”

Chieron Tenk asked, “Will the size of the vortices/curls/eddies increase? It seems that the structures are pretty small (like 100m diameter for a vortex).”

Andrew: “No Chieron, I don’t think the size of the vortices will change. That is determined by the fidelity of the fluid simulation, which didn’t change.”

Interest List

This idea of an interest list has to do with what you are looking at when in world. You viewer makes a list of things in your field of view. It sends this to the server and the server sends you the mesh, object parameters, and textures needed to render the scene.

When you see far off stuff rendering before nearby things, the interest list is not working well. When you see things outside a building render, while you inside (no windows) and before the building walls then the interest list not working well.

These things also place an unnecessary load on the server. You can’t see things outside most buildings. They should download later if at all.

This is the part of the system Andrew is working on. It has the possibility to improve performance and reduce bandwidth consumption.

Andrew describes the status of the task as, “My news is that I think I’m done with my first pass on the server’s interest list code. I now need to package up my work for QA. I might have a few regions up on ADITI next week if all goes well.”

Server Updates

This has not changed since my last update. Friday’s late in the day information was that things were going as planned and hoped. Provided there are no problems this weekend the RC channel, all are running the same code, will roll to the main channel.

Hopefully things will be back on cycle next week. This week got confusing as to what was where and when.