I’ve been gone all weekend, a wedding to attend. So, writing up the latest Metareality podcast has had to wait. The podcast is: Not Cool… well the podcast is. They are referring to Second Life™ not being cool.
As always this outline is my take on what I hear and may or may not relate to what you hear when listening to the podcast.
Metareality Podcasts
00:50 – Is Drax a real name? Karl is messing with Drax. But, then Drax gets to take some funny takes on the German thing about Stiefvater.
03:30 – Exodus Viewer slider scandal Drax is involved in… this too is funny and you have to listen to appreciate it.
Using a viewer is a technical task and creating machinima is an artistic task. A person is sometimes brilliant in one field and helplessly lost in another. We often see these disparities in talent. It’s the natural way human minds work… or don’t. It makes for great opportunities for humor. Drax consistently does the ‘Wow!’ machinima… and I don’t have to watch him fumble with sliders and crack Gianna up.
05:00 – Lots of feedback on Disgruntled Frogs. Is Karl serious about that? That is undecided. But, it could very well turn into something… Amphibians with Attitude, Pissed Off Puppies, or whatever you can dream up. It might happen and might be a good thing for SL.
6:30 – SL Feet – Guy that wants to be Gianna’s dog… (cross-eyed icon here).
07:30 – Disgruntled Frogs with toes for the fetish crowd… OK… you have to be there for this to make any sense.
08:30 – SL greeting and new user experience.
11:00 – Mentor problems
12:00 – Eating the candy… Gianna’s mom eats her Halloween Reese’s pieces. It has something to do with new users in SL… really.
15:00 – Minecraft and why it is liked and not Second Life… This is where the title Not Cool comes from for the podcast.
16:30 – In relation to player retention and solving lag… the HTTP Project Viewer’s speed.
If you have not used the HTTP Project viewer and don’t follow Inara’s or my writing about viewer, you probably don’t know the Lab is reworking the communications between the viewer and the SL servers. The HTTP Project Viewer is way faster rez’ing and area.
The faster rez is not just dependent on your connection speed. I have a good 30mb/sec connection with mostly 0% packet loss and 80 to 150ms ping time. But, using the new HTTP Project viewer things render much faster, very noticeably faster. So, this is more than just a quality of connection thing.
It is also worth noting that this first HTTP change is not using all the enhancements that Google has been adding into the HTTP protocol. For instance: there is a data compression algorithm that is built into the protocol. The data compression and decompression is very fast and happens at a low level on the data stream making light weight on your CPU. We will see that added by the Lab, Monty Linden, in the second round of HTTP improvement.
17:00 – Gianna has the idea that if the viewer would tell people what was slowing down the process or degrading their performance, people could improve their computers. Without the information people have no idea what to upgrade or tweak to get better performance.
These would be notices like; your graphics card sucks lower your graphics settings, your packet loss is way too high move to a new neighborhood, etc, etc, and until you fix these things your experience in SL is going to be lame… don’t be lame switch to DISH… or whatever.
18:00 – Drax on spoiled users… we are… I am.
18:50 – Karl on content creators wasting resources. Good discussion to listen to.
21:00 – Gianna on limits as to what the avatar can wear… this idea is expected to earn Gianna the position of most hated avatar in SL… well… probably not… It is a realistic concept.
23:00 – Lag and retaining users.