More Bits & News 2014-21

Unscheduled Maintenance

Today there was a problem and the Lindens pulled maintenance on the SL system to fix something. Logins were failing for a time Tuesday. The Lindens thought they had it fixed by about 12:30 noon. I wasn’t trying to login until late today, so I don’t know. But, they did not post an All Clear until about 2:30 PM PDT.

See: Grid Status Reports. This is a good report to read as it has advice about logging in after system wide problem.

Server Rolls

Because of the system problem the Tuesday roll outs to the main grid did not complete. Those will be restarted for the main channel tomorrow at 9:00 AM PDT/SLT. The Lindens say more information will be in the Grid Status Reports.

The Wednesday rollouts are being moved to Thursday.

Thursday Down Time

I haven’t seen anything about rescheduling the planned maintenance for Thursday. My assumption is it will still happen as planned… I suppose they can roll region servers and do maintenance at the same time. 

Bits

Hamlet made it to SVVR (Silicon Valley Virtual Reality – Conference and Expo) and has been Tweeting while there. Check out his tweets on Philip Rosedale’s speech. See: Live Blogging Philip.

Philip when asked if SL and HyFy will merge, he said they hope to “interoperate” in any way they can. If you follow political speak and advertising hype, that phrasing may sound familiar. The word interoperate is open to interpolation and ambiguity. I am pretty sure we lack enough understanding to put any real meaning to that statement. It is sort of what everyone would want to hear.

Several people have commented on Philip’s statement that we are near to having all 7+ billion humans within 100ms packet round-trip time. Have you watched your ping times in viewer statistics? 18% of the world is without electricity, according to the International Energy Agency.

Wile Google and other companies have plans to provide Internet coverage to remote parts of our world using balloons (reference), that still doesn’t get them electricity. We can read into his answer a more practical meaning. Fiber optic networks are being built in developed countries. Wireless networks are growing. But, we are years if not decades away from having the majority of people on sub-100ms connections.

This just goes to show we need to keep thing in perspective.

Sliderless Appearance Building

In SL we use the appearance sliders to shape our avatars. Hamlet in The Sims 4’s Intuitive Character Customization, links to a video of the new character customization in Sims-4. Pop over and check out Hamlet’s thinking.

Hamlet wonders if this may signal the end of slider use for appearance customization, or parametric customization. For non-technical users I think that is the direction to go. But, for a game design platform would that still be a good idea? Again I have to say I think that would be a good change. But, we will still need access to the parameters. Without out them, how do we get a shape into Blender/3D Max?

SL Retention

This subject has been debated and argued for years in the SL community. Every game I know that has started losing players and facing closing down from lack of interest has debated the subject. There studies and papers written by game designers, academics, game owners, psychologists, and users/players. So, it is not surprising PrimPerfect returns to the subject.

They have collect some heavy weight academics and a couple of ‘in-the-trenches’ SL engineers, Brooke and DaveR Linden. Plus Jo Yardley participates. I was busy building an office network for a client and missed the meeting. But, I plan to catch it when the video of the show is published: Prim Perfect Shows Archive.

Kokura Viewer

A test version of this viewer is out. The step forward in this release is the inclusion of Interest List improvements. The development team needs your help testing the viewer. See: Kokua Test-3.7.7 Interest list merge.

SVVR – Road to VR

The blog Road to Reality has lots of coverage of the conference & expo. See: Road to VR.

One of the discussion at the conference is about whether there will be one VR or many and in either case shall they be made democracies (mob rule) or Greek god models (dictatorships – supposedly benevolent) . If you’re not a history buff or student of human nature, you’re probably for the democracy style.  My thinking is if your free market minded then you’re for the many worlds and voting with your dollars.

Since these are software houses building the virtual worlds that have to make a living, I expect competitive dictatorships where we can vote with our dollars.

2 thoughts on “More Bits & News 2014-21

  1. LL is notoriously slow to update http://status.secondlifegrid.net/ (or perhaps I am incredibly impatient during a crisis). I find http://etitsup.com/slstats/ to be a more immediate glimpse into the overall health of the grid.

    • I think there is some measure of ‘can we fix it before too many notice’ in the status reporting.

      The Lindens are responders. So, they are always going to be late arrivals to the problem.

      That doesn’t grow my patience or make it easier… :/ Your link is interesting. Thanks.

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