Second Life News Bits 2014-43

This past weekend was a party weekend for me. I’m still moving a bit slow today.

Viewer

Oz Linden says that when the Benchmark RC Viewer, the one that stops using a GPU Table to select viewer settings, everyone will get a viewer-settings reset to what the viewer now thinks your default settings should be.

Open Source 2014-43

Open Source 2014-43

I don’t know if that means ALL settings or just graphics settings. I suggest you backup your settings now.

The HTTP RC Viewer when used in Blue Steel regions is simply awesome. Download: HTTP Viewer version 3.7.18.295372. A list of Blue Steels regions is here: List of Blue Steel regions in Second Life.

I’ve gotten to use the HTTP RC Viewer for a couple of hours exploring Blue Steel regions. It is a nice change. I quickly got used to the fast render. When I left the Blue Steel regions it was like going from walking downhill to trying to walk in a swimming pool. Ooouf!

See Bittersweet Frostbite’s post about the performance: New Second Life “Berlin” HTTP Viewer: Fast, faster, much faster

BrowserFix Viewer version 3.7.18.295539 – According to the release notes: This build removes SSLv3 usage from the internal browser to avoid potential security problems caused by the POODLE exploit, and restoring the ability to connect to Facebook and other sites that have disabled SSLv3. It is otherwise identical to 3.7.17.294959.

From the SL Grid Status page: [Posted 7:00 PM PDT, 18 October 2014] We are currently performing unscheduled maintenance to our Facebook share feature in the Second Life viewer. During this time, residents may receive an SSL handshake error message, and the connection with Facebook will fail. Please check back here for updates.

Project Viewers

No changes since my last update.

  • Benchmark Viewer version 3.7.17.294710 – There are user cases in the forum of people having good success with this viewer and new laptops and graphics cards.
  • Experience Tools Viewer version 3.7.16.293901
  • Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296

Mac Yosemite Upgrade

There is an SL Forum thread about this upgrade. It seems most that have used it for any time are not happy using it with Second Life. That could change as more people post. See: Mac OS X Yosemite.

A problem and work-around for a Yosemite problem was found by Six Igaly:

Problem: SL works yes, but, I must not dare to switch to Safari for a minute, not even a second! Because when I switch back to SL I can’t move anymore. Ah well, I can run yes..and in a straight line and that is it. Also when I start typing in chat or IM (to explain my friend what is going on) the fun really starts. As soon as I press the ‘u’ an upload window pops up, and the ‘a’ erases all text and somehow acts as a backspace. A relog is all that helps so far.

Work-around: In the meanwhile I found a way to solve it without having to relog. You see, I just realized, the fact the upload (finder) window shows up whenever I press ‘u’, it must have to do with a shortcut that got borked somehow. And the shortcut for uploading an image is Cmd-U. So somehow when switching to Safari and back effects the Cmd key. So I took the test..went to Safari, switched back, I could not move..and typing ‘just’ in local chat opened my upload window. I cancelled, then pressed the Cmd key once and typed ‘just’ again. This time the word ‘just’ appeared in my local chat, and above all, I could move again. And as I write this I tested this again. Bingo. I found a workaround

Working at Linden Lab

A new employee review of Linden Lab popped up on GlassDoor.com. See: Love the people, growth potential, and collaboration at Linden! It is mostly positive.

Viewer Ping

Lots of us have wondered about the PING shown in the Viewer Statistics, Ctrl-Shift-1. The question came up again in the SL Forum (Reference) . Oz Linden posted this response:

Looking at the code (I had not had occasion to look at this before), the Ping Sim measure appears to be based on a separate Ping message (our own message type transmitted over UDP, not ICMP). Those messages are mixed in periodically with the other UDP messages that are more or less constantly flowing between the viewer and the simulator. Because it’s the application that is turning that message around rather than a low level part of the network stack, the fact that it is consistently higher than ICMP ping to the same host isn’t surprising.

It’s hard to guess what that 7 second display meant… it’s possible that the simulator was temporarily not responding for a few seconds but eventually caught up, but without much more data that’s just speculation.

When we first set up the Snack channel, we deliberately used regions that were getting a lot of avatar activity so that we would get a better sample of the resulting texture and mesh fetching activity and how it changed the load on the simulators. Due to some unforeseen aspects of how we did it, we ended up making some simulator hosts handle quite a bit more activity than is typical; in a very few cases, that resulted in noticeable problems for users (we moved some regions out of the test as a result). You may have seen one of those episodes.

The tests of the same CDN change on the Blue Steel RC at normal loads have not shown any problems like those, so we are confident that they were just a result of the unusual load pattern.

As others have commented here, both the Ping Sim and the packet loss numbers are based only on the UDP; they don’t reflect what may be happening on the HTTP/TCP connections, since any packet loss on those is detected and corrected automatically by the network stack.

One of the reasons that it can be bad to set your Bandwidth setting very high is that it allows the amount of UDP to increase too much; since UDP does not have any other form of congestion control, too much of it can cause loss of TCP packets, resulting in much reduced performance on those connections. (reference)

So, if you use the system PING built into your computer, you are going to get different values than you see in the viewer’s stats. I’ve asked about the viewer’s ping on and off over the years. There is a server side component in the viewer’s value. In the days when it was common to find a server lagging it was also common to see a high ping time on that server. However, a Windows ping to the same server was usually far less.

Consider the viewer’s stat ping to be an aggregate of viewer, network, and server performance and a non-standard ping in the world of computer networking.

The Firestorm Team recommends a max bandwidth setting in the viewer of 1,500 or 80% of your measured download speed, whichever is smaller.

Second Life & Education

AJ Kelton has posted a short note on the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable (VWER) about a planned meeting where Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO, will be talking about the benefits Linden Lab is offering in Second Life. See: Amazing Opportunity Re: VWER and Linden Lab.

This notice (mine) of what they are doing is a bit late, but still interesting.

Second Life’s Don’t Panic

This is a new interactive games in Second Life with multiple levels, puzzles, scares, and prizes. Enter the Don’t Panic game here. Fabulously Free has an article on Don’t Panic here.

SLUniverse Peeps on SL2

Veron Helstein asked the question, “Did the announcement of SL 2.0 affect your engagement in current SL?” For Viron it has killed interest in SL1. Most disagree with him and have trouble understanding his feeling. I’m not sure if he is a troll or one of SL detractors that often try to draw out animosity toward Linden Lab and SL… or if Veron is for real.

The responses are interesting. Some speculations are rather strange by my thinking.

See: Did the announcement of SL 2.0 affect your engagement in current SL?

Help People With Disabilities

Hamlet has an article up about Jay Jay Jegathesan’s, University of Western Australia, speech on his thesis regarding using virtual worlds to help those with disabilities. See: Watch This Academic’s Moving Speech on How Virtual Worlds Can Help People With Disabilities.

Virtual Worlds and Ministers

I think history supports the idea that in general the clergy has lagged behind when it comes to technology. I suspect Galileo would agree with me. Carol Howard Merritt has written an article about that in respect to Sybrina Atwaters recent dissertation at Georgia Tech on  faith communities in Second Life. See: What’s really real?

Tiniest Avatar

Hamlet has an article and video of the tiniest avatar. It is TINY. See: This Tiny SL Avatar.

Burn2

Burn 2 is open until October 26th. Daniel Voyager has a list up of places to visit in the Burn2 build. See: BURN2 main landmarks to visit 2014.

What will Linden Lab do with Content and SL2

There is a thread started by Charli Infinity. Charli’s thinking is the Lab will steal everyone’s stuff, creators’ stuff, and populate the new world with it. I’ll be blunt, that is dumb.

Gaia Clary posted an interesting come back:

‎2014-10-20 08:11 AM

Lets take your idea as granted for a moment. then lets ask these follow up questions…:

  1. Who will be doing upgrades and maintenance for the items that will be sold by LL?
  2. Why would LL actually put any effort into a new virtual world at all? They could just sell the items here and now…
  3. Why would Creators step into the new world when LL is already taking over the entire market?
  4. Why would Creators even stay in current SL if their work will be grabbed by LL and resold in the new world?
  5. Why would users step out of SL and enter the new world when it is made from stuff that already exists in current SL?
  6. Actually LL has stated that the compatibility of the new world to the current world is limitted. So who will adjust all the millions of LSL scripts to whatever will be provided in the new world?
  7. Can you give any example where Linden Lab has taken user content and resold that content within the past 12 years?

Charli reveals he (?) has missed the point behind many of those questions with his (?) following responses. Check it out.

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