Viewer

According to Oz Linden we will see the Benchmark Viewer get promoted to the main default version this week, may be tomorrow, Wednesday. This is the viewer that does away with the GPU Table.

This viewer is still being tuned to give reliable graphics settings. The one currently in the Alternate viewer page just got some updates. I’m not sure when the ‘just’ is. I suspect last Friday.

On another note about viewers… the Max Bandwidth setting is becoming less important as more of the Second Life™ data moves via pipeline in HTTP. The Max Bandwidth is a setting that controls UDP protocol traffic ONLY. With more and more traffic moving to HTTP the UDP congestion is less and less. See JIRA VWR-29029 for the old problem of setting Max Bandwidth too high. 

The region servers and SL backend limit outbound data to a max of 3k. The CDN servers deliver at the fastest possible rates and exceed what the SL servers can deliver. On several levels CDN offers the possibility of speed ups in SL performance. Rumor is CDN will cut the network load at the Lab by 90%. Oz will only say the number is not that big, but is significant.

Oz says so far they are not sure if the Lab will see a cost reduction from using CDN or an additional cost. The Lab made the change for performance reasons. There will be network load reduction, less bandwidth consumed, but whether it will pay for the cost of CDN is unknown, for now.

Fabulously Free’s Hunts

It is Halloween in North America and that means we have lots of hunts in SL. Fabulously Free has a list of what they consider the top ten hunts for today, 10/28. See: Today’s Top Ten Hunts.

Fab Free says these are the most ‘viewed’ hunts. I am not sure how they measure viewed…

Linden Lab Jobs

I saw a new open for Land Product Coordinator @ Linden Lab. What is that? See it at the link to StartUpHire.com.

Studio 777 Official Skill Gaming Operator

There is aan article, well, more of a notice, up about Studio 777 being approved for skill gaming in Second Life. See: Linden Lab Approves Studio 777. There is a lot of hype and financial disclosure information and who is working with who stuff.

Sims 4 a Second Life?

Clare Cullen has written a piece about the time Sims 4 takes up. Gee, it is like a second life… See: Sims 4 – A ‘Second Life’ that needs as much time as the first. Do the avatars in Sims 4 REALLY look that bad? I’m looking at the pregnant avatar she used as the opening image. Ugh. Fortunately it gets better.

Quoting from the Entertainment Newsletter: “When you finally do get to the stage of creating a mini-Sim, the progress of pregnancy is depicted very literally – the Sim must go through all three trimesters. This is both interesting and slightly boring at the same time. The fact that they now get stretch marks hits a little too close to home for me personally – wasn’t the appeal of the game that it presented a glossy version of life that you could manipulate and control in a way you couldn’t IRL?”

…

“In summary, aside from some very minor clumsiness in the new user interface, the Sims 4 is the best looking, most detailed version of the Sims yet  – If you have the time to play it.”

Photography in Second Life

There are some people that do some amazing things with images captured in Second Life™. Kes Myas has an image up that I find striking in its realistic nature. Titled Dancing Shoes. (NSFW – nude). The images on Flickr show Kes has talent.

I have several of Kes’ images in my favorites.

Blender Podcast

This site has an audio of interviews with the movers and shakers in the Blender world. I like how the cast is presented. It comes with time marks denoted with the name of the person being interviewed. The links are NOT into the audio. They are links into the person Twitter stream. Check it out here: Episode 34 / Impressions from the Blender Conference. (1h:02m:00s)

You’ll get an idea of what the different people are working on improving in Blender. There is a lot of rambling.

Blender Awards

Blender present the Suzanne Awards. See the full article at: The winners of the Suzanne Awards 2014 are…

Land Impact Changes

Officially there are no known changes to Land Impact (LI)accounting in the past weeks or months. But, people are reporting changes to LI values in their builds. These are existing builds that supposedly have not changed but now report higher LI costs.

If you can document a change, file a JIRA with the details.

We know that the viewer can lag reporting real LI values for a time after login. Plus the Edit panel can be slow to update. This new problem is suspected of not being a lag issue but an actual change. However, the Lindens say they haven’t changed it.