Second Life News Week #26

Getting the news out took a bit as I decided to include my own Meet the Lindens video. Pantera Północy posts his videos more quickly than I do. I get bored with his single camera angle. I also process the video to improve the audio… since my camera is moving around have to capture audio at my avatar’s location, not the more easily controlled camera location which has the audio level is all over the place if I move around. That single spot audio is not the best, so I think it still needs some help. But it is serviceable.

Other News

I’ll start off with this alarming bit of news showing where RL government is going with climate change, Climate Apocalypse? Ireland To Ban Private Cars, Import 1M Third-World Migrants. Whatever you think about Climate Change, make sure you aren’t just drinking someone’s Kool-Aid.

SL16B Crowd – The Meet the Lindens Tuesday event was attended by close to 200 people, 11 were Lindens, spread over four regions. Max per region was about 55. I didn’t crash and things worked well. People were a bit slow rendering, textures lagged, but no regions crashed. My FPS was in the 7 to 11 FPS (i5, 32GB, GTX-1060 High-Ultra Shadows + Projectors). – April’s mic was cutting out. – The video is a bit jerky. At 7FPS that happens.

Video Abstract

The video starts with Oz and April telling us about their history with Second Life™. Both were residents before they were hired by the Lab. I found this part of the video INTERESTING… Saffia is a good interviewer.

When we can get Oz or other techy Lindens talking, they always have interesting stuff to say and we learn things about the SL system.

In this Meet the Lindens meeting, April Linden confessed that 2 to 6 months ago they moved the SL inventory to the cloud. Not every detail has moved, but basic inventory (database) now runs in the cloud on much faster computers. And no one noticed, which is what the Lindens want.

Will we get larger regions when SL moves to the cloud? Oz says they have experimented with that. Some experiments were awesome and some terrifying. So, region size is not the primary concern. Getting SL running in places closer to users for better performance. Once that is done then they will start to look at doing some of these other things.

April and the operations crew, the people keeping the serves running, often are noticing and fixing problems before they impact any significant number of users. Some can be fixed before they impact the grid, the simulators.

Oz talks about BoM being delayed a bit by adding the ability to have different left-and-right arm textures.

He also explains what is happening when one tries to rez something on their property and gets the message, “Owner does not allow rez’ing here.” What happens is a line is drawn from the ‘camera’ to where the mouse is clicked. The line is projected until it interests with something. Often the line passes through a mesh object and interests someplace unexpected.

Cuties!

Cuties!

Last names are easy enough to add back and they are progressing. But, Oz complicated things. He felt that just enabling Last Names would be unfair to all those that now have Resident as a Last Name. So, he thought we should be able to change names. But SL was designed with the idea in mind that names NEVER CHANGE. Every part of SL is built on that premise. So, every part of SL has to change. This is a way bigger problem than any Linden anticipated. But Oz says they are making progress and they will eventually come back.

Oz also explains the current plan is to have residents pick a last-name from a list. They do not plan to re-use any pre-Resident names. So, old residents will have ‘distinguished’ names. 🙂 First and Last names will be able to be changed.

New members will be given the default last name, Resident, at sign up. Picking the last name at sign up was a significant deterrent to signing up. So, while technically easy to allow a choice at sign up, for now, that will not happen to avoid losing possible new users.

Changing names is an impact on the system. So, they will charge for changes to keep the number of changes small.

How will you know if a friend changes their name? When a person changes their name, the new name will automatically appear in place of the old name in the viewer. So, your friend with the new name will still show as a friend, but with a different name. How will you know who it is? Oz says that is something they haven’t thought about yet.

Oz also explains that a name change is not going to be everywhere instantly. Part of the complexity of changing names is the viewer caching names for various uses. So, the name will change quickly in some places and slowly in others. I suspect some places will not update until after a relog. The idea is likely to make that time-frame for change as small as possible.

What is it going to cost to change names? Oz is happy to say that is not part of his job.

Will we get more than 10 picks in the viewer? Oz thinks that is likely to be a Premium benefit. As best I can tell that is not something currently in the works.

More pages… links below.

2 thoughts on “Second Life News Week #26

  1. Why are you posting a link to a quack news site? It’s not hard to verify a news source these days.
    https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/climate-change-dispatch/

    • I thought it was easy to check website credibility. But you may have proven that not to be the case.

      First, your link sends me to a check for Climate Change Dispatch (CCD) on the website Media Bais/Fact Check. But apparently, you didn’t check the Media Bais site. Look here: https://www.justfactsdaily.com/media-bias-fact-check-incompetent-or-dishonest/

      Second, To verify whether I, CCD, and Just Facts are right, you might have done better to first check whether or not the writing of CCD was accurate. Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=Ireland+To+Ban+Private+Cars&rlz=1C1ASVA_enUS743US743&oq=Ireland+To+Ban+Private+Cars&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60.1375j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

      Or you could have checked various news sources to see if Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar did actually make such a speech. He did.

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