Second Life News Week # 28

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General News

A thread in the SL Forum is about what the Lab should do to get more people into Second Life™. (Thread: Its amazing how strong SL seems to be!?) I read through it. Seems everyone has their opinion. I see no real suggestions based on anything other than opinion. So, I doubt the Lindens will find anything worthy of their time. But…

We Are....

We Are….

Are you aware of what the Lindens have done and are doing to attract new users? Or maybe how much they are spending on advertising? Or even how targeted Internet advertising works?

Are you aware the Lab has done and continues to do lots of A-B testing?

If you can’t answer yes to most of these questions and whip off some of the university studies carried out in SL then why would you think you are qualified to advise the Lab on what they should do?

In the article The Daily Grind: What tends to attract you to an MMO? Massively Overpowered provides a way to get information that people actually may know something about that could be useful. The title explains it all.

Unoptimized Content is a Huge Problem, But How Can LL Fix it Now? Penny Patton has an article on how the Lab might choose to solve the problem of non-optimized content. It is a long-term process. It could work.

I think The Lab has the idea of improving content optimization as a prime directive. In the user group meetings, the subject comes up now and then. My take is that while the Lindens want to improve optimization and add pressure for creatives to optimize, they are not going to do so at the expense of creative freedom.

Teleport Hammers – Yeah, these are still a thing. In a couple of forum conversations and a New World Notes article, Is It Too Late To Curb SLers’ Use Of Badly Optimized Mesh Bodies? See the comments.

Two years ago I was writing about TP Hammers, Second Life Server News 2017 w/23 (June 2017). This is when teleport request throttles were being put in place. The Lindens also worked on the performance of the server in rejecting incoming requests. Both changes reduced the load on the target region.

What some have apparently not realized is TP Hammers while not as bad as they once were, are still a problem. With some hammers and hammers set incorrectly, it takes longer to get in than it would if they were not using a hammer. This has apparently eluded some.

A new FOCUS Magazine is out. Interviews and classes. Classes 7/17 and 7/26. See Facebook FOCUS Magazine. One of the articles has a small list of great places for photography. Plus there is a July Photo Contest.

Servers

Its late Tuesday and there is no Sever Deploy post. From the Sever-Scripting UG comes word there are no server updates this week. Mostly because of the holiday weekend. We can expect an update to roll to one or more RC channels next week.

Quoting Simon Linden,

“The grid is running the same version all over, and we decided not to release new code tomorrow because it’s not quite ready.   We should have a minor update out next week, Wednesday, on at least one of the RC channels.”

So, all main grid regions are running the simulator version, #19.06.14.528215. Listed as Internal changes. My home region in the main channel did NOT get a restart.

Being unseated from vehicles is an ongoing problem. Changes have changed how crossings are experienced. We are down to a couple of typical problems. One is where we become unseated and end up sitting on the ground as the vehicle continues on. We may or may not be able to recover without a relog.

Another is we get tossed into limbo and the vehicle disappears.

In either case, we may or may not be disconnected in those cases.

Simon is thinking they may delay the destination region’s interaction with the avatar until the transfer of vehicle and avatar are complete. Adding a second or two to the crossing shouldn’t be a problem as long as the crossing is successful.

I see a problem with extending the time it takes to cross. I have been using Firestorm and Catznip 12.2. Firestorm has a “STOP” mode for region crossings. Most other viewers are doing an extrapolation of vehicle and avatar position projecting it forward during the crossing to create a seemingly smooth transition. When the viewer fails to make an accurate extrapolation, we see what we call rubber-banding.

I find those seconds while the vehicle position is being extrapolated tend to lead me to over controlling the vehicle.

Firestorm’s “STOP” mode simply stops the vehicle and avatar at the region boundary. The world freezes for a couple of seconds. It sounds worse than it is.

I suppose those of us using STOP-mode in Firestorm will have considerably less issue with extending the crossing time than those dealing with the vehicle being in limbo another couple of seconds.

Scripts Run % has been an issue for a while. The result is slowly responding scripts. Meaning vehicles fail to respond in a timely manner. In the Topless Cruise today I ran my Bandit aground three times because I was in regions with only 8 to 25% of scripts running and the boat would not respond to key presses.

In response to Profaitchikenz Haiku’s question, “How are the studies of low script run time progressing?” Rider Linden said, “We’re making progress on that.  I think we’ll have something out soon…”

Viewers

The main Second Life viewer is version 6.2.3.527758.

Other Viewers

Catznip R12.2 – Released July 6, 2019 Week #27.

There is an ongoing joke that Second Life is an inventory game which pits content creators against users. Creators come up with ever more novel creations that defy categorization while users compete to categorize everything and organize inventory better than other players.

If you go with that cute humor then Catznip is the inventory-game-pro’s choice of viewer. I consider Catznip to be the leader in handy inventory tools.

Inara Pey has published a nice review of this Catznip release. See CATZNIP R12.2: A Little Extra Quality of Life. I’ll mention a couple of things I didn’t see in Inara’s article.

The viewer comes in Windows 32 and 64-bit flavors. There are tabs on the page for Apple and Linux versions, but they are grayed out. If you run older HD Graphics, you will likely need the 32-bit version. There is an Intel graphics driver issue that chokes the 64-bit viewer.

The download file size is about 98MB. I got about half of it then the download stalled and I had to retry. Chrome browser has a ‘pause’. Often you can pause and resume to restart a download. You can also reload the page (F5) and then click Resume to restart the download from where it stopped.

This version installs over the previous version. No need to uninstall or do a clean install. Just install.

Using the viewer, I ran into a couple of problems. I fly and the lack of a choice to use Predict or Stop for how the viewer handles crossing was annoying. Catznip seems to use only the Linden Predict, which can cause rubber banding at crossings. But, maybe I just can’t find the setting.

I also think this version is slow loading and rendering textures. Prior versions have been worse and better in this regard with recent versions being better.

Firestorm has a load of new images uploaded into their wiki along with some new pages. It appears these all have to do with the next release of Firestorm. You can take a sneak peek. Just remember, things may change between now and the release. And that these are not straight forward links. This is all work in progress so, you may have problems viewing the linked page and image.

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There is a new page, a work in progress, that popped up 7/7. See Firestorm Release Notes 6.2.4.xxx FIXME – This is GOING TO BE the release notes once the viewer is released.

So, we are getting closer to a new release of a Firestorm Viewer.

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