I read a lot of the thread, its about 8 pages as I write this. But, the actual changes weren’t posted in the thread. So I went looking for them. The blog Glamour Sause posted New Rules at Flickr – What can you do?by Kess Crystal. She has a good take on what is happening.
The Email Notice… ?
Flickr has sent out an email. It doesn’t really notify you of the change. There is what I thought was a promo splash, Flickr Forever. But, no it is an article about a TOS change and more limits on Free Accounts.
The changes affect only those of us using a free account. The big changes are;
No Moderate or Restricted level images
Only 50 private images.
Only Safe accounts – if your account is rated Moderate or Restricted by Flickr you have a problem. Click for how to fix it.
Wow! We have a new Firestorm Viewer Release. (3/21/2022) This one has a bunch of new stuff. The Firestorm Blog explains what is new and the changelog explains what has been fixed. As usual, Inara explains in more detail on the Modem World blog than Jessica does on the Firestorm Blog. However, for the quick read go with Jessica’s.
My Graphics Settings
The viewer is a quick download. It is now 140MB, up from the previous 120MB. The installation is simple. Launch the downloaded file. No clean install is needed.
The Splash Screen is of course the first thing you’ll see. It was first seen in the previous version. A bunch of people didn’t like it. That is normal for SL residents. No matter what one does about half of SL peps won’t like it and will complain.
The screen hasn’t changed much. There are ‘operational’ improvements. It works better. It is still a lot of information in one place. But it is easy to ignore.
The FS Team has taken a different approach to destinations than the Lab did. When the Lab first added ‘What’s Hot Now’ to their destinations list several people pointed out that busy places we often full. Clicking to TP to a full region resulted in a failed TP and people wondered how new people would see/react to the error. I don’t know how much testing the Lab did or didn’t do but I do know the Lab decided to limit entries in their list to regions that were not full. Thus, no TP fails. Noobs were protected.
Inside the FS Viewer, the destination guide uses the Lab’s destinations. So, only the splash page on viewer startup shows the really BUSY regions, like Exhale with 91 people in region. Versus the Lab’s panel showing Freebie Galaxy as the most populous with 28 people. Whether this is a good thing or not… you decide.
In week #5 – Jan 31, my Windows 10 computer updated. Immediately my Firestorm Viewer started freezing. Very annoying.
The viewer would freeze for 2 to 15 seconds, the screen would go black for a second then come back with everything working for a few seconds or minutes. Then things would go sideways again and the sequence would repeat. Basically, not usable.
Chilling at home…
Any teleport to a new region would trigger the sequence. So sailing and flying were impossible. Walking was hard enough.
I started my diagnostic process. Both Black Dragon and SL Default viewers had the same problem. Grid Status looked good. Only a few people were complaining of similar problems.
My computer seemed to be running well through the freeze as was network communications.
I hang in the SL forums these days… well… more like look through them once a day and post now and then.
I notice some women were talking in one of the threads were about going for a girls’ night out. They couldn’t find a male strip club. Wait… what? I and a couple of my friends used to go club-hopping to watch the guys. We didn’t have a shortage of clubs to choose from… So whasup?
Male Dancer Club
It was suggested they search on CFNM… aka Clothed Female Nude Male. Really!?! That seemed pretty esoteric. But… there are 35 listings for such places in SL.
The Firestorm Viewer version 6.4.21 had been out for a bit now. People are reacting to it. The thread Newest Firestorm version – lag monster popped up 8/4. Which made me curious because that is NOT my impression. So, I went and ran my tests, which I rate at one half-a-posterior.
This version is covered in detail over on Inara’s blog here: Firestorm 6.4.21. I’m not going to repeat what she has already written. I just want to consider what people are experiencing based on what I can see and measure.
My experience is: this version is better.
My Front Porch – 2021-08
The big thing is Firestorm’s viewer now uses multiple threads for decompressing textures. Decompressing is a task that has bottle-necked performance forever. But since it has had little effect on Frames per Second numbers it doesn’t seem to have been a high priority to change. The major effect of texture decompression is in scene render time. I think scene render is much faster. But actually, measuring it well is quite complicated. I suspect most of us hit a region and consider how long it takes for the place to render. A few of us may now and then even time it. Which is practical and simple. Neither is precise and measurements are highly influenced by our location in the region, which way we are looking, our cache – when did we last visit, the region’s construction, and avatar occupancy.
One thing that can affect our perception is this install clears our viewer’s cache of downloaded content. We have to reload EVERYTHING. I think this should only affect your first-time post-install-visits to places you frequent.
A while ago the Firestorm Viewer was upgraded to use the simplified cache developed by the Lab. I think this is the first release of Firestorm that has this upgrade. Beta testers for Firestorm will have had the upgrade for some time.
From the changes the FS Team has made, I would expect this viewer to be faster at rendering a scene. I wouldn’t expect a higher FPS (Frames per Second) rate. I guessed that I might even see FPS dip while textures were decompressed as more CPU cycles would be getting used by the texture processes. That is what I experience… sometimes… There are some oddities happening when one teleports. So, detecting a slowing or a speed-up due to the new multiple threads is tricky.
There are 20 to 30+ Firestorm threads running at anyone time. My four cores are all carrying about the same load but the overall use is about 50%, which is similar to past versions.
Microsoft announced the coming release of Windows 11 June 24, 2021. So…. Will Second Life run on Win11? Yes. There are very few changes in Win11 that would effect how applications like Second Life work. So, we expect the change over to be a non-event for SL users.
Windows 11
So… then what changes?
There are lots of articles out written by the beta and early adopter users. A change is the opening menu. One of the changes in the menu is Live Tiles. If you use them, this change will SUCK. They are gone. But, in return, we get Windows Vista-like widgets… Oh Great!
We get a new Microsoft Apps Store… I never thought of the store as part of the Windows Operating System. But, that is in the update news. The main talking point is they are making it easier for you to find apps. I’ll take that to mean, we have changed our advertising strategy.
If you do photography in Second Life™ or consider it screen captures then you likely want better images. Possibly you may even want to create impressive images and sell them as NFTs.
Focus Magazine is putting on the FOCUS Photography Fair. They are promoting it as; Poses, Props, backdrops, lighting, and more.
Promo Poster
Having been there I can say they have done an impressive show. I’ve found a number of things I did not know were available in SL. Some of these items make it so If you are not an SL builder you can still manipulate the world to make the images you dream up.
I have found posing hands in Black Dragon especially tedious. There is a Bento Hand poser at the fair. It does a great job of allowing me to easily manipulate hands. Yay! But, I have to do that before I start BD’s Poser. Boo! Still it helps.
If you watch detective shows on TV, every so often they will do something with LiDAR. These are generally really expensive systems that scan a crime scene and eventually produce a 3D model. Expensive in this case is like US$10k and up. There are cheaper ones in the $100 and less range for personal or hobby use. But you may already own a LiDAR system and not know it.
Professional LiDAR
If you have a newer smart device that uses facial recognition then you may have a LiDAR system. The iPhone-12 has an actual LiDAR camera/laser on the front… back?… camera away from the screen… normally used for distance measuring. It is rather low resolution but also is stronger and reaches farther.
The screen side camera facing you is used for facial recognition. It is higher resolution but not as strong… meaning far-reaching.
