Nalates Urriah

#SecondLife Viewer Snowstorm

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Today my viewer updated to the Snowstorm RC. I have it set to use RC Viewers. So, I’m using Second Life 3.7.11 (291465) Jun 25. The release notes are here.

Summerfest '14
Summerfest ’14

I went over to Summer Fest 2014 to try it out. First, the cute little pacific island theme used at Summer Fest makes it a really fun build to explore. The foliage is awesome. The buildings have a weak LOD, but if you have your viewer’s LOD setting turned up, they are OK. I don’t I prefer performance in this case.

The viewer runs faster. I was getting 20 to 40 FPS at the Fest. But, rendering is still a problem. Oz Linden said at the Firestorm Q&A that they are working on changing the viewer to allow it to use more of the video RAM you have on your graphics card. I doubt any of that work is in this viewer. But, possibly. So, that may be why we are seeing this problem.

The main viewer and this Snowstorm RC both have the problem of texture thrashing. The textures render sharp then blur and reload, sharpen and repeat. It makes taking pictures a pain.

I think the problem is worse in this viewer than in the main viewer. Again, I don’t see the problem in the Firestorm viewer.

I don’t expect to see texture thrashing in a GTX560Ti with 1GB of VRAM.

Second Life 2 Won’t Change Me

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I am curious how many people will be affected ad how by the announcement of a coming new world by Linden Lab™. Hamlet at New World Notes ran a poll last week to find out. He published the results here: In Survey of SL Users, Plurality Believe Linden’s New World Won’t Change Their Second Life Usage.

Click over to see the results.

@ Server-Scripting UG 2014-27
@ Server-Scripting UG 2014-27

It is interesting to see that the group of those that feel it isn’t going to change their use of Second Life™ is about twice to 4 times larger than the other groups in the poll.

Since about a quarter of users are not sure how the announcement will change their use of Second Life, no single group is a majority. But, the larger number of people feel there will be no change.

The Change in MMO Appeal

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Over at New World Notes Hamlet has an article up titled: The MMO is Dead; Long Live the MMO. He points us to an article over at Paste Magazine (site about entertainment). It has an article titled: The Moment of the MMO has Passed.

Playing Around
Playing Around

The author is writing about how the age of MMO’s (Massive Multiplayer Online) has passed. He feels that much of their popularity was from socialization. If you have read the study Longevity by n-Yuen Teng and Lada A. Adamic, that I often refer to, you’ll see how the two support each other. It seems social interaction is more the key to player retention than any other single factor in a game. So, I see the study as supporting the author’s thinking.

The author, Ian Williams, feels that while MMO’s once filled this niche for social interaction in our lives they now have competition and thus are not going to be as popular as they once were. He may have a point.

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Second Life News 2014-27

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Servers

There are no server roll outs this week, main or RC. Things will continue as last week. The RC’s apparently didn’t do all that great and improvements are being devised. We won’t see those hit until next week.

Server-Scripting-Content UG 2014-27
Server-Scripting-Content UG 2014-27

For holidays there is a no change window that comes into play. No one has said that is happening, but I suspect.

Viewers

Not much change since last week. The main viewer is the SL Sharing version 3.7.10-291134, no change since last week and likely no change until after the Holiday. 

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Internet News 2014-27

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Every so often I pass along news about the Internet. Mostly US centric. This summer lots of things are stacking up that are mostly never mentioned in the mainstream media.

Stop Drama w/Dramamine

[youtube 2hEUbezqd88]

Facebook Guinea Pigs

This week news broke that Facebook experimented on 700,000 of their users without their knowledge. The idea was to see of ‘mood’  is contagious in the digital world. To do that they added either more positive news or negative news to the test subjects’ feed. So, you aren’t just seeing an unedited feed at FB. It can be manipulated. 

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