General Computer Stuff

Will Win 10 Creators Update Kill Second Life?

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There is some consternation about a Windows 10 update: Creators Update. It is a free Win 10 update. My headline is hype. Nobody seems to know how it will work with Second LifeTM. However, the new features are a combination of interesting and OMG more advertising built into Windows.

Whatever, the new features are:

  • 3D in Windows 10
  • Built-in game broadcasting
  • New tab management in the sucky MS Edge and more…
    • Microsoft Edge is faster
    • Tab preview bar
    • Set tabs aside
    • Jump List
    • More extensions
  • Enhanced security features – MS Privacy Dashboard
  • Paint 3D
  • Remix3D.com access
  • Game streaming with Beam
  • Gaming settings: Game bar, GameDVR, broadcasting, and Game Mode
  • Improved Windows Store – They added e-books, whoop whoop
  • Dolby Atmos – Adds Dolby audio via an app
  • Cortana can do more… like control music by mood.
    • Language compatibility for iHeartRadio and TuneIn
    • Music recognition support for the Chinese
    • Full screen Cortana when computer idle
    • Carry sessions across devices
  • Mixed Reality in Photo, Maps, Music, Movies, & TV
  • Mini View Feature
  • …and more.

So, how is it going to work with SL? No one in the forums is writing about their experience. May be everyone is waiting for someone else to go first. In general we are currently clueless.

I plan to install it on my laptop first. It runs SL at medium settings and produces 10 to 20 FPS. I want to see if adding Win 10 Creators Update with a “Gaming Mode” improves its performance. For now I will avoid the update on my main machine.

I’ll get back to you.

Second Life and NVIDA Update Problem – Fix

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It seems people updating to the current NVIDIA driver are having problems logging in. They crash on viewer launch.

As of April 6, there is an NVIDIA driver version 381.65. This is the one people have a problem with. The previous version 378.92, the one I am running, does not have the problem. So, some people are rolling back to 378.92.

Whirly Fizzle has posted in the SL Forum that the problem has been tracked to NVIDIA’s Shadowplay/Share feature. Turn it off and things work.

We are early in this problem fix cycle. So, we may learn more soon.

Internet Outage

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The outage is large enough to be making national news. Amazon cloud servers went down. That affects many web sites and services like Second Life. The SL asset services depend on Amazon’s cloud, the S3 services – AFAIK.

SL login is supposedly not affected. The login servers are  in one of the Lab’s locations or on co-location hosts other than Amazon. But, once logged in you may not rez, the region may not rez completely, and your inventory may not populate.

Do NOT try to change or fix your appearance. You will likely confuse your viewer and make things worse. Do as little inventory-asset related tasks as possible.

Second Life: What Viewer Statistics?

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If you have ever pressed Ctrl-Shift-1 to reveal the Viewer Statistics panel and wondered what all the stuff means, there is a good explanation of the items in the panel over at the Firestorm Viewer Wiki. See: Firestorm Viewer Statistics. Almost the same information is available in the SL Wiki: Viewer help: Statistics.

Network Transfer Rate Comparison

I think on both sites they have simplified the text for the less techy users. I think that is a bad idea, as the people looking for explanations of how the items in the panel work are likely tech savvy.

The first four items listed on the pages are the source of a lot of confusion; FPS, Bandwidth, Lost Packets, and Ping. So, I’ll provide a bit more information.

Read more

NVIDIA Driver 378.66 Released

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SL users have suffered from a problem with the NVIDIA driver, a blue colored world. I haven’t seen the problem, except in pictures. Whether you see the problem or not depends on your graphics settings. Having ALM enabled seems to eliminate the problem. So, while I can’t say this new driver version fixes the problem, it is worth a try.

Version 378.66 released 2/13. Download.