Second Life and Virtual Worlds
I’ve got to tell you about a great site I learned about. It is so handy. Love it.
In the process of building my new computer I hit a purchasing problem. As I often buy things from eBay I’ve become accustomed to knowing when I can get an item. Things are ‘Buy It Now’ or the remaining time in the auction shows. I can control my wait time. But, getting a GTX1060 was proving to be a problem.
Today is the day. NIVIDA releases the GTX1060 @ MSRP US$249. Every place I’ve looked they are sold out.
The new GTX1060 has the same performance as the GTX980 but, for less money, even at eBay prices. At least for now. It takes time for those on eBay to catch up with the market.
Massively Overpowered has an article up titled: THE DAILY GRIND: WHICH MMO HAS THE BEST EYECANDY? Readers are contributing screen captures. Surprisingly only a couple of images surpass what we have in Second Life™, at least in my opinion.
I decided to put some of my images from SL up in a comment. From following people on Flickr I know there are people with far nicer images.
Hamlet at New World Notes is pointing out David Rowe has a SL VR Viewer working. The page Hamlet linked to is out of date. The new news is in the comments where David says,
David Rowe Post author5 Jul 2016 at 11:22 am
Just tried LL’s Rift viewer and, well, it’s surprisingly un-good. It’s like the graphics are being fed from the wrong framebuffer object or the pipeline is being misconfigured when you switch into HMD view. Intentional or bugs? I suppose time will tell. The graphics should be able to be so much better (even if understandably the FPS isn’t so good)!
Links:
Note Jo Yardley’s comment about being able to use Vorpx with a regular viewer (i,e., like Firestorm, Alchemy, or LL’s regular viewer) to view Second Life in your Rift. I haven’t tried it myself but am told it can be used.
The site Road to VR has an article about Nvidia and the changes they are making to improve VR performance and that tech moving into game engines. See: Unreal Engine and Unity to get NVIDIA’s New VR Rendering Tech.
Until recently video cards were given geometry (the mesh world), lights, and a camera position and they rendered an image. As the camera moved the geometry was reloaded shaded and rendered again with mesh and lights in relation to the camera. (Which is technically saying it backward. Consider the camera fixed and to change the view we move the world. Think of your computer screen as the camera. It sits on your desk never moving. Everything displayed on it moves. Thus the reason for reloading geometry.)
Those of us subscribing to the Adobe CC have received a set of updates. One of which is the latest version of Photoshop.
They have moved things around. So, some of the features I regularly use are not where I expect them to be. Annoying. But, once I get used to the changes, it will be better. Less clicks. And there is a new feature for masking and selection.
