Second Life and Virtual Worlds
I’ve been interested in the LEAP Motion controller since I first heard about it and the Oculus Rift. So, seeing Engadget’s review appear online I had to check it out.
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Obviously they found some problems. You can read more about their experience at their web site: Leap Motion controller review.
Indigo Mertel posted on Facebook about these SpaceGlasses. cNet has an interview with the developer: Meta’s Meron Gribetz and the rise of the natural machine. But the fun part is the video.
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In an earlier article I pointed out the rush all the companies are in to capture a part of the mobile market. Oculus is in the race for mobile market share too.
With the coming of Server Side Appearance (SSA – baking) those using older viewers are going to have to update or suffer never seeing an avatar render again. For many the challenge will be their computer not being able to run recent viewers. The hardware is just too old. But, there are inexpensive ways to upgrade to a computer so it will handle the newest viewers.
Minimum is this case is a very nebulous term. If you read Gwyneth Llewelyn’s blog you’ll know she gets by with some really minimal hardware. I think that would drive me nuts. But, I also use the computer for graphics intense work. So, in most ways it is a matter of personal choice and priorities.
You probably know that most of the data in our computers is saved to magnetic media hard drives that have spinning disks inside. The disk has delays as the read heads must wait for the disk to rotate the wanted data under the read/write heads. It can take the heads 4 to 12ms to find the data. Then the data can only be read as fast as the next bit of data comes to the read/write head.
Newer solid state drives (SSD) have no moving parts. So, there is no delay waiting for disks and/or read/write heads to rotate into position. So, rather than waiting several milliseconds the data is available in less than a millisecond. If you put your Second Life cache on an SSD, you will have a faster more responsive cache… places you have previously visited will render faster.
While conventional hard drives are cheap and can store terabytes of data on a single drive, the SSD’s are expensive. The cost per gigabyte of storage is about 100 times more than for conventional hard drives.
I’ve been using NVIDIA driver version 285.62 for quite awhile. I needed to update a clients machine and noticed a new update was out for my machine, 295.73. So, I got it and updated my computer.
The install has dramatically changed. Along with the drivers and Control Panel comes 3 add-ons for Photoshop; DXT Compression, Normal Maps, and Scripts.
This is a Photoshop plug-in that allows Photoshop to open and save Direct Draw Surface (.dds) files. Simply said these are files used with DirectX to provide efficient textures, They are not much use for Second Life users, which uses OpenGL.
Several people in the forums are asking how to get better Frames per Second rates and why their computer is so slow running SL. Several are asking about upgrading their computer for Christmas or getting a new one. So, I decided to write a HOW TO specific to Second Life so I could avoid repetitive forum posts…
Even if you never want to open the computer’s case, this information will help you know what to have your computer tech upgrade for you.
First consider what we are working with, other games have better graphics and performance than Second Life. When comparing SL with other games, one is wise to remember that most things in the SL world are made by novice content creators. Render efficiency is not foremost in their design goals and that shows in SL frame rates. Take a look at: Typical Second Life Frame Rate Performance by Graphics Card/GPU. The page was last updated in August 2011. It shows an nVidia 470 getting about 45 FPS.