Changes

Second Life Wiki Lockdown 2014-52

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I have a bit of time to write today. RL is still busy with work and holiday related stuff. I can confirm that Adobe’s latest release of Dreamweaver is way buggy when one tries to use their new fluid ‘LIVE’ design features. It appears Adobe is moving away from Dreamweaver and toward their new Adobe Edge.

SL Wiki

I’m not sure how many of my readers use the SL Wiki. I suspect even fewer add to its content. Those of us that do contribute to the wiki content have been blocked for some time. The SL Wiki is no longer user editable. Few Lindens can edit it.

Months ago some socially dysfunctional people started vandalizing the wiki. The Lindens locked it down to stop the vandalism.

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Second Life and LoD

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LoD is Level of Detail. It is a term used in 3D modeling to improve performance by reducing the amount of data that has to be rendered. In Second Life™ it seems to be poorly understood and ignored by many. The result is a poorly performing Second Life. This video shows the major problems.

I did not intend to belittle anyone with the video. But, having a ton of poorly rendering mash in a region gave me the extreme example I needed.

Some of Mad Pea’s builds are absolutely gorgeous. But, with a little bit more work they would not have had the LoD failings I was seeing. It may also be that they intended to have the various victims’ business cards be hard to find and they used LoD to make it even harder. I doubt it, but may be… 

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Second Life Performance Boost

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Market Place

Yesterday about lunch time the Lindens posted a blog article titled Performance, Performance, Performance. The surprising part, at least to me, is the performance improvements made to the Market Place. I’ve been covering the coming change to Viewer Managed Market Place. But, I don’t recall hearing about Market Place (MP) performance improvements.

Whatever, the Lindens say they are seeing a 70% faster response time and pages load 30% faster.

Builder's Brewery Materials Class
Builder’s Brewery Materials Class

Group Chat

I’ve been sort of covering the improvements to group chat. News in this area is almost always after the fact. The Lindens have realized that whenever they say anything about changing something they get complaints about how the change is the cause of whatever problem users are having. So, they think they get better feedback on some things if they change and listen before saying anything.

This last week we have been running on new code in the chat servers. The metrics say things are MUCH better. I know I haven’t got a ‘cannot connect’ error when trying to comment in group chat this past week. But, I have also been busy and not in world much either. 

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Second Life Updates to DK2

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The Oculus Rift Project Viewer has been upgraded 3.7.18-295296. Along with the upgrade comes a post in the blog: Oculus Rift DK2 Project Viewer Now Available. They are still careful to point out that this is a somewhat incomplete viewer, but then Oculus Rift is incomplete. However, those with DK2 units can play with this viewer.

Second Life Market Place CHANGING

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Last Friday was the Third Party Developers User Group meeting. We often have a wealth of news coming from this UG meeting. This week we learn of a Market Place (MP) project that has been in progress via closed alpha/beta since January 2014. We don’t get much news about the Market Place and commerce.

Viewer Managed Market Place

Brooke Linden spoke at this meeting about how the market place will be changing. The Lab is going to move us from the current Direct Delivery system to Viewer Managed Market Place. I expect for customers little if anything will change. But, for merchants this will be a big change and involve migrating the current Market Place to a new backend system.

Server-Scripting UG 2014-41 - Halloween Nears
Server-Scripting UG 2014-41 – Halloween Nears

I did not hear anything about changes in how the Market Place will look to customers or how it will operate from the customers’ side of things.

The problems the Lab is seeing with Direct Delivery, a feature that starts in the SL Market Place and ends in the viewer in-world, is merchants are having problems managing their Market Place (MP) inventory. Also, the Market Place engineers have not been able to fully complete Direct Delivery. Magic Boxes are still used for selling items the merchant does not have COPY rights to. 

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