Changes

Second Life and LoD

by

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… 

Read more

Second Life: Viewer Managed MP

by

We have known for a short time that a revised Market Place tool is coming to Second Life™. Yesterday the Lab posted that they have a Beta Version running in ADITI, the preview grid. The announcement is here: Viewer-Managed Marketplace Available on Aditi. (VMM)

There is a JIRA Project for reporting bugs and requesting features. More information on using the new Market Place is available here:  VMM Beta Knowledge Base.

The Merchant Outbox is out. We will now have a new management tool that opens from within our Inventory panel.

If you’re like me you are wondering how this affects existing items we have in the market place. According to the KB there is a way to migrate listings in the Market Place to the new system. It appears we are basically finding the UUID, or some kind of ID, of an existing listing in the Market Place and matching it to a folder in our inventory.

For information on how all this works, see the KB article.

Second Life Performance Boost

by

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. 

Read more

Second Life Updates to DK2

by

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

by

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. 

Read more

Second Life’s New User Avatars

by

Designing Worlds has a show up in which they interview people running Japanese new user help regions. I watched the show on SLArtists, the Treat.tv site seemed to be down this morning, at least I could not access it. The video is here: Designing Worlds DW 245 – Japan’s New Residents. The Designing Worlds page that should have the video is here: Designing Worlds visits the Japanese regions to learn how they support new users – now on the web!

Taciturnly - April 2014
Taciturnly – April 2014

About 3:30 minutes in, they talk about the problem the new user avatars are causing. They feel this is a MAJOR obstacle to improving player retention.

The new mesh avatars for new users was thought by some to be a definite problem for new users. The thinking was they would create more problems than they solve and harm player retention more than help. The people doing support in beginner areas are confirming the problems are manifesting. The question they are hearing often is, the promos say we can customize our avatars, so why can’t I change my avatar?  

Read more