Second Life’s Viewer Managed Marketplace

December 12, Friday, there will be a meeting for discussion of the new Marketplace features. It seems few merchants know much about the coming change. The announcement is here: In-World Feedback Session.

I guess this tells us how few residents actually keep up with SL news, either via forums or blogs. Of course that reflects a similar RL fact that only about 20+ million of 300+ million people in the U.S. watch TV news (national news).

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Second Life News 2014-47 TPD

This past Friday was the Third Party Developers meeting. Chakat NorthSpring has a video of the meeting: Second Life: Third Party Viewer meeting (21 November 2014). These meetings are consistently getting shorter. This one is down 30± minutes or so.

Blood Letters #21
Blood Letters #21

A couple of extra Linens were in attendance Friday; Brooke, Xiola and Bazz.

Viewers

Oz Linden did his usual recap of viewer devlopment. He says they have lots of stuff in progress.

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Second Life Performance: Render Muting

We have and are hearing lots of complaints about how some number of avatars lag our Second Life™ experience. If you open up the Viewer Stats (Ctrl-Shift-1) and look at server performance (Simulator: Time Dilation, Sim FPS, Physics FPS, and others), you often find the region server performing well; TD=0.999, Sim FPS=44-45, Physics=44=45. Even with lots of avatars in a region. So, it isn’t region/simulator lag that is the problem. Over the last year large steps in reducing simulator lag have been taken with CDN being the most recent. The lag is now in our viewer.

Render Auto Muting
Render Auto Muting

There is a value the viewer displays labeled Avatar Render Cost (ARC). In November 2011 I wrote about ARC and how to use it, as it had recently changed. (See: #SL ARC Replaced) Things have changed since then. We now find the value displayed in two different ways. Try: Top Menu->Advanced (press Ctrl-Alt-D if you do not have that menu item)->Performance Tools->Show Draw Weight for Avatars. This will display a colored text above avatars showing their ‘render cost’. This does clutter the screen, but makes it easy to see which avatar has what ARC. 

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