General News

Bandwidth Problem Update

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With the release of the Havok 2012.1 update and Pathfinding came an increase in bandwidth used.  In the articles #SL News Week 33 and #SL News Update Week 33 I mention the problem. See JIRA: SVC-8124 – Excessive “ParcelOverlay reliable” messages sent by regions since last rolling restart (2012-08-08). Votes=124 – Watches=90 – 8/24. Resident interest in the JIRA shows it obviously not a big issue, unless you have a bandwidth capped/metered Internet service.

Networx Bandwidth Monitor

The fix for SVC-8124 was added to all 3 release channels to increase the probability that it can roll to the main grid next Tuesday.

I asked Oskar Linden if the Lab has seen an increase in bandwidth used since the PF release and 8124. He says not that he has heard. I suppose that means either it is a small enough problem, for the Lab, that they aren’t talking about it in house or Oskar has had his head down working and not noticed it.

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Firestorm Support Island Opening

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I received an announcement today that the Firestorm/Phoenix Team has created a support island that will be opening on August 25th. The island is for use of the SL community. The team is encouraging RHN, White Tiger Mentors, Mental Mentors and others to use the island for training and support. I get that other support groups are welcome too.

Update 8/25 – Now Open: Second Life’s Firestorm Support Island by Firestorm/Phoenix

Update 7/2017 – Photobucket has disallowed use of their hosted images on 3rd party sites unless I pay them. Images are here.

Obviously the island is designed to assist new Firestorm users and for the team’s support crew.

FS Landing
FS Support Island Landing Point

The island has a landing point that starts new users on an educational path, a literal path as you can see in the images. It is designed for those using the Firestorm Viewer.  So, people using other viewer may be a bit confused by the images of what to click. But, confusing new users by showing multiple user interfaces might be worse.

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#SL News Update Week 33

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This is a catch up article from last week. I had serious RL partying to attend to this weekend. So, hopefully this will get me caught up. I am bummed there is no new Metareality poscast in week 33.

Region Crossing

In Week 22, 2012 Phase I of the Multi-Threaded Crossing Project rolled out. See: #SL News Week 22. Today Oskar tipped us off that Phase II is moving through the QA process and close to reaching Release Channel Candidate status.

I take that to mean that in the next couple of weeks we might see it on a release channel. This is a complex process that is taking a load of work. So many parts of the SL system are touched there are a load of places for things to go wrong. We saw that with Phase I. It took months to make it to roll out. Phase I was in and out of the release channels for months. Hopefully that will not be the case this time.

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Second Life Going to Steam

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Another announcement came out this morning… Second Life is going to be available on Steam. (Reference)

As some sharp-eyed developers have speculated, we’re going to make Second Life available on Steam in the next month or so.

Many of us have friends who are avid Steam gamers, but if you’re not familiar, Steam is a very popular online game platform that offers a wide range of titles (and will soon also offer other software as well).

What does this news mean for Second Life? You’ll still be able to access Second Life just as you can today; there won’t be any change to that. But, the more than 40 million people who use Steam will also be able to get Second Life as easily as they can get games like Portal.

We’ll make an announcement on the blog when Second Life is actually available on Steam, but in the meantime, if you have friends who are Steam gamers, let ‘em know it’s coming!

 

Second Life Traffic Numbers

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For land and shop owners this is a serious problem. With the roll out of the latest update lots of people are seeing the problem.

Traffic Count in SL Search – enlarge

JIRA’s

SVC-7458 – Traffic counts borked across (All or Many Regions) – See 1. Second Life Viewer – VWR VWR-27621 Drop In Traffic Calculations. Nov 2011. Short not much information.

SVC-7459 – Drop In Traffic Calculations. Nov 2011. Updated Aug 2012. This seems to be the most active JIRA on the topic.

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More on What is Second Life

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I was talking to a friend about being at a concert while programming. That thoroughly confused them. I needed something to show them for a quick explanation. Trying to explain Second Life™ with words is pointless, in my experience.

What is Second Life?

The Lab has a good web page up that serves the purpose of explaining SL. While it falls short, the videos there are far better than my words and verbal efforts. I can just say, “Second Life is a second fun only life.” Send them to the web page and they seem to get a closer idea of what SL is. But, I have yet to see any answer to the question “What is Second Life?” that actually works for everyone.

Check out: What is Second Life?