You have probably heard that Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO, spoke at SVVR 2015. You can see a video of his speech on YouTube. It is three plus hours long… the video not Ebbe talking. His part starts at the 39 minute mark and lasts about 20 minutes.
Kathleen Watkins has a summary of the speech over on Hypergrid Business: Is there a future for user-created content in Linden Lab’s new world? But, it seems Kathleen is not a follower of Ebbe or his words on the Next Generation Platform aka SANSAR aka SL2.0. So, I’ll do my own.
To the left (in red) are pieces of the viewer. To the right (in blue) are simhost/simulators and other backend services. And at bottom (in green) are new CDN services.
Solid lines with arrowheads are communication paths, either UDP or TCP/HTTP. Dashed lines indicate legacy communication paths that are now or soon will be deprecated, obsoleted and/or deleted.
Ball-and-stick objects between a communication path and a text label indicate a viewer debug setting and the communication path or paths that setting influences. These, too, are in solid and dashed flavors. The latter indicating obsolescence. And as always, at least one error crept into my diagram. In this case, the ‘HttpPipelining’ setting only influences mesh and texture communications. Inventory is currently unaffected by this setting. [Image has been corrected – ed]
Generally, things are moving in the direction of simplification and less resource conflict. The mesh and texture HTTP traffic, which is usually the greatest load, tends to part ways with the UDP traffic a few network hops after a user’s router or modem. Lacking TCP’s throttling mechanism, UDP often wins in a fight (give-or-take the efforts of fairness algorithms along the path). Allowing UDP to overrun the path between viewer and simulator does still degrade the experience and the bandwidth setting remains an effective tool for avoiding this problem.
Other settings should generally be left alone. A lot of bad advice was spread around in the community in an effort to work around throughput problems. We’re trying to undo that history and get back on track with more typical (albeit aggressive) HTTP patterns.
A couple of things have caught my interest this past week. The Linden Monthly Meet Up held at Basilique and the discussion about the Altas Obscura article.
Antirrhinum @ The Alchemy by Brattilicious, on Flickr
I find the Meet Up fascinating because of the chaos and ambiguity of what was going on. What happens at a meeting where the agenda is to say, ‘Hi’? No one ever just says Hi… you can’t eat just one potato chip… or in my case Cheetos.
From the Third Party Viewer UG meeting we get a little news. It was another short meeting.
What The……! – by Simone Landers, on Flickr
Viewers
RC Second Life Big Bird Viewer version 3.7.29.301361 – This viewer has fixes for some attachment-related issues. The Lindens are not anticipating any difficulties with this viewer, so this one should be moving to promotion as the default viewer soon.
There are some server side fixes for attachment problems that are in the works.
The meet up has come and gone for this month. Did you go? Could you get in?
Sur La Maison de Ville Balcon by Connie Arida, on Flickr
I went a bit late, 5 minutes or so after it started. I did make it in. I had decided to use the Firestorm viewer. I lasted about 15 or 20 minutes before the viewer poofed. I didn’t try to get back in. There wasn’t much going on when I was there. Three Lindens were hanging around. People were chatting away everywhere. So, it was pretty chaotic while I was there.
Today is the day for the Lindens to get in-world and mingle with the masses… well, whatever mass will fit in the region Our Island aka Basilique. The meet up starts at 1 PM SLT today, 5/14.
Basilique Dress Code – 2015
Seems everyone in the SL blogosphere is publishing the time and location. Since this is a single region without any adjacent regions, I expect it to fill up quickly and be hard if not impossible to get into. When I checked out the location at 8:30 AM there were already people camping out. Checking the map later, about 10 AM, it seems the region is already starting to fill up.
