General News

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 News & Bits 2014-48

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Servers

We haven’t had any server updates running in the RC Channels. We have had a version running in RC that has tweaks to CDN settings. Those tweaks are rolling out to the main grid tomorrow, Tuesday, Week 48.

According to the Deploys thread there are no new changes being made to any RC channel.

Blood Letters Slow Render Day - 3 to 4 minutes
Blood Letters Slow Render Day – 3 to 4 minutes

A no change window opens Wednesday 11/26 and runs to Sunday 11/30.

Cocoa Bugs

There are no Cocoa bugs for Mac users. Just ask Lindens or Apple engineers. Come on, who are you going to believe, them or your eyes?

But, there is hope. Cinder Roxley is working on those issues, retina resolution support for the viewer, mouse look, and second screen support. So, we may see a fix at some point. This assumes a fix is possible and Cinder seems to think it is.

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Drax Radio Hour #46

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From time to time Drax and Jo have breaking news or scoops. In this show Drax interviews a number of Lindens. From them we get new insights. This makes the show well worth hearing. See: Radio Hour Episode 46.

For a quick summary see Ciaran’s article: Drax Visits Linden Lab HQ And Finds FIC Cups!

Blood Letters Office - Well Dressed!
Blood Letters Office – Well Dressed!

I haven’t tried to capture a summary or abstract of each section, just those that interested me and I think will be of general interest.

Show Index

3:30 ± Alexa Linden

4:40 ± Xiola Linden – Runs the SL Twitter feed, Facebook, puts out PR pictures…

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Second Life in the Media

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Inara Pey has written a good rebuttal to a rather retarded article appearing on MoviePlot.com by Marlon McDonald. You’ll find that article here: These Strange Stories Prove Second Life Isn’t The Dreamworld You Believed… Inara’s rebuttal appears on her blog and to MoviePlot.com’s credit they have posted a version of the article. See: A rebuttal to … Read more

Second Life: Ebbe Altberg Interview

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I’ve seen several people blogging about this week old interview. I finally got around to reading the interview. There isn’t much new in it. I did not expect there would be. If you’ve been following Ebbe and Second Life, you know most of what he said. But, there are a few new things that are interesting and probably new details that I’ll touch on. Mostly interesting is the insight into what Ebbe is thinking.

The interview is here: Linden Lab explores VR for its next-generation virtual world (interview)

 

Blood Letters Murder Scene
Blood Letters Murder Scene

We know the Lab has been hiring software engineers for SL2. But, did you know they plan to hire 30 or 40 more? They currently have 190 employees. Ebbe says the number of employees has remained flat as they hired and dropped employees from projects they dropped. They plan to grow to 220±.

I think it safe to say some of the staff from released projects probably transferred  over to SL2. He makes it clear they have taken people from the Lab’s various projects and focused them on SL2. 

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Week of Restarts

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This morning the first question asked of Oz Linden on the Open Source User Group was; What’s with the restarts? See: Scheduled Maintenance. Oz was all ‘what restarts? Oh… those restarts…’ Saying: They’re doing some checks on some of our server hardware that requires that they take them down briefly.  I don’t believe that all … Read more