Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life: New Art Region

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Vivienne Daguerre let me know that she has remade her sim into Roxeter, a place supporting and featuring SL artists and live musicians, and in the future she hopes to add writers and theater performances to the list.

Vivienne  says Freya Lovencraft has started a machinima series, “Behind the SL Music”. The first machinima is this one:

Vivienne says the sim is totally non-profit, paid for by her store profits. For more information on that you can see her website: Roxeter.com. There is lots of information there.

Vivienne  has been around Second Life™ since 2004. I know her from our days at the Mesh Creators group starting in 2011 when mesh was just being added to SL. She is a 3D modeler & scripter that enjoys art and live music.

Second Life Things Week 21

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DDOS Attacks

A number of MMO games are the targets of Distributed Denial of Service attacks. I would expect Second Life™ to get its share of those. Massively Overpowered is reporting on the MMO Shroud of the Avatar getting attacked.

Has Your Favorite Mmo Been DDOS’ed?

Shroud Of The Avatar Gets Slammed By Ddos Attack

Discovering the Horizon
Discovering the Horizon by ~~*κïrα ß. murƒïη*~~, on Flickr

WoW Dying?

In Second Life™ we repeatedly hear that SL is dying. Everything is dying. Deal with it. But, World of Warcraft (WoW) dying? It has lost 3 million players in 3 months. That leaves them with 7 million active players. A game with 7 million players is not what most of us call dead. But, we are hearing the Chicken Little types crowing. 

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Second Life at SVVR 2015 – Conference & Expo

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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. 

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Second Life: Alchemy Viewer Held Hostage

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If you have been wondering where the next release of the Alchemy Viewer is, we now know: Fallon, Nevada. The intrigue is dark and the team could use your help…

See Cinder Roxley’s plea for help: We’re Not Dead

Livia
Livia by ~~*κïrα ß. murƒïη*~~, on Flickr

OK… it isn’t all that dark or desperate nor was the NSA involved, but it is a bit of fun writing on Cinder’s part.

New Second Life Network Architecture

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Monty Linden posted an update in the Technology forum. See it here: Second Life Network Architecture.

Second Life Network Architecture - 2015
Second Life Network Architecture – 2015

Quoting:

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.