Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life Bits 2015-07

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Unreal Engine

Jo Yardley has posted about the graphics available when world builders use the Unreal Engine. See: Stunning demo shows what is possible in VR graphics with Unreal Engine.

I am sure it will be pretty awesome to use the Oculus Rift HMD in a world like this.

Improvements

Ciaran Laval has an article up on his site that gives a good summary of recent changes in Second Life and coming changes. See: Linden Lab Ask Us To Check Out Improvements To Second Life. I’ve mentioned some of these weeks ago but he goes into more detail and collects them into one place.

Daniel Voyager has a similar article: Linden Lab publishes upcoming improvements to Second Life.

Directly from the Lab: Check Out the Latest Improvements to Second Life. 

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Avatar Render Cost 2015-07

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Penny Patton writes about reducing her avatar’s render cost. (See: Draw Weight.) Kay Jiersen picked up on the article and wrote an article too. (See: Render weight best practices for Second Life.) Some time ago I wrote: Second Life Performance: Render Muting, which is about the same subject.

Penny Paton's Example of Dense High ARC Mesh
Penny Patton’s Example of Dense High ARC Mesh

Penny is pointing out there is a bit we can do to change our render cost with only a minimal change in appearance. Kay suspects few people are even aware of the Avatar Render Cost (ARC) feature in the viewer and have no clue they need to do anything. I agree with Kay. But, she goes on to recommend changes to Second Life, which is where I disagree.

Kay made field trips to various places in Second Life where she recorded the ARC values of avatars in the regions. Kay points out that only 81 of 190 (42.6%) avatars would render using a setting of 80,000 for Render Muting. That means 109 or 57.3% of the avatars would not render .

The horrible frame rates (FPS) I am getting have me looking at a new computer and a better video card. But, I actually have little hope that will help FPS in regions populated with 30+ avatars.

On an empirical basis Kay found that jewelry is a major culprit in high ARC. 

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Second Life News 2015-06

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Servers

There was no Beta Server UG meeting this week. The Lindens were meeting to decide on which projects would be planned for implementation in 2015. With any luck we’ll hear what they decided, at least to some degree.

Slow render Feb 2015
Slow render Feb 2015

I am hoping they decide to work on the viewer’s caching system. I’m tired of coming home to a grey house, something I can do several times per day when I am in Second Life.

I am also hoping they get the Avatar Render Cost feature working. My hope is they will flash a value on screen when you add any new attachment to the avatar. I think it would be great to have that happen when trying on mesh demos. I think it would put pressure on designers to make more render efficient items.

Viewers

The main viewer is now version 3.7.24-297623. (Release Notes) This is the viewer with reduced pipelined texture and mesh fetching timeout. So stalled connections fail quickly, allowing earlier retry. The timeout value changed from 150 seconds to 60 seconds for textures, and from 600 to 240 seconds for meshes. 

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Second Life Bits & News 2015-06

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Second Life Photography

PrimPerfect has an article up on photography. It talks about Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan, and Wildstar Beaumount being interviewed in a ‘first’ show on Second Life Photography. They say a second show will look at post-processing of Second Life images.

The first show was this past Monday at 2 PM in Garden of Dreams at the Designing Worlds studio. Next Monday they will air the second show. You can catch the replay of the shows at the Treet.tv web site, on the SLArtist.com channel, the Aview TV Designing Worlds channel or on the Designing Worlds blog.

AvaStar’s Sparkles

Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix is aware some people are having problems getting Sparkles 50% discount. To help them out she has posted: Troubles getting Sparkles Discount.

Servers

This week the main channel gets an update. It is the Experience Tools permission fix update. Release Notes. 

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