Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
It seems some Kokua users have had some problems with the 3.7.24 (previous) version of the viewer. Also, some on third party grids have seen the viewer crash. But, Kokua does make an OpenSim version that is more compatible with OpenSim grids.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This week the main channel gets an update. It is the Experience Tools permission fix update. Release Notes.
Last week a new maintenance viewer became available in Alternate Second Life Viewers – Download: Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.25.298030. According to the Release Notes there are over a dozen fixes: (Note MAINT JIRA items can only be accessed by Lindens. So, I omitted the links.)
There are photographic artists and skilled photographers playing in Second Life that display their work on Flickr. I follow a number of them, but certainly do not know of all of the talented ones.
Most artists/photographers have a personal style. I think their styles tell us what they like and when similar to my likes, I follow them.
Some photographers do a good job of portraying ideas and/or evoking feelings. Isa Messioptra’s Darwin is interesting in that respect. I wonder how many that see this image consider whether their belief system is provable and whether they blindly believe or can actually show the reasoning behind their belief?