Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
This past Friday was the Third Party Developers’ User Group meeting. This one was longer than recent ones and lots was discussed. Video:
Project Managed Marketplace Viewer (VMM) version 3.7.25.298865 – A new version of this Project Viewer was released Friday. A blog post about it was being prepared Friday (2/13). A feedback meeting is planned. Brooke sounds like a politicians when talking about the meeting. It is going to be about explaining the feature and getting feedback.
The Firestorm (FS) team is tentatively planning a viewer release for March, which they hope will have all the Linden updates and bring FS current with the SL Viewer. There is some concern about whether the Lab will have Viewer Managed Marketplace (VMM) ready in time for the FS Team to integrate it into FS for the next release.
The anticipated release for VMM is near the FS feature freeze window for the March release date for FS’ new version. That means the FS people have to rush the inclusion or delay the release, if the Lab hits their early release date, which could happen. I wouldn’t bet on it. But, I also wouldn’t bet against it.
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.
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.
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.