Second Life

Things about SL

Capital Exchange & Second Life

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I see that SL Capital Exchange is suspending trading in Linden dollars. Today I see they announced:

On July 16, 2014, I filled out the first form for the Skill Gaming Application for Capital Exchange Stock Market Simulation Game. From that point until today, there have been numerous correspondences between me, my law firm, and Linden Lab. As of today we still do not have an official determination, positive or negative, on our application.

I was hoping that because much of the delay has been on the part of Linden Lab, that we would be allowed to operate past the November 1, 2014 deadline set forth in a recent post by Linden Lab. Unfortunately I was informed by Rowan Linden that we cannot. So therefore effective immediately, I am suspending all trading at Capital Exchange until our application is approved or denied by Linden Lab.

….

See the full article for more details and information: Capital Exchange Suspends Activity Until Further Notice.

Second Life Performance Boost

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Market Place

Yesterday about lunch time the Lindens posted a blog article titled Performance, Performance, Performance. The surprising part, at least to me, is the performance improvements made to the Market Place. I’ve been covering the coming change to Viewer Managed Market Place. But, I don’t recall hearing about Market Place (MP) performance improvements.

Whatever, the Lindens say they are seeing a 70% faster response time and pages load 30% faster.

Builder's Brewery Materials Class
Builder’s Brewery Materials Class

Group Chat

I’ve been sort of covering the improvements to group chat. News in this area is almost always after the fact. The Lindens have realized that whenever they say anything about changing something they get complaints about how the change is the cause of whatever problem users are having. So, they think they get better feedback on some things if they change and listen before saying anything.

This last week we have been running on new code in the chat servers. The metrics say things are MUCH better. I know I haven’t got a ‘cannot connect’ error when trying to comment in group chat this past week. But, I have also been busy and not in world much either. 

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Second Life Inventory & Performance

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Over on SLUniverse the question was asked about whether large inventories degrade viewer performance and cause region crossing problems.

Oct 2014 - Testing Alchemy Viewer
Oct 2014 – Testing Alchemy Viewer

Trinity Dejavu give a pretty good explanation of how inventory size affects viewer performance here. I think basic information needed for understanding inventory was skipped over and a couple of points could have been more accurate. So, I added my 3 cents worth and I’ll post it here too.

To understand inventory one needs a basic idea of how assets, the stuff in your inventory and the regions, are handled by the Second Life™ system. I’ll keep it lite.

Everything in SL is a collection of vertices and textures/images. Primitives, cubes, spheres, etc., are just some numbers; type, size, rotation, and position. The lists of vertices for primitives are built into the viewer, so no downloads beyond the parameter values. So too the avatar is built in. All that is ever downloaded for primitives and the avatars is a list of numbers, parameters. For the avatar we call the values collection: Shape.

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Trying Out Alchemy – Second Life

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Alchemy Viewer Logo
Alchemy Viewer Logo

Download size is 42mb that uses 159mb of disk when installed. The install was error free. Recently I get errors with the Linden installs. Some times a retry fixes it. Others times I have to ignore to continue. The Crash Logger seems to be the problem with the install. I am almost always installing just after running the viewer. The Linden Viewers still seem to work OK in spite of the errors. But, it is reassuring to not have errors.

The install places the viewer in C:\Program Files\AlchemyBeta.

The cache installs in C:\Users\[Win_login_ID]\AppData\Local\Alchemy64. You can set that to be any location you want. I usually move it off my C drive for better performance. Windows uses my C drive for its swapping and temp files. Moving it saves the viewer having to compete for hard drive bandwidth.

It seems the cache for the 32 and 64 bit version are different. I’m not sure why they would do that.

The logs are installed in C:\Users\[Win_login_ID]\AppData\Roaming\Alchemy. So, it seems the 32 bit and 64 bit version use the same logs and chat files. There is a setting that will allow you to place the chat logs wherever you want. 

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Alchemy Viewer Beta 3.7.19 – Second Life

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Alchemy Viewer Logo
Alchemy Viewer Logo

The Alchemy Viewer team has released a new beta version of their viewer. I have yet to try it. But Inara has written up a good review. See: Alchemy 3.7.19: mainlining HTTP and enhancing legacy search.

The viewer’s page announcing the release is here: Alchemy Beta 3.7.19.

It appears we get a search feature in this version that has a new User Interface (UI). The change will change how you use search. It sounds much more efficient. Still, it depends on the SL Search Engine, so I doubt the hit accuracy has improved. That will take some work on the Linden server side to improve. But, this new UI should be nice to use.

The Camera Control gets compressed. But, this is just the standard camera control, not photo tools, which is why I often use Firestorm.

The World Map gets a revamp. They make more efficient use of screen space, or read as removing white-space from the controls. The panel looks busier now. I’ll have to try it before I can decide if it is better or just different.

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Drax Radio Hour Show 42

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Drax and Jo have episode 42 of their Radio Hour out. Ciaran has a review of the podcast out. Seems the uninformed media is again voicing ignorant opinions about Second Life™. Only a small part of Ciaran’s discussion is devoted to the journalistic stupidity. The rest is pointing out what’s in the Drax/Jo episode. He provides a good summary of the show, so I’ll skip that task having a busy day ahead of me.

See Ciaran’s: Drax Files Radio Hour Ep 42 – Leaping, Bashing The Beeb & 2007 Oldbies. (Note: at 7:30 AM SLT (PDT) Ciaran’s site was down with DB access error. – I read the article via Feedly.)

See Drax’s Radio Hour 42: show #42: been there, done that!

Drax has included a video in the show’s blog page. (9 min)

You see the problems volksvlijt is having using the Oculus Rift. Also, at about the 4:00 minute mark you can see and hear volksvlijt talk about texture thrashing. I suppose the dual image render for the Oculus is using up video memory faster and causing the thrashing.

From the problems volksvlijt runs into I suspect that the Linden Oculus Rift Viewer still has a ways to go.

There are a number of videos embedded in Show 42’s page.