Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life News 2013-31

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I got most of the interesting news out Sunday. Today we have confirmation of which server updates they plan to roll out this week.

Main Channel

The main channel will get the maintenance pack with some bug fixes and the faster materials processing that ran in Blue Steel last week (30). So, objects failing to detect collisions after teleporting, run time permissions messing up in attachments, and pathfinding characters wondering out of their parcels should all be fixed. The Materials system will now be able to request 4 textures per second in place of the 1/sec previously.

Blue Steel

This channel gets a new maintenance package. llListen (BUG-3291) and llApplyImpulse (BUG-3307) have fixes. Plus there is another… or some more crash fixes… which I read to mean more exploits cured. 

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Second Life News 2013-30 #2

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Some of the most interesting news comes from the Third Party Developers meetings. This is not a meeting that is well publicized. I suspect many think that having just the well informed attend is more productive. I tend to agree.

This article is 2,600+ words. It has some work-around methods for some current problems that people are experiencing. It covers some of the most informative news about SL that is available.

TPV Dev Meetin 2013-30
TPV Dev Meetin 2013-30

Server Side Appearance

SSA is going extraordinary well. The stats coming in are as expected, which means the backend is performing as expected. This means the Lab’s estimates for the amount of hardware needed are going to be correct.

View adoption is going pretty well. About 75% of users have adopted an SSA capable viewer. (84% of Firestorm users – see chart) Looking at that the other way, something like a quarter million people login each day with an old viewer. Also, the numbers vary quite a bit from day to day. 

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Second Life’s Annoyances

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I generally think Linden Lab is doing a good job with Second Life. I see the quality of the simulation improve and degrade over time. But, there is a definite trend of improvement. Sort of a two steps forward one back.

Hair Fair 2013 - Waiting to Rez
Hair Fair 2013 – Waiting to Rez

At the moment performance seems to have degraded, at least in regard to texture download and rendering. I saw this problem with the Linden SL Viewer 3.6.1 (278007) Jun 27 2013 12:41:07 when I visited Hair Fair 2013 (HF). And I do keep HTTP Get and Inventory enabled. I’ve given up on the older UDP protocol. It has little future in SL. HF regions were running the main server release version 13#13.07.08.278357 not an RC . 

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Bits and Pieces 2013-30

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Ciaran Laval has a post about the 50% discount for educational groups coming back. See: Educational And Non-Profit Ventures See The Return Of The 50% Discount. The original Linden announcement is here: Updated Pricing for Educational and Nonprofit Institutions.

This is probably a good thing. But it is also probably a bit late.

A number of people think the cost of a region is too high. But, that is in the eye of the buyer. I was over on Lost Paradise today looking at Ae’gura. There were 6 users on in the last 24 hours and 17 over the last 7 days. At the same there were 50,000+ concurrent users logged into Second Life™.

Lost Paradise rents regions for US$40/month, the Lab $300±. For daily possible visitors in a day that is $6.67 per user in LP and $0.006 per user in SL. If you are doing business, SL is way cheaper. I know that is not a accurate cost per visitor comparison, but the cost ratio per visitor is accurate.

For educational groups that tend to bring their own students, a discount seems to be reasonable thing that should help everyone.

Hypergrid Business has articles this week on AviWorlds going offline and a how to tell when your grid is about to fold. Hmmmmm… 

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KokuaViewer.org Down

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I’m not sure what’s up today. The kokuaviewer.org blog and wiki are down today, just when I need a copy of the viewer for my new Win7. I’ll use an older copy.

The domain name is still working but PING is dead and a TRACERT dies in Comcast’s LA area. So, I don’t know if it is Kokua’s site or Comcast that is the problem.

Their back!

Viewer Pipeline Update

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The Viewer Release Candidate pipeline is operational. Get ready for some surprises. Remember. I’m writing as a Windows user. Things may be different on a Mac.

Open Source Meeting 2013-30
Open Source Meeting 2013-30

Oz Linden explained some of the thinking about and intended operation of the new pipeline. Part of the explanation was getting my terminology straightened out. Words convey meaning and people have to have the same meanings for the words being used to communicate. 

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