Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life Baking Dance

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You probably know about SSA – Server Side Appearance by now. But, as we move into it and more people try it we are finding an oddity here and there. Today I heard of a new one.

As things are planned your viewer will handle your appearance during editing in Appearance Mode ( as right click on avatar Edit My Outfit ) always has, baking things locally and quickly. But, when you go into Appearance and pop on an Outfit, does the SSA system try to find a cached bake of the Outfit? Or does it just start baking the Outfit? Either would take some time. Does the viewer have to wait on the server?

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Second Life News 2013-18 #2

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Second Life™ data centers are located in Phoenix and Dallas according to Maestro Linden. He is not sure but thinks there is another in DC. A few months ago the Lab was consolidating from three data centers to two. So, it is probably two, but one never knows.

When asked, Maestro confirmed there is no data center in San Francisco.

If you geo-locate the region IP addresses (site) you can get from the viewer’s Help-About…, you will probably find the addresses are in other locations. For me most regions appear to be served from San Francisco. I suspect that if you are on the east coast of the USA you’ll find them in a different city, but I’m not sure. Let me know if you check it.

I’m about 460 miles from San Francisco and about 300 miles from Phoenix. So, one would think that I would connect to the closer servers in Phoenix. But, network traffic routes through the major backbones and data centers. Traffic leaving Southern California generally travels up to Los Angles (LA). For me to connect to a site in Cambridge, Mass. (173.223.104.110) my connection is through LA and up to Montréal, Canada and eventually to Cambridge. Not the most direct route for surface travel. The point being map distance is not the same as network distance.

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Drax World Makers Episode 5: Engrama

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This episode of Drax’s World Makers features musicians that are using Second Life™ to reach an international audience.

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Facebook is boring… Second Life is exciting…  Argentinean Pupito Helstein and Lakua Arriaga have fresh take on how they can meet fans and reach a larger audience.

The indie group is Engrama, which if I translate accurately is a spin on something that creates a memory. But, I may be losing something or missing the mark in the translation process. Whatever, you can find them in-world.

According to the events schedule there is a free concert May 11, Saturday, at 3:00 AM SLT. That is a little hard for USA West Coasters to make. The location is Lavender Island. There is a group joiner there.

 

 

Second Life Viewer Release Changing

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You probably know that the server updates come through 3 releases channels; Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum. This is sort of having 3 Beta versions running at the same time. It allows 3 different sets of code be tested at the same time. The best performing of the three gets promoted to the main channel.

New Viewer Channels
New Viewer Channels

The result is the server code update at a pretty fast pace. In fact so fast that several server updated features are waiting on the viewer to update.

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Second Life Prims Not Rezzing

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For some time we have had prims that don’t rez. Parts of a road or wall or something will be missing. If we right-click where they ‘should’ be, they snap into view. The problem is in the viewer. It is a years old problem, but generally rare. Recent Interest List changes have made it worse.

Andrew says there is a fix but the code is currently in very crashy viewer. After my day in Fantasy Fair I think the main, beta, and development viewers are all way crashy. I’m trying to chase down what’s up with that. I was having trouble staying on for more than 15 minutes at a time, which may be something on my side. Whatever, Andrew’s fix has not made it to the QA teams yet. They need to get the crashing fixed before it goes to them.

Andrew says the fix is in with the viewer code that has the viewer hinting for the server. This is the hinting that tells the server more about what the viewer needs and what’s in the viewer’s cache.

As it turns out the problem with the prims not rezzing comes from the viewer getting confused about what it has cached and can render and what it needs to wait to render. It has all it needs, but doesn’t realize it.

At best we won’t see the fix rollout for a couple of weeks. The viewer people are focused on getting SSA out. (Server Side Appearance – baking) Behind that is the Materials release. From our seats it is a coin toss for which is going to go through first; hinting and prim rez fix or Materials. Whichever, I expect it to be after SSA is rolled out.

There are some possible problems with SSA, think COF Corruption and unexpected surprises. If things go badly with SSA, that will delay the prim-rez-fix. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. And… things could go well.