Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life Deferred Render

by

There is a problem with Deferred Render (L&S = Lighting & Shadows) crashing some viewers. The Firestorm Viewer team thinks most people cannot run L&S. That may say more about who is using Firestorm and Phoenix rather than SL users. But, as far as I know there are no good stats to answer the question of how many people can run L&S, at least not in regard to SL users.

As we move forward this will be a more important issue. It certainly makes a difference in how Second Life™ appears on your screen.

What it is?

Deferred Rendering is a high fidelity render of lighting and in some systems shadows. There is no limit to the number of lights that can be rendered, which is a big step up from the 6 or 8 lights we could previously render in SL.

Read more

Flatterbots

by

I suppose most of my readers know about Flatterbots. These are automated avatars that run an AI program to carry on a conversation. They basically flatter you while they beg. There is an interview with the person behind the bots on: Every Second Man. See: The Mind Behind the Scam.

Second Life News 2013-1

by

There is not much news yet this year. But, there is a little. First there have been no rollouts to the main channel or RC channels for two weeks because of the holidays. Maestro Linden says the Second Life™ servers have not been bad for two weeks without restarts. Things do slow, but otherwise not bad.

First Meeting of the Year - Morris, ADITI.
First Meeting of the Year – Morris, ADITI.

Coming Up

Caleb Linden is working in the Phase II Multi-Threaded Region-Crossing code. Two weeks ago a pile on test was done. Some issues were found and fixes are in progress. If things go well, the code may rollout to an AGNI RC channel next week (2). I think that is pretty impressive. But, there may be some problems so, don’t get too excited.

Read more

Second Life and OpenGL

by

A question by Loki got me looking at the state of DirectX/Direct3D and OpenGL. We hear Windows runs games faster on Direct3D than on OpenGL. That is supposedly why Second Life™ viewers run slower, fewer Frames Per Second (FPS), than other games using Direct3D. But, some people say otherwise. One of those people is Steam or more accurately the online gaming company Valve.

Valve makes the Source Engine that runs Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Dota 2. Valve is not a Microsoft fan, which I don’t find surprising as Microsoft is known for trying to make Windows a closed shop that keeps other gaming systems at a disadvantage. In testing in August 2012 Valve reported that OpenGL on Ubuntu ran faster than DirectX/Direct3D did on Windows. You can read more about that in: OpenGL is Faster.

This tells us it is not just OpenGL and Direct3D that solely control performance. The OS has quite a bit to do with it also.

Read more

Looking Back at Second Life 2012

by

The Linden Blog has a new article this month titled: A Look Back at Improvements to Second Life in 2012 and Forward to 2013. It is worth the read, but it is pretty small. Having written 568 posts this year I thought it was a little light. So, I decided to look back over the year. I had no idea how much work I was getting into.

This article is the result of my look back at 2012. I have uploaded the WORD (docx) file I used to compose the article. I think it makes for a handy quick reference that can be searched. I find trying to search the blog for specific information less than ideal. So, if you want a quick reference to when things happened, get the file. Please do not re-post or publish it.

This article is long. But, check it out to see how many things you remember. I was surprised how much I had forgotten. I was also surprised how fast and how slow some things happened.

For a short version of this article see: 2012 – The Short List

Please forgive the poor use of tense. I found writing in past tense rather awkward. Also, notice I have made page numbers correspond to months.

Update: I have added the 2013 review here: Second Life 2013 in Review

Read more

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12