Second Life

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#SL Materials Update Week 34

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We got a bit more information on the Materials system this morning in the Open Source meeting.

JIRA

Oz Linden created a JIRA for the development process and bug reporting. See: STORM-1905 – Add support for Normal & Specular Maps.

The STORM Project is closed to creation of new items except by Lindens. Residents can add to existing items. If you are wanting to create a new item, like a feature request, create it in the VWR or VIEWER project.

Feature Requests

Oz says feature requests will probably do better in the Building & Texturing section of the Creation section of the forum. It is unlikely that any features will be considered for Phase I or the first pass at the Materials System. The Third Party Developers (TPD) and Lab have their hands full getting Materials implemented and working out coordination between TPD’s and the Lab.

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Content Creation Improvement Week 33

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The Content Creation Improvement User Group (CCIUG) has been discussing redesign of the Build Panel. Geenz Spad has been bugging me to get people interested in redesign of the panel. I’ve been like, “OMG! This is boring…” Now with the announcement of a materials system project, I understand his motivation. See: Second Life Materials System Announced.

Idea for New Build Panel – Enlarge

To implement the materials system will require design changes to the Build Panel. Whether anyone likes the idea or not the panel is going to change. So, you can either participate in the design process or not. HOWEVER… for all the clueless people that can’t handle change or cope with frustration and fill the forums with rants without participating in the process, remember. We will be pointing to this point in the design process to mock you. :p

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Interesting Debug Settings

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Strawberry Singh has a post on her blog titled Debug Me. Whether you follow her blog or Plurking you know she does some great pictures, which is an understatement. In Debug Me she is explaining some of the Debug Settings she uses to improve her pictures. You’ll have to visit her site for her settings. I’ve written a little about the settings from a performance aspect.

  • RenderGlow – This is mostly a visual change with little impact on render time. The viewer has a number of glow settings that do affect performance. So, you can control glow in most any scene of visual and performance aspects. Use your web browsers page search/find on the Debug Settings page to find them all. Some improve the rendering of glow at the cost of a slower render, but it is not a big performance factor.
  • RenderVolumeLODFactor – This changes how objects in SL are rendered. It has an impact on performance, but the amount of impact depends on the scene and camera location. So, you won’t see a 1-to-1 relationship between the setting value and performance. Berry gets good results with the value high, but that is in photos. If you are exploring SL, a setting of 1 or 2 is going to improve rez time and FPS. But, you will see the distorted sculpties and mesh objects that change shape as you get closer or move away. Higher values stop that changing. For photos a large setting can solve the problem sculpties looking funny.

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Second Life Going to Steam

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Another announcement came out this morning… Second Life is going to be available on Steam. (Reference)

As some sharp-eyed developers have speculated, we’re going to make Second Life available on Steam in the next month or so.

Many of us have friends who are avid Steam gamers, but if you’re not familiar, Steam is a very popular online game platform that offers a wide range of titles (and will soon also offer other software as well).

What does this news mean for Second Life? You’ll still be able to access Second Life just as you can today; there won’t be any change to that. But, the more than 40 million people who use Steam will also be able to get Second Life as easily as they can get games like Portal.

We’ll make an announcement on the blog when Second Life is actually available on Steam, but in the meantime, if you have friends who are Steam gamers, let ‘em know it’s coming!

 

Second Life Materials System Announced

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If you have followed me for a time, you know that I have been mentioning a MATERIALS SYTEM RUMOR. Today the Lab announced that indeed there is a Materials Project. So, what will our world look like with materials? Check out the 2min video.

If the video is still showing as unavailable use this link: Youtube

OK… every one else can display the video and my site won’t…   I suppose I need a plugin change.

Click for Video at Youtube

I think this is pretty awesome. We’ll be using this on buildings and CLOTHES… oh damn, SHOES too. /Me dances looking at my feet and thinking about new shoes.

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Viewer Performance

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A resident by the name of Nala Spires did some testing to see what affects the SL Viewer performance the most. You can read about his test and the results here: CPU / RAM/ VGA what sl likes More ? ((attempting to answer that ! ))

Nala Spires

She used this viewer: Windows 7 professional 64bit firestorm Viewer v4.1.1.28744

She also used FRAPS to benchmark the performance. FRAPS slows my system so I would expect the numbers to be a bit lower than normal.

A lot of the numbers make no sense to me. Since it is FRAPS I assume they were FPS numbers. But jumping around between 200+ and 20 seems a bit beyond anything that makes since to me.

I did read her Conclusions and they are interesting. Nala concluded  memory speed had a significant impact on performance. Buying FASTER memory did the most for performance.

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