Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
The mesh meetings are getting interest and the agenda is getting lots of items. Today’s meeting had 16 items on the agenda when I checked it.
I posted an article on this a few days ago. See: Second Life Mesh Enablement. I guess this was brought up in the Closed Beta for Mesh. At that time some thought the idea was shot down and dead. Obviously not, it’s back.
Today Kelly Linden had a meeting in Ambleside, AGNI. It is sort of the Scripting part of Content Creation/Mesh Import/Scripting Group.
This is a new feature being added to the Linden Scripting Language (LSL). Many scripters in SL are eagerly awaiting its roll to the main grid. Right now we rez and throw prims to simulate bullets fired from a gun. While effective it is not the most efficient way to simulate bullets. In laggy sim’s one can literally walk on bullets at the sim edge.
Kelly is hoping to see this feature make it to the main grid soon. Exactly when is unclear. It seems to be wrapped in the Mesh release. His advice is to add a request for the release date information to the Mesh Meeting Agenda. I have to wonder if all the various things wrapped in the mesh release is suggesting the Lindens are planning some big news media splash.
In the SL Wiki we have been given the equation that represents how mesh complexity is converted to Prim Equivalency. The page has changed from time to time and the values used in constants have changed too. Often changing without the wiki page updating. Frequently a release of a Mesh Project viewer changes all the equivalency values we have been seeing in the viewer. Changes to the simulator software have also changed the values shown in the viewer. Several have been guessing at what the Lindens are actually trying to achieve with these changes. Speculation on what the Lindens will do and why is ranging from hopeful to ridiculous. Now Runitai Linden has explained the Linden goals.
When the Linden’s used the worlds ‘Prim Equivalency’ the stage was set for residents to start comparing prims and sculpties to mesh. The Lindens may have even been thinking of mesh as a prim type. We know that the first mesh we saw in open beta was very sculpty like. The Build Floater even had a mesh asset in the same place as a sculpty has a place for (sculpty map window) the sculpty map.
You probably remember that on the first of the month I posted Second Life Chat Load Test. That test was carried out last week. It was hoped we would see some of the numbers this week. That didn’t happen but we did get some of the story from Oskar Linden in the Beta Server Group meeting. I also posted #SL Server Follow Up Week 23, which has a section on chat. That article explains the inefficiencies in group chat.
Three regions were involved. One running the main grid server-trunk version (Oatmeal ) and the other two running the a test version with improved chat software. Also, the Utility Servers received new software weeks prior to the test. Nobody told me. But, Oskar just officially announced it here: UTIL hosts updated with Group Chat fixes. The test was pretty well covered in blogs, forum, and group notices. The turnout was good and the Lindens collected lots of good stuff… data. Oskar Linden said, “It was a huge success from a QA POV.”
The main things being tested were backward compatibility – old grid software to new grid software, multi-region chats, and large in region group chats.
We have all seen the trend of decreasing concurrent users and poor player retention numbers. There seems to be a turn around. I think it is too early to actually say that with any certainly… or if I wanted to be a wiener, certitude.
Tateru’s site has stats on Second Life. One of her graphs is displaying signup rates.
Since the SL Signup process changed we are seeing a climb in signups. On average the signup were about 10,000 per day for over a year. It looks like that has jumped to between 13,000 to 14,000 per day. It appears to be in an upward trend. It is early in the trend change, if it is a trend. We don’t know if this is a long term change or not. But the old trend has been broken.
This morning I see KirstenLee has a new release candidate out. This one is based on Linden Lab 2.7.3 code. So, this viewer is on the very edge of the latest viewer code. The full version number is 2.7.3.8. The viewer remains Anaglyph 3D capable and it now works with my 8800 GTS card. My first impressions review follows.
One of the KLV users with an nVidia 460 card on driver 275.33 is experiencing crash on start. So, it is a good idea to keep your previous RC1 install package. I’m on an nVidia 8800 with driver 270.61 (per Windows driver ID 8.17.12.7061). Watching Group chat I see others are having crash problems. The crashing seems to depend on the nVidia driver version. Some have gone back to version 266.38 and say they get 3x better FPS. This very much looks to be an nVidia and OpenGL issue.