Second Life and Virtual Worlds
So what is a Physics Material? These are materials that can be applied to an object. They allow one to adjust friction, density, gravity multiplier, and restitution… and I have no idea what the restitution part is about. So, with a material you could make a balloon that floats away. Balloons are more fun indoors. … Read more
llCastRay is a Linden Scripting Language (LSL) function. You may or may not know that SL guns rez and fling prim bullets. Rezzing prims produces lag. Rezzing prims with scripts causes even more lag. llCastRay is a replacement for that process. One may be able to develop weapons with less lag using llCastRay.
Details on the function are in the SL Wiki: llCastRay()
It seems that the XMPP Chat the Lab has been implementing and testing in ADITI is not providing the improvements hoped for. So, progress on implementing XMPP Chat is stalled. The effort is changing to finding out what is the causing chat problems we have now.
According to what the Lindens say in the Beta Server Meeting the new XMPP Chat was no better than the current chat. The decision has been made that the Lab will not be replacing our current chat with a new system that is no better.
This week Fast Assets moved to the main grid. This is sort of a change from doing things in a sort of single cue of first in-first-out to multiple cues. The idea being to reduce anyone person’s wait time. One should see the world rezzing faster.
Moving into the Release Channel testing are various bug fixes. None too exciting, but they are progress.
Tuesday saw the usual rolling restarts and new software. Again it is bug fixes and a few new features. Users are unlikely to see any changes. With a stop watch one might… might… notice a speed up in inventory download speed. Parts of the gzip feature have made it to the main grid and some … Read more
Well… everyone is talking about the decrease in the number of concurrent users. I have certainly noticed the currently online numbers displayed at login decreasing. In 2009 I was seeing 80,000 and climbing. Now it is rare to see 70,000 and common to see around 40,000 to 65,000 with the median generally reported to be about 52,000. So, is SL dying? Is the sky falling?