RL has me bouncing from client to client. Not much time to play. But, I did make it to Thursday’s CCUG meeting. This meeting was status reporting, questions about what is being worked on, and what may be considered in the future.
SL Speculation
Second Life and the Future of Apple Users
For SL users there is the Apple question, will Second Life™ run on Apple? Or… continue to run on Apple?
In June of this year Apple announced its discontinuing support of OpenGL after macOS 10.14 Mojave (scheduled for release Sept 2018), the core aspect of SL’s render engine. It will take a couple of years for Apple to phase it out. But, updates and support officially stop now. For some time support has been really bad.
They explained their reasoning when some game developers declared they would stop making games for Apple.
The reasons;
- OpenGL was designed 25 years ago.
- Core architecture is from the beginning days of 3D graphics.
- Designed is based on outdated thinking.
- OpenGL is a legacy tool with updates ‘tacked’ on.
- Hardware GPU work flow has changed.
- Never designed for multi-threading.
- Today’s rendering is asynchronous.
On the PC side of things OpenGL is still supported. We can’t know for how long. Khronos, OpenGL’s developer, has introduced Vulkan. (See: State of Graphics: DirectX 12 & Vulkan – 4/2016) Development is exciting and popular. The group is on the forefront of some interesting tech. But, I don’t know that it will be helpful for SL.
Ebbe Altberg & Third-Party Dev Meeting
I wanted to sit in on this week’s Third-Party Developers’ meeting. I wanted some footage of the meeting to use as an opening for my summary of the meeting. I was late. Seems to be a pattern. But, I was planning to use Pantera Północy’s video of the meeting. It comes out Saturday morning.
I was surprised to find Ebbe Altberg talking! Whoa! So, I brought up OBS and recorded the rest of the meeting. The first 15 minutes are missing. Those minutes are in Pantera’s Video, which came out before I got finished.
I’ve been having audio problems with the SL recordings. I got some of that cleaned up. I still had problems but the audio is intelligible and better.
I thought about indexing the video. I usually do. But, Thursday is an RL busy day and I already have a work-related video rendering in the background. My completer is WAY sluggish and all 4 cores are pegged at 100% heating up to 57. This one of the few times I hear the fans pick up speed. So, I’ll do the index later when I don’t have to deal with pauses.
The video is jerky in places. I was recording and had the rendering paused. But, I was still seeing a hit in the viewer. My i5-6600 did pretty well considering the load on the system.
See the thread in the SL Forum, Ebbe Altberg talking at the Third-Party Dev Meeting.
Second Life and the CLOUD
Inara Pey has apparently sat through a dry video of Tara Hernandez’s, Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Lab, presentation at Amazon’s Las Vegas promotion for their services. She has written about it here: SANSAR AND SECOND LIFE IN THE CLOUD: LL SPEAKS AT AWS RE:INVENT. The video is here:
That is a 34-minute video on YouTube. There are some gems in the video that interest Second Life™ people.
I had not realized the first iteration of SL used a graphics engine designed to circumvent the Windows graphics and go directly to hardware. This go-to-hardware was the early game-graphics optimization used by most of the industry. That is long gone. Now OpenGL is the optimization that interfaces with all the various graphics systems in use with SL.
Inara covers the main parts SL’ers will find interesting. But, the video is loaded with tidbits about Second Life and how they are changing away from the problems with ideas for Sansar. So, some seldom talked about SL things are described in the video.
There is about 10+ minutes of tech description on Sansar and how it works. And toward the end some words on how they plan to adapt Second Life for life in the cloud.
Second Life to Kill OpenSim?
Hypergrid Business has an article about what Linden Lab’s® move to the cloud may mean for OpenSim grids. By knowing what may happen to OpenSim we can infer what is likely to happen to Second Life.
David Kariuki thinks moving to the cloud will allow Linden Lab to run on demand regions. Meaning if no one is in the region, the region would spin down and drop out of the servers, go offline. When someone is on the grid next door or TP’s there, the region loads into a server and spins up.
The result is fewer servers would be needed, a huge cost saving in hardware and electricity.
It sounds to me like this could be a performance problem. Would we have to wait while the region spins up? Or can a region load fast enough we wouldn’t notice? We don’t know.
Linden Lab pours MILLIONS into Second Life
Ebbe Linden has posted in the SL Forum. The post is titled Celebrating 14 Years of SL with Investments in Its Future. In it, he says they have budgeted US$ Millions for the coming year, which is awesome.
He tells us about some of the coming changes to Second Life. Some we know about, others are new news.
One change is moving SL to the cloud. I have heard no details. So, exactly what this means is currently speculation. My speculation is this should significantly drop the cost of running the system. I imagine an empty region could be spun down and then only spun up as needed. Would this reduce land cost? It might.