SL Speculation – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Content Creators UG Meeting 5/23/2019

2019/05/24 by Nalates Urriah

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.

Second Life and the Future of Apple Users

2018/08/21 by Nalates Urriah

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Designed is based on outdated thinking.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

2018/03/17 by Nalates Urriah

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 … Read more

Second Life to Kill OpenSim?

2017/09/18 by Nalates Urriah

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.

Brand New Colony (Sept. 2017)

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

2017/08/29 by Nalates Urriah

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.