SL Speculation

Second Life to Kill OpenSim?

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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)
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.

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Linden Lab pours MILLIONS into Second Life

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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.

Cerridwens Cauldron_007
Cerridwens Cauldron_007 (URL)

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. 

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Content Creation UG 2017-04-27

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This video time compresses no-voice sections to reduce the total run time from 70+ minutes to less than 45. The Time Marked outline is below. We get a few hints of possible coming features.

Prior to the meeting officially starting, Medhue Simoni and Jessicaann Wrigglesworthwere were discussing how Appearance Sliders in Blender-AvaStar work with animation.

The meeting starts at TM: 03:00.

04:30 – Vir Linden working on the HTTPAssets viewer to reduce crash rates. Fixing a couple of bugs. New version out to RC this afternoon (Thursday – v5.0.5.325825). 

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Second Life: Will We Bake Our Mesh Body Avatars?

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The idea of baking mesh avatars has been a subject coming up in the Content Creators UG over the last couple of weeks. The idea is to change how mesh avatars work. If you don’t understand how a Classic body layers work now, this may be confusing. I’ll try to sort it.

Mechanical beauty
Mechanical beauty

Starting back a couple of years, the Lindens added Server Side Appearance baking (SSA). The Classic avatar is made of three separate parts; head, upper body, and lower body. The parts allow layering of textures placed on the Classic body. Sort of like sticking decals one a top another. 

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Second Life: Third Party Developer’s Meeting 2017 w7

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There are 2 Maintenance viewers showing on the Alternate Viewers page. One with render changes (Love Me Render Viewe), one everything else (Maintenance Viewer).

The non-render change viewer has about 44,000 hours of run time logged. It currently has a better crash rate then default viewer. But, it isn’t enough hours to know how stable it actually is or if problems are hiding. That usually takes about 100,000 hours.

The Hell`s Heaven 2.0-2
The Hell`s Heaven 2.0-2

But, if the viewer continues to do as well for the next couple of weeks, it may roll out.

Work is progressing on 3 fronts in the Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer; process management changes that alter how updates work, Work on the Mac side to get Havok (SL physics engine) support, and a new structure for updating CEF, the video player used in the SL viewer.

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Second Life: How are User Groups Doing?

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There is a page in the Second Life™ Wiki listing the official user groups. Currently there are four weekly meetings;

The Bento Development group has changed to the Content Creation group. There was another Content Creation/Mesh Import group that stopped meeting in 2014. The meeting transcripts for that old group are still available. They are not the same groups but, similar.

Imagination
Imagination

This week and next there are no Content Creation group meetings. The next meeting is February 17.

Currently the Content Creation group meeting in Hippotropolis is the most interesting. They are dealing with the challenges of creating Bento Content. As problems come up the Lindens look at ways to make fixes or changes and users work to figure out work-arounds and better methods for creation. Various Lindens attend the meetings. 

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