Category Archives: Viewers

General Viewer Information

Second Life RAM Disk

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You probably know that most of the data in our computers is saved to magnetic media hard drives that have spinning disks inside. The disk has delays as the read heads must wait for the disk to rotate the wanted data under the read/write heads. It can take the heads 4 to 12ms to find the data. Then the data can only be read as fast as the next bit of data comes to the read/write head.

Inside a Typical Hard Drive

Inside a Typical Hard Drive

Newer solid state drives (SSD) have no moving parts. So, there is no delay waiting for disks and/or read/write heads to rotate into position. So, rather than waiting several milliseconds the data is available in less than a millisecond. If you put your Second Life cache on an SSD, you will have a faster more responsive cache… places you have previously visited will render faster.

While conventional hard drives are cheap and can store terabytes of data on a single drive, the SSD’s are expensive. The cost per gigabyte of storage is about 100 times more than for conventional hard drives.

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Firestorm Q&A Video Released

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The video of the Firestorm Team’s Q&A meeting has been released. Pantera Polnocy* made the video and posted it on YouTube. The video runs 2 hours 16 minutes. I left about 90 minutes into the meeting.

I won’t be providing an index. I have other fun things to do.

*If you try to find Pantera Polnocy in SL, leave out the space.

Firestorm Q&A Meeting Summary

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It looked like most of the development was there. The meeting was in voice. Questions were asked in local chat. Jessica Lyon was facilitating. She worked through the chat to answer most of the questions. Team members were also answering chat questions.

FS Q&A Meeting Feb 13, 2013

FS Q&A Meeting Feb 13, 2013

I think most of the audience was Firestorm (FS) fans. The meeting was civil and moved quickly without snide remarks or cheap shots, a nice thing for the team. It went well and was well done, I think.

Jessica took 15 to 20 minutes to start the meeting with news of coming things and to provide a warning.

As you might expect, the team is getting lots of questions about Server Side Avatar Baking (SSAB). The FS viewer will support it, eventually. For now FS is not yet merging the Lab’s SSAB code with the FS main build channel. Internally the team has merged to the Lab’s version 3.4.5. Jessica tells us that the internal version of FS is pretty bad off. It crashes often. The current release is far better than the current internal builds.

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Firestorm Q&A

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There is an announcement on the Firestorm blog about a coming Q&A meeting. See: Wednesday Question and Answer Meeting.  

Phoenix Firestorm Support Meeting Auditorium

Phoenix Firestorm Support Meeting Auditorium

The plan is to have Jessica Lyon moderating and developers available for questions. Everyone is welcome. However… the region will only hold 70 people. It is first come first served.

The meeting will be Wednesday February 13, 2013, at 1:00 PM SLT/PST (or 13:00 military time), which seems a bit ominous with all the 13’s. The location is in the region: Phoenix Firestorm Support.

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LOKI vs CHUI Good Review

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If you have not yet tried the Chat Hub User Interface (CHUI) take a look at Loki’s review: LOKI vs CHUI.

I like first users’ impressions of things. Nice review and lots of pictures of the interface as it is now.

Loki’s opinion of it and how he does nearby and group chat and IM’s is interesting. His feeling that he is likely to change how he has been doing chat to get the benefits of the new CHUI speaks well of the new interface.

Second Life Development Viewer 3.4.6 Released

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A new version of the Development Viewer came out yesterday: 3.4.6 (269073) Jan 15 2013. I figured this would be a good viewer to use for testing the Interest List improvements running in Blue Steel and Le Tigre RC channels. It is an interesting change.

To try the Interest List you need to find a shop in an RC region (Second Life RC LeTigre 13.01.04.268719). I tried:

  • Farstone – Prim build shop.
  • Mayfair – An all Mesh build region with mesh clothes shops.

Then I compared to a standard region in the main channel without the Interest List improvements.

  • Heels – The N-core shop – A prim build.

I find it interesting that this viewer is running at 15 to 75 FPS and probably averaging in the 30 to 40 FPS range. It did that in all three regions. I’m running one setting under ULTRA with Draw Distance at 128m.

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Mesh Building 2013-3

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Drongle McMahon is into mesh and does lots of experimenting. When I see his posts in the SL Forum I usually check them out to see what he has to say. I learn a bunch. The more I learn the more I cut from the cost of my mesh objects. So, while this article may get geeky it can save you Lindens.

Second Life Mesh Physics Problem

Aquila Kytori’s Illustration of Drongle’s Experiment

Recently he has been seeing oddities in the physics model’s cost affect on items using prim type physics, which you may need to use for some objects like walls with doors. There is a thread titled: Triangle physics weight – Cautionary tales, episode 2.

His post points out some problems with physics models and how one of his went from a Land Impact (LI) of 7,671 to 0.5… why is worth knowing and understanding.  Continue reading →