Project Sansar – August 2016 & January 2017

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Jo Yardley covers a recent Ebbe Altberg interview: Ebbe Altberg interview about SL & Sansar which is going public next January. The original is here: Episode 7, Ebbe Altberg, Virtual Reality Snowball Champion.

Jo Yardley - Interview Coverage
Jo Yardley – Interview Coverage

I found two interesting points. In the early testing they ran into problems with users getting dizzy. Recent testing shows they have eliminated that problem. I suspect as people are so different there will still be people that get dizzy or suffer simulator sickness. But, in general people will have a good experience. The author got to visit Sansar and thought very well of the experience.

The other is that there will be a group entering Sansar in August 2016, by invitation, from those that have signed up. Then Sansar will go public in January of 2017.

I suspect I’ll only make it into Sansar in January. But, that is only 5 months or so away.

Listening to the audio I found the interviewer thinks somewhat as I do that for sometime VR is going to be a bit primitive and rough around the edges. Its going to take some time for it all to come to gather.

Nvidia Titan-X Pascal

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August 2, 2016 Nvidia released their top of the line video card the Titan-X. There is a previous generation Titan-X. To distinguish between the previous gen and the current generation we have to include the architecture descriptor; Maxwell (previous) or Pascal (new).

How much faster is this Titan-X Pascal than the previous one? Almost twice as fast.

You can see the card is about 30% faster than the GTX1080. 

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Second Life Third Party Dev Meeting 2016 w32

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Viewers

The main viewer has updated to version 4.0.7.318301. This was formerly the Maintenance RC Viewer. There are a lot of fixes in this update. Oz Linden points out that work is being done to prevent viewer crashes. This release dropped the crash rate by 4%, which is huge.

One fix in that line is in the image processing. When video memory filled up and there was no way for the viewer to handle the texture… it crashed. Now it will simply skip rendering the texture and color the object gray. 

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Nvidia vs AMD: Serious Problem

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In the last 10 minutes or so of the Third Party Developers’ Meeting the problem with AMD video cards problems came up.

It seems especially the R series of video cards (RX480 etc.) have a problem with OpenGL. See: BUG-20057 – Visual Artifacts with ALM enabled on some AMD graphics cards.

AMD Screen Artifact - No Fix
AMD Screen Artifact – No Fix

This bug is dependent on screen size. So, you may be able to escape it by changing your viewer window size or screen resolution.

There is a thread in the AMD forum about the problem. It is way techy. See: OpenGL display artifact on W7100.

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Project Bento Update Video 2016 w32

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This is an interesting update on the current bugs and progress on the head bones. Matrice Laville, the programmer for AvaStar speaks about several issues.

One of the people working with Bento is totally frustrated. She provides us a textbook case of victimization and projection. Wow. She is having problems with the Bento Collada file in the SL Wiki dated Aug 6th. Even after several people downloaded and checked the file during the meeting then told her the file was complete but had bone position issues, which were talked about earlier, she couldn’t hear them. 

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Hardware: DIY Power – How much?

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In building my new computer I needed to verify my calculation of the amount of power required. What size power supply do I need?

By my, mostly in my head, calculation as I selected parts I need 500-550 watts at peak demand. I select a continuous supply rating based on my anticipated peak demand. While power supplies have built in the ability to handle peak loads that exceed their continuous rating and that often gets advertised, that ability usually comes from considering what all the parts can stand when pushed to >100% of their design spec.

Computer Power Supply
Computer Power Supply

Humans can walk all day at 5 mph. But, we can only run at 20 mph for a few minutes. Sort of the same thing with computer power supplies. At some point in time they overheat or an individual component overheats by too much and the unit fails. Some units have anti-self-destruct protection, which reduces the power supplied to save itself. And what does that do to the rest of the computer? Nothing good. 

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