Second Life and Virtual Worlds
From the Third Party Dev Meeting 2016-16… Oz Linden starts off saying there isn’t a lot of new stuff. But, news-wise there was quite a bit and I found most of it interesting.
Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 4.0.4.314012 – Oz describes this version as having lots of annoyances fixed. It hasn’t changed since my previous Tuesday update.
That little baby girl grew up into the cutest DOLL… that is sort of what has happened with Second Life™ Jelly Babies. Earlier I wrote about the name Jelly Babies being trademarked. So, the Lab is not going to use that term for muted avatars. And I certainly am not going to call muted avatars muted avatars… ugh. That give no one an intuitive sense of what is being talked about.
I follow Mesh Body Addicts, a blog by LilDaria resident, Daria for short, which is all about mesh bodies and clothes. Love it. Daria is using the term JellyDolls in place of the trademarked Jelly Babies, which I like. So, we may have a new name for them.
If you have found the new WordPress panel for editing URL/Links annoying join the crowd. Add your voice to the thread at: New WordPress URL Popup Causes More Work.
This change is a serious annoyance.
Lots of people do not want the links leading off site to replace their page with the destination page. I’m one of those. So, I have do a bunch of clicking to tell the link to open a new tab. It was bad enough with the previous panel/popup. Now it is way worse.
If you too are annoyed, please drop by the WP site (link above) and add your voice.
I learned more about using Bento bones and animating after the meeting than I did during the meeting. The meeting lasted about 45 minutes. Discussion after the Lindens went back to work lasted over an hour. I broke my coverage into 2 videos. The meeting part is in the video here: Second Life: Project Bento 2016 Week 16. The ‘after’ meeting part is here:
I’ve trimmed the hour plus video down to 45± minutes by removing parts where there is no voice. This means you’ll notice some video jerks where I trimed out parts. You’ll have to watch the chat window too. You’ll hear some voice responses that are answers to questions and statements made in text/local chat that got trimmed out. You can see the text, you just don’t have to wait while it is typed.
In Second Life we run on OpenGL. Most Windows games run on DirectX. Microsoft has announced DirectX 12. It will essentially make NVIDIA 500 series and older cards obsolete. To use DX12 you’ll need a 600 or newer series card. This video explains what is happening. OpenGL is not left out.
It looks like ATI/AMD is making a replacement for OpenGL called Vulkan. It sounds like Vulcan is targeting more devices than DirectX 12. I expect to see Vulcan working on an Android mobile device way before DX12. I still have serious doubts we will see real time 3D render of good quality on mobile devices in the near future.
So, is the Lab planning to upgrade SL to Vulkan? I don’t know. I’ve asked. Vulkan is open source.
Word is OpenGL will still be developed. I think that odd. OpenGL is referred to in one place that came up in my research as a high level API, higher than Vulkan. The basic geek speak uses high and low to refer to how close you are to the hardware… the closer you get to the hardware the more programming you have to do. With higher level languages the more the language does for you.
Think of it this way… a low level addition command would be written as: place this value in Reg#1 and this other value in Reg2 then preform an XOR operation on then and place the result in Reg3 then move Reg3 to memory as variable X. A high level language would let you write the code as A + B = X and handle all the registers, operations and moves for you.
There are good reasons for using higher and lower level languages and API’s. But, generally we want API’s that produce more overall efficiency. From the other stuff said about Vulkan I would think it should be called a higher level API…. it does way more for the programmer. Whether it is higher or lower it is the next gen descendant of OpenGL.
For those of us playing in SL this means little today. But, suggests that play in Sansar will mean we will need a 600 series card or higher.
If you are looking for more details start at the Wikipedia: Vulkan API.
This week I made it to the whole meeting. There is a request for merchants with products using the new Bento skeleton to join the Torley in make the feature announcement. This an opportunity for those helping with the Project’s development to get recognition and early promotion of their goods. Tentatively they plan to start shooting the video in a week or two. So, be at next Thursday’s meeting.
Also, there was a good conversation after the meeting. I have it in another video, which will be up later. I learned a lot in that conversation. If you are planning on working with Bento, you’ll want to listen to it.