Second Life and Virtual Worlds
I’m in the process of trying to stop some content scrappers that that regularly hit this site and suck gigabytes of data as fast as they can. It drives the server CPU to 100%, eats bandwidth, and makes this site extremely slow.
In an effort to discourage scraping, I have disallowed ‘hot linking’ of images. If your blog has used images from this site via a link rather than making a copy of the image, let me know. I can allow your site access. Whether I will depends on how you used the images.
Hamlet has an interesting survey up in: In Survey, New World Notes Readers Overwhelmingly Interested in Trying Project Sansar This Year. 65±% want to check out Project Sansar. 23±% are undecided. 10±% are NOT interested.
Since Sansar will be free to play (visit), the 23% waiting to hear more makes no sense to me. I’m waiting to get in so I can see for myself. I’m far too jaded to trust anyone’s opinion more than my own eyes and firsthand experience. If you are waiting on more information, isn’t that an interest?
For weeks there have been rumors and some confirmations of bannings and sim shutdowns. The subject came up in a recent interview with Ebbe Altberg, Linden CEO. We didn’t learn much as the Lab doesn’t talk about bans or ToS violations.
Honour McMillan has more photos of Insilico here.
What Ebbe pointed out is that a person banned can say almost anything about the process. We have no way to fact check their claims because the other side, the Lab, is muted. Saying anything creates legal liability for the Lab, so…
Project Bento is moving ahead. The AvaStar people are working on building tools to help people animate the new avatar. You can see a video of where they are now. YOU HAVE TO CLICK…
This isn’t something we will have access to this week or next. We may not see the final release of Project Bento for some weeks and possibly months.
We may have the AvaStar tools soon. Building the animation tool is a simpler task than building a player that works with the new skeleton and the legacy version animations.
With the release if the Maintenance Viewer (4.0.2.312269) in week #11, invisiprims pretty much died their final death. Support ended for these critters in 2011. The code that renders them invisible has been in viewers up to this release. But, with this release something changed.
Inviziprims were prims with a special texture that caused things behind the texture to become transparent. Rendering-wise this was nightmare and problematic. The Lindens took advantage of a happenstance of the render pipeline to get them to work. I understand Crazy Mole once built a dry dock using invisiprims (the picture). Many boat builders used them to make the water inside their boats disappear.
Hamlet has a tip he got from Trinity Dejavu over on Reddit. See: Simple Trick to Speed Up Second Life Rendering.
The ‘trick’ is to turn off avatar rendering when you first arrive in a crowded place. (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-4) One press turns off avatar rendering and a second press will turn it back on. B turning it off your viewer can concentrate on rendering the ‘area’. Later when you render avatars they ‘seem’ to render faster because the viewer just has to render them as all else is already rendered.
This doesn’t make it any faster or actually reduce render time. Actual time to a final render is probably longer. But, psychologically we break the wait time into two parts with each being less than the single pass render but added together… more. Basically it is just easier on our patience.
But, I haven’t put a stop watch on it yet…