Second Life: Ebbe Altberg Interview

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I’ve seen several people blogging about this week old interview. I finally got around to reading the interview. There isn’t much new in it. I did not expect there would be. If you’ve been following Ebbe and Second Life, you know most of what he said. But, there are a few new things that are interesting and probably new details that I’ll touch on. Mostly interesting is the insight into what Ebbe is thinking.

The interview is here: Linden Lab explores VR for its next-generation virtual world (interview)

 

Blood Letters Murder Scene
Blood Letters Murder Scene

We know the Lab has been hiring software engineers for SL2. But, did you know they plan to hire 30 or 40 more? They currently have 190 employees. Ebbe says the number of employees has remained flat as they hired and dropped employees from projects they dropped. They plan to grow to 220±.

I think it safe to say some of the staff from released projects probably transferred  over to SL2. He makes it clear they have taken people from the Lab’s various projects and focused them on SL2. 

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Second Life News 2014-47

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Group Chat

Simon Linden Tells us:

Yes some of the chat servers have been having troubles in the last few days.   I’ve been looking into that … the code running there isn’t super new, and the outages might be timed with some of those [hardware update] restarts.

In any case, there is an update soon for the chat servers, and already another in the pipeline.

Servers

Photo Shoot w/Mr. S
Photo Shoot w/Mr. S

This week there are no rolls for either the main channel or RC channels. Next week is a no change week. So, I expect no roll outs that week either.

We can expect tweaking to the CDN system. This week whatever they are doing that requires multiple restarts is ongoing.

The main reason for no updates is the hardware updating requiring the restarts scheduled for this week. Estimating time for any individual update or the group is difficult as Simon says, “We also have to actually open up the server box and look inside to see if it needs an update, so it’s random how long each one takes.

This shouldn’t do anything grid-wide, aside from extra region restarts.” 

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Second Life: Blood Letters Day 7

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There’s not many spoilers here… but there are some technical things that may interest those playing Blood Letters.

The day numbers are my days playing, not month days or game days. The Letter numbers I use are the game day/letter number.

Blood Letters 2014 - Letter 17
Blood Letters 2014 – Letter 17

Day 7 (Monday) – Letter 17: Oh no. I’ve lost a bodyguard to the perverted murderess. So, I am off to Warm Animations, the home of a romantic animations place. The link takes me to the a place in front of the store. The hint is clear on where I should be. Plus, whenever you TP to in this region you are going to the main landing point. 

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Second Life Performance: Render Muting

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We have and are hearing lots of complaints about how some number of avatars lag our Second Life™ experience. If you open up the Viewer Stats (Ctrl-Shift-1) and look at server performance (Simulator: Time Dilation, Sim FPS, Physics FPS, and others), you often find the region server performing well; TD=0.999, Sim FPS=44-45, Physics=44=45. Even with lots of avatars in a region. So, it isn’t region/simulator lag that is the problem. Over the last year large steps in reducing simulator lag have been taken with CDN being the most recent. The lag is now in our viewer.

Render Auto Muting
Render Auto Muting

There is a value the viewer displays labeled Avatar Render Cost (ARC). In November 2011 I wrote about ARC and how to use it, as it had recently changed. (See: #SL ARC Replaced) Things have changed since then. We now find the value displayed in two different ways. Try: Top Menu->Advanced (press Ctrl-Alt-D if you do not have that menu item)->Performance Tools->Show Draw Weight for Avatars. This will display a colored text above avatars showing their ‘render cost’. This does clutter the screen, but makes it easy to see which avatar has what ARC. 

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Week of Restarts

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This morning the first question asked of Oz Linden on the Open Source User Group was; What’s with the restarts? See: Scheduled Maintenance. Oz was all ‘what restarts? Oh… those restarts…’ Saying:

They’re doing some checks on some of our server hardware that requires that they take them down briefly.  I don’t believe that all regions will be affected, but I’m not sure.

So, we aren’t really sure what they are checking. It may just be they are giving the gerbils their flu  shots.

Blog: Pictures Back

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I as posted earlier, I moved the blog and my other sites from a Windows to a Linux server. That borked my image links. I did an SQL REPLACE today To fix ALL the image links in the blog. They should all be appearing now. Please let me know if you see any that are not displaying.