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.

Second Life: Blood Letters My Day 3 to 6

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I didn’t make it back to Blood Letters Thursday. So, I was catching up Friday, Saturday, and today, Sunday. Day numbers here are NOT game day numbers. They are the days I’ve gotten to play. The previous posts are here; Blood Letters My Day 2 – Second Life and Blood Letters Play – Second Life.

Blood Letters 2014 - Cute Avatar
Blood Letters 2014 – Cute Avatar

This set of posts is not so much about clues to help figure out the game as it is tips about the wackiness of Second Life and the viewer problems that can make playing Blood Letters frustrating.

The Letters and Places

Day 4 (Friday) – Letter 13: A new letter took me to Pouncival where NanTra, an animation/pose shop, is located. Again LoD is a problem in finding the clue. I missed the business card on my first pass through. The hint got me to the right place. The Rich Daddy turns out to be Michael Greene and his state is probably no surprise.

Pay attention to the animation names.

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Server Move

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Some of you will have noticed the site was a mess for a few hours. I had done an update to WordPress and it did not go well. Go Daddy suggested we move from my Windows Server to Linux to solve some problems. I had been wanting to do that for some time. So, I swallowed and we went for it.

In the move they made a typo. It took a couple of hours to figure out what went wrong.

You’ll notice that most of the images disappeared. I am still sorting that out. I use Shortcodes Ultimate to work with images. Something in that plug-in didn’t work well with the transfer to Linux. So, I’ll have to hunt that change that down.

Plus I have to run through all the ASP pages I used in other sites in this servers and change them out. But, that is another story.