Second Life News 2018 w16

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Servers

Tuesday the main channel updated to version #18.03.29.513939. Internal changes…

Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum will update to version #18.04.09.514272. Internal changes and… a fix for BUG-214702 – LSL HTTP In returning fairly frequent 503 errors.

The capability for handling offline messaging is being worked on. The cap has been improved but there is a problem with Friend Requests. If one is sent while you are offline, there is no way to accept it that works. Being fixed.

Winters back.. Run!

Winters back… Run!

As it is the underlying system that allows Friend Requests can fail in several ways, it may take some time to fix the problem as it is a base system.

Oz Linden: The test channels [on ADITI] have the new improved throttles for LSL HTTP-in that I’ve discussed on the forums (and documented on the wiki)

Rider Linden: Those [test channels] are currently available on Aditi: Umbreon and the adjoining region.  But Mazidox may have put them on other regions as well. Continue reading →

News Bits 2018 w16

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EVE Online – Seems they are adding a solo-player versus environment aspect to the game. They have created an interesting backstory and weapons that for those participating in that play will greatly complicate the game. If I understand, this will to some degree level the playing field for new and experienced players. For details see: EVE ONLINE’S UPCOMING ‘INTO THE ABYSS’ EXPANSION SOUNDS INCREDIBLE.

let-me-back-in

let-me-back-in

There is a lot of news about events and new aspects of EVE coming out. Search over at Massively.

OpenSim – Hypergrid  Business is reporting a number of OpenSim worlds have been suffering outages. See Outages plague grids this month; Speculoos returns.

A couple of days this month I had problems connecting. A little checking revealed most of SoCal was suffering Internet attacks. Continue reading →

50% Off Blueberry Stuff

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Yay, Blueberry is having a sale starting this April 13th, a Friday the 13th. Which in some cultures is considered an unlucky day. While there is no empirical data to suggest these Fridays are any worse than other Fridays, the superstition lives on.

Happy 6th Birthday Blueberry!

Happy 6th Birthday Blueberry!

So, six years in Second Life™… 13th pretty neat time to have a sale. Happy Birthday Blueberry

Not everything is on sale there are some exceptions. You’ll see them listed in the promo image above.

Blueberry is popular. I love how the clothes fit my Slink body. The clothes look good. So, I expected the region to be full. The main region, Lenox & Blueberry, is limited to 20 basic account avatars plus 5± premium member avatars. The store is designed for as lag-free an experience as is possible given the nature of a store in SL. Adjacent is the region Palua. Its limit is about 30± basic members. Adjacent to Palua is Just Because. It has a limit of 25 or 30. Continue reading →

Second Life News 2018 w15

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Servers

This week there is no roll out to the main channel. It continues to run version #18.03.27.513831.

Blue Steel and Le Tigre won’t get a roll and will continue running version #18.03.29.513939.

Magnum will get an update Wednesday to version #18.03.29.513939.

•{ In the morning . . .

•{ In the morning . . .

All are Internal fixes…

Any regions running 14 days or longer without a restart will be restarted.

Second Life Viewers

The main viewer remains version 5.1.2.512803, which came on week #10.  Continue reading →

The Great Bakes-On-Mesh Debate

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Well, we are getting an upgrade to the Server-Side-Avatar-Baking service. That is fact. What the service does is old news. The blogosphere was covering it in 2012. By August 2013 it was considered a success. (Ref)

So, what is the service, aka SSA or SSB? Prior to 2012 the classic avatar skin, tattoos, underwear, shirt, and jacket were composited into a single texture in your viewer and used to render your avatar. This is like the process we use in Photoshop, GIMP, and other image editors when we bake a set of layers into a single JPG or PNG image.

...Wait

…Wait

A significant part of the viewer’s render process was the baking effort. Once I was dressed and my clothes baked into an image safely cached on my computer, I was good. BUT… whenever I saw a new avatar, my viewer had to collect all their textures; skin, tat, bra, and top and bake their clothes into a texture to put on the avatar and render it. Everyone was doing that.

With 6 possible zones (ie., hair, head, upper, lower, eyes, skirt) to bake and 3 of them having 5 layers we were downloading a bunch of textures just for the classic body. So, something like 15 or 20 textures per avatar. In a region with 40 avatars… that is like 40×20=800 textures… if they were 1024 textures that could be as much as 3+GB of texture, admittedly in extreme cases. Plus, our viewer had to composite them before the avatar could be rendered. Each viewer was doing this and the region was coordinating the downloads. Continue reading →

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Other News in Second Life

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Talent, some we have in abundance in Second Life. I was hitting that ‘Next Unread Topic’ link in the forum and found My bad drawings of my worse avatars. This is a thread started in June 2017 and still running.

People draw a cartoon sort of caricature of their avatar and post both a picture of the avatar and the drawing. Kind of fun.

Thou Shall Not Pass

Thou Shall Not Pass – Nal: Figured this should be under TALENT

Linden Home Insurance – This was a big sale on Sunday, 4/1. It’s Never Been a Better Time to Be a Premium Member!

Belleza – A new update came out this month. Belleza bodies now have Bento hands, a better neck seam for Lelutka heads. Updates are being sent or get a redelivery. Read more here: Belleza’s Bento Update is here!

Slink – There is a version v8 of the Slink Dev Kit. There are only small fixes between the earlier March update, v6, and a day or two later v7 update. The v8 update has a newer male body. The changes are ease of use type changes. Have the Kit redelivered to get the new update.

The source file has not been renamed. So, you can use the link in the email you received in March. It still works. Or get a new a link from the Redelivery Terminal in the Slink main store. Only the files inside have changed.

SL Jobs – Hamlet at New World Notes in Virtual Job Hunting In Second Life About As Daunting As Job Hunting IRL  points us to Lexy Neven’s video HOW TO FIND A JOB IN SECOND LIFE (2018 UPDATE). This is all the basics a newbie would need to learn.

Wild Orchard – This designer has a load of EXPENSIVE gowns. BUT… there is a sale on. Marketplace only. Try Wild Orchard Clearance. L$89 to L$149. Some nice stuff.

The Making of… – I found this an interesting video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6TX86uCOsw – Have no idea why this video only works as a link… :/

Natsumi Xenga is the artist. Her Flickr channel, PICSSR, and Google for all the other places her art pops up.

Faster Computer for Cheap?

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Intel is pushing their Intel Optane® memory. It isn’t totally new. It has been around for a while (2017). However, the name makes it a bit ambiguous as to what it actually is. Is this memory? Yeah, but not really. If you see it you may think it is an SSD, Solid State Drive. Not exactly either as most of us think about memory and SSD’s. Optane memory is a module with memory that installs as if it were an SSD but speeds up your EXISTING SATA hard drives, the spinning disk kind.

The new buzz term you may hear is storage class memory. Optane is a step in achieving actual storage class memory. A RAM drive is sort of the idea here. But, can’t be considered ‘storage’ as it clears at power off. Massive amounts of memory are also too expensive to compete with large hard drives.

Some people buy SSDrives that connect to the motherboard’s SATA ports thinking they are going to get those reported super speeds for SSD’s. But, the SATA ports are a bottleneck. SATA was not designed to run at memory speeds. So, the SSD is only as fast as the SATA port. Screwed again. Continue reading →