Second Life News for June 2025

by

I thought I would try some AI scanning to gather SL news on a monthly basis. This is what I found for June.

SL Mobile: Grumpity and Philip point out that work continues on the rendering capability of mobile devices. There has been a 10x increase in people signing up and onboarding via mobile and Project Zero. Nice.

Homes: A new neighborhood, Ridgewood Enclave, is planned for Premium+ members. The availability of commercial regions tied to the new homes is mentioned. Also, some refurbishing of existing home themes is planned. Some PBR updates to existing themes is mentioned.

Gacha: OK, most of us know Gatcha is back. Some of use think that is a good thing. I have my doubts.

Read more

SL22B Exploring

by

Still undecided on what to do with this blog. I use it for historical reference. Stuff like when the Lab introduced mesh and other historical references.

I play more in Second Life now. I put more photos into the Second Life(TM) Forum. I only pay a ‘little’ attention to what is happen technically in SL. There are big changes; mirrors, PBR, new scripting language… and more. Still it seems to be happening at a slower pace, at least in my perception. So, I’ve left the technical reporting to Inara.

SL22B

I used the Destination Guide to grab a Land Mark (SLURL) to get into SL22B. I saw the Observatory listedd and was fascinated by the image. I wanted to see that thing. So… I go looking.

When I TP’d in I was at that location and the ‘thing’ was right there. But it wasn’t twisting and rotating as in the promo image. So I didn’t immediately connect the location and ‘thing’. Duh!

Jumping up and down on it did nothing.

Look for the pages links below.

Pages: 1 2

Problems…

by

2/4/2025 – Update. I finally took time to make a quick patch. There is more left to do. Basically PHP and Python updates make my thyme obsolete. I’ll have to decide if I keep the blog and update the thyme or move on. Decisions, decisions…

I don’t blog as much as I used to. So, I don’t keep the back side of this site updated as well as I should. Go Daddy hosting has an incentive to get customers to update. They charge more to let one run older versions.

So this is a quick update to avoid additional charges. I am not particularly happy with the look and most of my plugins no longer work. But the articles are readable. I can post new stuff… if I get round to it.

The problem is in the PHP version I was running. Also, I have some custom pages I built that need some code updates. Seems the new PHP (the software language that the site operates on) has some language differences to improve security. It has been long enough since I wrote my custom pages the less secure commands have progressed from ‘depreciated’ to ‘deleted’. Ouch!

I’ll be working on the site. Getting new versions of my plugins working and eliminating whichever one was crashing my site.

This will take some time.

You can find me in SL and on the SL Forum. I often post in Your Avatar. I think it would be fun to meet you there.

Christmas Shopping 2024

Firestorm Viewer Performance Numbers

by

October 22, 2024 the Firestorm Team released a new version of their viewer: 7.1.11.

I am running 7.1.9, their initial PBR release. I’ve had a few minor problems and it is a little slow. But not so slow as to be frustrating. If I were still playing in SL’s combat games, I would probably be complaining. The FPS numbers and comparison to a previous version is here: Firestorm Viewer 7.1.9.74745 PBR.

I skipped the version 7.1.10. I wasn’t excited about it and… I have been playing with Alchemy Viewer.

The Firestorm blog is Announcing Firestorm 7.1.11. You can read more details there. And Inara has her review of the viewer up: Firestorm 7.1.11: DeltaFPS. So, I am only providing some empirical performance numbers.

LocationFPS v.11 DeskFPS v.9
Porch 512m30*51
Porch 128m45* 46
Green Room @ 2200m DD=128m112119
Nelsonia 4peps @ DD= 128m64
Arapaima 9peps @ 128m 55
Exhale Club 68peps @ 128m30

*Weird. Making measurements this time I noticed a difference. FPS numbers start low and S L O W L Y  build to a max. Getting to the max value took several minutes more than a couple of times. Also, when I switch away to another app the viewer gives up CPU cycles to the other app. A good thing… but coming back to the viewer I experience another slow build to the max FPS.

Also, one time I would get one set of numbers and another time a much different set of numbers. So, I got horrible numbers, OK numbers, good numbers, and better numbers. Also, switching away from the viewer app to another app had its oddities. Mostly the FPS would start recovering from the CPU conserving mode and return to something better. But on occasion I could not get the numbers to recover.

I was scratching my head on this oddity. I tried restarting the computer and running only the viewer. While I have a load of Windows background apps running that has always been the case. So, I think the change is in the viewer. Or… PBR sucks up all the performance… but that doesn’t explain the oddities I am seeing.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be experimenting as I play in SL. If I learn what is going on, I plan to update this article. And… there is an interesting new feature coming in FS. Scroll to the end. Look for the page 2 link…

Pages: 1 2

Optimizing Second Life Snapshots: Alchemy Viewer & Reshade Guide

by

I don’t write often these days. A couple of things have inspired me. One is ValKalAstra posting an interesting image. You can see it here on the Second Life Forum or on Flickr. For me this was a ‘how did she do that?’

The Second Life viewers, the Lab’s and third-party viewers, have filters for the Snapshots. Those are easy to use. To change the active render one has to get into tweaking a huge set of settings. Not so easy. And the sort of wireframe look in Val’s image was something I know I could not do in Firestorm or Black Dragon.

For whatever reason I though this was done in the Alchemy Viewer. I didn’t know about Reshade. Reshade is an add-on app for video games. It used to add image filters to a game that does not have them. So, the wireframe looks of the image intrigued me. I though Alchemy had some new twist on wireframe mode. So… I got the viewer.

ReShade Image from Alchemy
Playing with ReShade in Alchemy Viewer

Alchemy Viewer for Second Life

Alchemy is a third-party viewer. You’ll find it listed in the SL Wiki’s list of Third-Party Viewers. See the Details.

I downloaded and am running Alchemy Beta 7.1.9.2492 (64bit).

Alchemy supports RLVa and uses version RLV v3.4.3 / RLVa v2.5.0.2492.

Read more

Pages: 1 2 3

Firestorm Viewer 7.1.9 Problems

by

The latest release is causing many people lots of problems. For others no problems. I find this version of Firestorm Viewer to be the most problematic viewer from Firestorm that I’ve used in a long time. But I remember the OLD DAYS when viewers were seriously buggy.

So, what problems are people seeing with the Firestorm Viewer?

Slow render/rez – I see a bit of that. While I think Firestorm is generally faster at rezzing scenes often something just doesn’t rez. And it never rezzes or I don’t have enough patience, which sucks. But there are two quick fixes… or may be that is two steps to a fix… Press Ctrl-Shift-R twice to pop in and out of Wire Frame mode. This will usually cause everything to render correctly, scene and avatar.

Once in a while changing to Wire Frame won’t cause the avatar to render fully. Some times everything but the avatar rezzed fully. In these cases or just to restore the avatar Rebake the Avatar: top menu Avatar->Avatar Health->Force Appearance Update (Rebake) or Ctrl-Alt-R.

One or both of these steps should get you easily rendered and avoid restarting the viewer.

Viewer Crashes/Freezes – These are difficult to pin down. Before you start trying to troubleshoot the problem make sure your computer is in good shape and working well.

First, run the System File Checker built into Windows, 10 and 11. Do that by opening a command window and running the SFC command as an administrator. See the images on this page. Also, you can search for Windows 10 System File Checker for more detailed information and step by steps.

Open Command Window

Enter the command: SFC /SCANNOW. This will take 5 or 10 minutes to run. It will find any problems with the Windows System Files that may be causing problems. It will end and tell you; all was OK, it fixed things, or is could not fix the problems. If the problems are such it cannot fix them, then you need to search for: fixing Windows [10/11] DISM. This is a bit more complicated but it is still only a couple of commands and Windows does the work. The result is almost as good as a reinstall of Windows without the annoying need to reinstall apps.

Make sure your Windows install has all the updates installed. Type: Windows Update.

Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date. You can search for: how to update Win[10/11] graphics driver [your card’s brand name].

Click below for more…

Read more