Viewer Stability 2013-23

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The Third Party Viewers List is ordered by crash rates with the highest crash rate last. It is interesting to look at this list and see which viewers are better or worse from previous weeks.

Yesterday the list was updated. Surprisingly Firestorm lost its first place position. That needs some explaining, because I think Firestorm is the most stable viewer going.

First off Radegast holds first place in the list. BUT it is a non-graphical viewer. It is a text only viewer. So, it lacks most of the code that has problems, the 3D rendering pipeline. So, I don’t count it.

Yesterday the SL Beta Viewer 3.6.0 moved ahead of Firestorm 4.4.0. Well yay! Linden Lab. Congratulations.

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Best Building Practices in Second Life

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With the coming of Materials, being able to use normal and specular maps, how one builds is more important. Knowing or not good building practices is going to determine the experience in Second Life™. Poorly built items, whether clothes or objects, have a detrimental effect on our frame rates.

Penny Patton Efficient Building
Penny Patton Efficient Building

The SL Wiki has a page about Good Building Practices. There is lots of good information there. But, a significant number of creators ignore the guidelines or don’t know about them. Or… it may be they don’t understand them.

Penny Patton has a new article up titled: Building a Better Second Life – Tips for squeezing both better performance and more detail out of SL through efficiently made content. This article is something that every person building in Second Life should read and learn.

Penny covers using textures and scripts. She gives examples of what efficiently built things look like. Her M&C fantasy build (some sections are NSFW) is an example of efficient building practices. Penny does get to her ubiquitous near mantra ‘build to scale.’

I believe her points are keys to a better SL.

Euclideon Geoverse

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Every so often I see an update on voxel technology. Jo Yardley caught a new update from Euclideon. I first saw a demo of Euclieon tech a year or two ago. At the time it was very impressive. Today the recent announcement of Geoverse is even more impressive.

[youtube Irf-HJ4fBls]

About a month ago I mentioned this tech in relation to Philip Rosedale’s High-Fidelity project. It is supposed to be using the voxel tech Euclideon is developing. (See: High Fidelity News) The comments in this new video about lag may be the reason that Philip’s people think they can build a no lag virtual world.

Geoverse would seem to suggest it is possible.

 

 

Second Life News 2013-23

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There no rollout to the main channel this week. None of the release candidates made it through testing.

Release Channels

Blue Steel and Le Tigre will get a new package for testing. This package addresses the disconnection issue many have been experiencing. (BUG-2564) This is the one where numerous avatars in a region would suddenly be disconnected. It also included LSL scripts using HTTP connection being disconnected too.

Plus there is a crash mode fix.

Magnum will continue to run the package from last week: The Interest List improvement for faster rendering of a never be for visited region. The only change to this package is the adding of the disconnect-fix-code also running on Steel and Tigre.

SL10B Contest

The Lindens have announced a contest as part of the celebration of SL10B. The first place prize is a Homestead Region for four months. Second and Third place winners will get a homestead region for 2 months.

The Linden Lab Logo for SL10B
The Linden Lab Logo for SL10B

You’ll find the rules and guidelines here: SL10B Celebration Snapshot Contest. 

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5 Minutes Isn’t Enough

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Drax’s World Maker’s video interview with Rod Humble is great. But, there is much more information than what Drax could fit into five minutes. Also, video is suited more to right-brain thinking, at least as Drax made it, a blend of words, sounds, and images. I find it an emotionally uplifting video that is invigorating.

Jo Yardley's Blog
Jo Yardley’s Blog

But there is more left-brain information that came from the interview. There are things that fit into the “If this… then what about … and mustn’t this mean…” thinking.

The additional information can be found in an article published on Jo Yardley’s blog: The Rod Humble Interview. 

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Message in a Bottle 2

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Prim Perfect has an article about Dizzy Banjo’s project for SL5B: Message in a bottle.

[youtube t_Pz6M9p_Og]

Dizzy is preparing something similar for SL10B. You can be part of Message in a Bottle 2 with a voice clip, 10 seconds or less. To learn more vitist Dizzy’s blog: Virtually Dizzy. Dizzy provides suggestions on what software you can use and how to submit it.

Dizzy plans to use a new trick for presenting the audio clips. Dizzy says it won’t be messages in a bottle but something fun. I suppose we will have to wait to find out what.