Second Life News 2013-23 #2

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There is a bit of news coming from various places.

SSA

Server Side Appearance has a problem that the Lindens have been working on for the past week. Well, thinking about, I’m not sure they are writing code. I first mentioned the problem of corrupting modifiable eyes and skin when going in and out of SSA enabled and disabled regions here: SSA Coming Not Too Soon.

Corrupted Textures
Corrupted Textures

Some people say the problem is unique to the Phoenix Viewer. Latif Khalifa tried the SL Viewer 1.23, pre-SSA Singularity, Imprudence and Phoenix. But, only found the problem on Phoenix. Whirly Fizzle said. She could reproduce the problem on the SL Viewer 1.23. Whirly says old FS viewers were OK and did not have the problem.

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New LSL Functions Coming

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Kelly Linden let us know he is working on two new additions to the LSL (Linden Scripting Language). They are:

llReturnObjectByOwner

llReturnObjectsByID

The functions require the prim containing the script be owned by parcel owner or estate manager. The function only operates on objects on land in the same region/parcel as the script.

The ByOwner version takes a scope flag of PARCEL, PARCEL_OWNER or REGION (only usable by estate managers). They require a runtime permission (PERMISSION_RETURN_OBJECTS). This permission is *special* and the permission can be asked of and granted by group owners to operate on group owned land.

They do not handle encroachment.

The functions will return the number of objects returned OR an error code.

There is a throttle on the number of objects allowed in your parcel-pool per hour. If your parcel has a limit of 2000 you can return 2000 objects per hour.

llReturnObjectsByOwner cannot return objects owned by the parcel owner or estate managers.

llReturnObjectsByOwner will return all objects owned by the ID specified – for example Maestro could return all objects owned by Kelly on Maestro’s parcels with 1 call.

These should be a welcome addition to SL. It will make it much easier for land owners to deal with griefers. Kelly does not have an ETA, normal. But, since we are haring about them, they are close to candidate release.

Philip on High Fidelity

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There are little bits of information that popup all over. On cNET there is an article about an interview with Philip: Philip Rosedale’s Second Life with High Fidelity.

The author’s (Dan Farber) take in the article is what High Fidelity is has not yet been determined. Really? I’ve been hearing things that have me thinking it will be a virtual world with less lag, more detail, and a better user interface.

In this article Philip says High Fidelity will be a mix of virtual world and augmented reality that will surpass the real world. There are aspects of human interaction that Philip does not believe can be captured. Think: smell.

Philip also thinks that eventually mobile devices will be able to interact with large data sets… massively detailed virtual worlds. He is thinking 5 years out.

I will point out that nVidia is taking on building video processors for Android. That should lead to lower power consumption video chips and better graphics on mobile devices.

We also find out that Philip has 10 people working on the High Fidelity project.

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.