Second Life

Things about SL

#SL and Scale

by

Or how tall are you? Really? There is a great post by Penny Patton in the SL Forum. See: A Matter of Scale – How scale affects content creation and land ownership in Second Life. Every builder should stop by and read the post. I doubt many people think this through before they build.  

#SecondLife Server Updates Week 24.5

by

The week of 6/12-18 there was not a main server roll out. The week of 6/19-25 we did get a roll out on the main grid. The roll out had the group chat fixes.

Group Chat

Group chat has been receiving attention. The Utility Servers were updated over a week ago. Now the region simulators are updated, a minor fix.

One of the Group Chat Problems found was the Utility Server for chat had to send chat messages to multiple people in a region. If ten people were in a region the server had to send ten copies of chat updates to the region. This change allows the utility server to send the sim one message and the simulator distributes the chat updates. This sim change is not something that makes a lot of difference to most users. But, any load taken off the utility servers running group chat helps.

The previous update to the utility servers has made a significant difference to group chat for everyone. Enough so that this alarming JIRA was filed: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-7031

Group Chat Performance

The above image is a plot of chat messages (messages + group status updates) per minute sampled over one day. Each dot is one of the 16 utility nodes.

Read more

KirstenLee S21(8) RC3 Released

by

RC2 was out 6/9. RC3 fixes some of the problems with RC2. One change is this version of S21 is very stable. No crashes after hours of use. There is no typical announcement on KirstenLee’s blog. But, the new download link for the RC is on the home page.

Camera

There are some ‘camera’ issues that show up when one is trying to select objects for editing or for camera zooms. I’ve seen problems for some time in most series 2 viewers. But, this is far worse. A click to select something often selects the object behind it. Other times selecting an object launches the camera to some odd new position. Research is on going to see whasup with that.

Speed

I’m seeing some odd results on FPS (Frames per Second) rates. In my cottage or places with few avatars I get good FPS. In places with lots of avatars I drag down to 9 to 12 FPS. Even in a shopping mall with lots of textures but few avatars, I see good FPS, typically 15 to 25 FPS.

Some are seeing good FPS even when there are large numbers of avatars around. I may need to mess with my settings.

Read more

Imprudence 1.4.0 Beta 1 Release

by

Imprudence has released the first beta of Imprudence 1.4.0. This has been the Experimental version most of us have been using for some time. So, it doesn’t look any different than previous versions. However, this release represents a massive amount of effort.

If you are still using Imprudence 1.3, it is time to upgrade. If you are on Apple/Mac, there is still an image upload issue. Otherwise, there  are about a gazillion bug fixes and new features.

Mesh

This viewer has no mesh support nor does it render mesh objects.

Outfits

The series 2 viewer outfits are not supported. I simply never change clothes while using Imprudence. Changing clothes while in Imprudence seems to create problems for me. That may be an Imprudence/OpenSim thing.

Read more

Something New Coming

by

The Lindens have been dropping hints that new features and wonderful things are coming. Hamlet at New World Notes (NWN) is curious about the idea in an article today. See: What’s Linden Lab Working on Beyond Its Peaceful Foyer? Unfortunately he has no hard information for what the new and wonderful coming changes may be.

Second Life Browser Based
Second Life Browser Based Viewer

However, his readers do have ideas and they are posting them in the comments. Of course everything written is speculation. The speculation ranges from horrible doom to creative. Some of the suggestions, I think are interesting, for what may be coming are;

 

Read more

Firestorm Features Survey

by

The Firestorm Development Team is running a survey on which features are most popular. See their blog post: Firestorm Feature Survey. The actual poll… survey… can be found here: Firestorm Features Survey. The survey ends Tuesday, June 28 at noon. See the survey results: Firestorm Survey