Second Life – Page 497 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Server Update Week 15

2011/04/13 by Nalates Urriah

Tuesday saw the usual rolling restarts and new software. Again it is bug fixes and a few new features. Users are unlikely to see any changes. With a stop watch one might… might… notice a speed up in inventory download speed. Parts of the gzip feature have made it to the main grid and some … Read more

Second Life Concurrency

2013/03/032011/04/13 by Nalates Urriah

Well… everyone is talking about the decrease in the number of concurrent users. I have certainly noticed the currently online numbers displayed at login decreasing. In 2009 I was seeing 80,000 and climbing. Now it is rare to see 70,000 and common to see around 40,000 to 65,000 with the median generally reported to be about 52,000. So, is SL dying? Is the sky falling?

Dolphin Viewer 2.5.6.15005 Review

2011/04/132011/04/12 by Nalates Urriah

A new version of the Dolphin 2 Viewer is out. The released planned for this slot was to be a 2.6 version. But, things change. Bug fixes, features, and the load of changes coming out of the Lab seems to have pushed this release out the door. It may be several weeks before we see the next release. There is lots to upgrade going into 2.6. The Development viewers are coming out in 2.7 versions.

Second Life Regions Closing

2011/04/11 by Nalates Urriah

I see today that AM Radio’s regions are going to close in 6 months. (See: AM Radio Regions Closing Down In 6 Months – by Daniel Voyager) It seems every week or so some region is closing. I have to wonder how many regions are closing and if the closings are a Second Problem or just the natural evolution of the grid.

Metaverse publishes stats on the number of live regions available on SL. Since December 2010 the number is static. Growth can be said to have reached plateau… or stopped depending on how one wants to spin it.

Second Life 2.6.3-225584 VS2010 Review

2011/04/10 by Nalates Urriah

The tools used to build our viewers are not the hot topic among most residents. However, the VS2010 in this latest project test build is all about the tools. VS2010 means Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Getting to where this tool can be used to develop the SL Viewer has been a main topic in the viewer development circles. Why is this important to you?

It will be a big deal for those with newer computers. First, the VS2010 is a tool much like Microsoft Word but for programming. Developers use it to write programs. It enables links to programming libraries, like Word has Thesaurus and Dictionary. It has syntax checking that is very much like spelling and grammer checking for word. Imagine if you could literally not read a document, it scrambled all over screen, just because a comma was in the wrong place. That is the level of precision with which programmers must write. VS2010 provides lots of help and support. While that is nice for the programmer, the benefit seen by residents is faster updates and bug fixes.

Second Life Viewer Beta 2.6.3 Released

2011/04/07 by Nalates Urriah

I previously wrote in the server update that gzip was added into the inventory download process. At the time there was no viewer that used the feature. The change over to the new HTTP with gzip inventory download is the new feature in this Beta release.

This version also has the avatar physics, bouncy boobs, bellies and butts. It is officially labeled Enhanced Body Physics. See: Enhanced Avatar Physics courtesy of Bea Linden.

There are some boring bug fixes in this version.

There are some known problems too. A big one is the Crash on Start if English is not the default language. Also, tattoo layers lost the ADD choice. They are WEAR only. That is a bug. Some body parts may disappear… guys be careful… a relog should fix the problem.

If you compile your own viewer, you can now compile using VS2010.