Nalates' Things & Stuff

50% Off Blueberry Stuff

2018/04/14 by Nalates Urriah

Yay, Blueberry is having a sale starting this April 13^th, a Friday the 13^th. Which in some cultures is considered an unlucky day. While there is no empirical data to suggest these Fridays are any worse than other Fridays, the superstition lives on.

So, six years in Second Life™… 13^th pretty neat time to have a sale. Happy Birthday Blueberry

Not everything is on sale there are some exceptions. You’ll see them listed in the promo image above.

Blueberry is popular. I love how the clothes fit my Slink body. The clothes look good. So, I expected the region to be full. The main region, Lenox & Blueberry, is limited to 20 basic account avatars plus 5± premium member avatars. The store is designed for as lag-free an experience as is possible given the nature of a store in SL. Adjacent is the region Palua. Its limit is about 30± basic members. Adjacent to Palua is Just Because. It has a limit of 25 or 30.

Internet, oh Internet… WTH?

2018/04/10 by Nalates Urriah

All day my Internet has been up and down. It is intermittent. Only gone for seconds, but that gets me logged off or wondering how long a page will take to load or whether it will load… Checking various sources… seems the Internet is having a bad connection day.

Second Life News 2018 w15

2018/04/10 by Nalates Urriah

Servers

This week there is no roll out to the main channel. It continues to run version #18.03.27.513831.

Blue Steel and Le Tigre won’t get a roll and will continue running version #18.03.29.513939.

Magnum will get an update Wednesday to version #18.03.29.513939.

All are Internal fixes…

Any regions running 14 days or longer without a restart will be restarted.

Second Life Viewers

The main viewer remains version 5.1.2.512803, which came on week #10.

The Great Bakes-On-Mesh Debate

2018/04/09 by Nalates Urriah

Well, we are getting an upgrade to the Server-Side-Avatar-Baking service. That is fact. What the service does is old news. The blogosphere was covering it in 2012. By August 2013 it was considered a success. (Ref)

So, what is the service, aka SSA or SSB? Prior to 2012 the classic avatar skin, tattoos, underwear, shirt, and jacket were composited into a single texture in your viewer and used to render your avatar. This is like the process we use in Photoshop, GIMP, and other image editors when we bake a set of layers into a single JPG or PNG image.

A significant part of the viewer’s render process was the baking effort. Once I was dressed and my clothes baked into an image safely cached on my computer, I was good. BUT… whenever I saw a new avatar, my viewer had to collect all their textures; skin, tat, bra, and top and bake their clothes into a texture to put on the avatar and render it. Everyone was doing that.

With 6 possible zones (ie., hair, head, upper, lower, eyes, skirt) to bake and 3 of them having 5 layers we were downloading a bunch of textures just for the classic body. So, something like 15 or 20 textures per avatar. In a region with 40 avatars… that is like 40×20=800 textures… if they were 1024 textures that could be as much as 3+GB of texture, admittedly in extreme cases. Plus, our viewer had to composite them before the avatar could be rendered. Each viewer was doing this and the region was coordinating the downloads.

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Other News in Second Life

2018/04/08 by Nalates Urriah

Talent, some we have in abundance in Second Life. I was hitting that ‘Next Unread Topic’ link in the forum and found My bad drawings of my worse avatars. This is a thread started in June 2017 and still running. People draw a cartoon sort of caricature of their avatar and post both a picture … Read more

Faster Computer for Cheap?

2018/04/06 by Nalates Urriah

Intel is pushing their Intel Optane® memory. It isn’t totally new. It has been around for a while (2017). However, the name makes it a bit ambiguous as to what it actually is. Is this memory? Yeah, but not really. If you see it you may think it is an SSD, Solid State Drive. Not exactly either as most of us think about memory and SSD’s. Optane memory is a module with memory that installs as if it were an SSD but speeds up your EXISTING SATA hard drives, the spinning disk kind.

The new buzz term you may hear is storage class memory. Optane is a step in achieving actual storage class memory. A RAM drive is sort of the idea here. But, can’t be considered ‘storage’ as it clears at power off. Massive amounts of memory are also too expensive to compete with large hard drives.

Some people buy SSDrives that connect to the motherboard’s SATA ports thinking they are going to get those reported super speeds for SSD’s. But, the SATA ports are a bottleneck. SATA was not designed to run at memory speeds. So, the SSD is only as fast as the SATA port. Screwed again.