Second Life

Things about SL

New Things Coming to Second Life

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There are several projects now making their way into the Release Channels and soon to the main grid. None are as fun or exciting as mesh, but they are things that should make SL faster and nicer to play in.

Faster Non-Texture Assets

Monty Linden attended Oskar’s office hours meeting. There is a small project (small code-wise) coming to the grid soon that will speed up non-texture assets moving through the system. Now is that cryptic or what?

Seems Monty means sounds and wearables. The change won’t be as dramatic as ‘Compression’ is for region crossing, but it is expected to be significant and have noticeable effects. The change has to do with making the process smarter, whatever that can mean in this case. Monty describes it as removing artificial slowdowns… which may have mostly to do with making the path things take through the system more efficient.

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Second Life Mesh Update 2011-01

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Second Life Mesh
Image by M_Shahab @ Flickr

Not much excitement in this area lately. Development is proceeding. The Lindens are not saying when they will arrive on the grid and more and more people are whining about that. The Lindens are not going to say ‘when’ until they have all the complex problems solved. I’m not expecting to see them hit the release channels for 2 or 3 months and I think that is optimistic. 🙁

Nyx Linden said in the last office hours meeting for mesh that they are looking at how to roll out mesh. Discussion is about a staged release. No real decisions so what is actually going to happen is up in the air.

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Second Life 40 Groups

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Updated 2010-01-13 – 6:15 PM – SLT

Several blogs are reporting that in some regions with some viewers one can now have 40 groups. There is no Linden Lab announcement out. So, this is testing and it may change at any time. Try it at your risk.

Update: So far there is still no official word. Speculation is that one going over 25 groups may lose those if Linden Lab turns the feature off. Whether the excess groups would be lots in alphabetical order or join order or something else is unknown. Actually whether they would be permanently lost or come back when the limits is raised is unknown.

Using Phoenix you will see the limit listed at the bottom of the Groups panel listed as 25. This does not mean that is the limit. That is just a cosmetic thing. One is supposed to be able to set the Debug Settings value in Phoenix40GroupsSupport to TRUE and see what limit the server is using (requires a viewer restart). Update: Phoenix is rumored to only support a max 40 groups. Whatever the case the next version (Firestorm) is planned to have better group support.

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Predictions 2011

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Predictions
Image by garryknight @ Flickr

I usually prefer to read others predictions rather than make them. The Dolphin Poll on users’ preference got me thinking and I have not seen many predicting a lot about where viewers are going. Of course that may be because it is a foregone conclusion. But, since this is my blog, I get to voice my opinion and ramble or rant on about it until you click away from boredom. Hopefully not. In this case I think I can put things in terms you’ll find interesting.

I think the viewer development path using series 1 viewer code is a dead end. At some point viewers based on series one code are going to go away. I think this year.

I think the series 1 User Interface (UI) will last longer may be even into next year, but it too will disappear. Simple, end prediction. Following are my reasons and thinking for why I believe this will happen.

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Dolphin Viewer Poll

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Lance is running a poll at the Dolphin Viewer site. It seems he is in the process of deciding which development path to follow, series 1 code and user interface (IU) or series 2 code and UI. Voice your opinion and vote. I think the results will be interesting, if enough people vote, and it … Read more

Dolphin Viewer 1.5.42.3627 Released

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This release is announced as a bug fix release with no new features or visible changes.

The fixes are to the Group Limit code (coming group limit increase) and texture caching.

Texture caching is a big thing. Some weeks ago the Snowstorm Team made some comments about finding some bugs in the caching code. I’ve wondered why, if we have a caching, does my cottage’s door have to download a texture each time I open the door. My door is one of those where the entire wall changes from solid to phantom and the texture changes from a closed door to an open one. The idea for this style door is to reduce the prim count. However, they used two textures that have to download. For better effect they could have placed both open and closed textures in one texture and just shift position to affect the change.

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