Viewer Performance

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A resident by the name of Nala Spires did some testing to see what affects the SL Viewer performance the most. You can read about his test and the results here: CPU / RAM/ VGA what sl likes More ? ((attempting to answer that ! ))

Nala Spires

She used this viewer: Windows 7 professional 64bit firestorm Viewer v4.1.1.28744

She also used FRAPS to benchmark the performance. FRAPS slows my system so I would expect the numbers to be a bit lower than normal.

A lot of the numbers make no sense to me. Since it is FRAPS I assume they were FPS numbers. But jumping around between 200+ and 20 seems a bit beyond anything that makes since to me.

I did read her Conclusions and they are interesting. Nala concluded  memory speed had a significant impact on performance. Buying FASTER memory did the most for performance.

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Disinformation

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Once up on a time, in the 1930’s, propaganda was a new mind control tool. The basic idea used by the National Socialist Party in Germany and Stalin’s Russia was to control the media. Anyone that did not parrot the party line was silenced. There was no investigative journalism. There was no questioning of the party line. To some extent we this playing out in Second LifeTM.

Understanding vs Disinformation – Image by: oskay – Flickr

At the time and even now a basic tenant of propaganda was and is the Big Lie. The bigger the lie the more believable it becomes. But, it cannot challenge what the audience already believes.  That is handled by small lies and innuendo.  With no presentation of countering facts and dissent propaganda takes root and moves into people’s belief system. It is a simple matter of repetition.

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#SL News Week 33

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Bandwidth

Bandwidth is a problem right now. Those using capped services and those having ISP’s with a strict abuse ToS are supposedly running into problems.

Server & Scripting 8/2012

The Magnum release channel seems to suffer the most. The worst case is when approaching the SW corner of a region that has 3 adjacent regions. Large draw distance aggravate the problem.

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#SL Mesh Update Week 33

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No new news on the Deformer. Karl, the one programming the Deformer, is usually a guest on MetaReality. Gianna that runs the show has been busy with other things. So, for the last 2 weeks no MetaReality podcasts and that means no updates on the Mesh Deformer.

Content & Mesh Meeting Aug 2012

The Redpoly Process is available for use, but it always was. AFAIK, no one has built a tool for use in Blender to make using the Redpoly process easy. So, that seems to be on hold.

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Second Life News Update Week 32

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I’m a little behind getting a Week 32 news update out today. But, other things to play with and write about.

Metareality’s Gianna is busy with something, so there has been no podcast for the last 2 weeks. The podcasts were our major source of first hand news on the Mesh Deformer. So, we have no clue where we are with this project.

Main Channel Roll Out

We have had lots of misinformation about this roll out and a load of misunderstanding. Fridays meeting of the Server/Scripting group got some more information out on the updates.

Server-Scripting UG Meeting

Andrew Linden tells there are a couple of things that crash regions running the new PathFinding/Havok 2012.1 software.  Falcon Linden has fixes that are being added to the server maintenance package. Those should be on an RC this coming Wednesday.

The two problems are rare, random, and not easily exploited by griefers or so it seems.

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#SL Vehicle Work-Around

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I found a work-around for some of the vehicle problems in the SL Forum. MB Robonaught wrote:

While many of the problems with vehicles used on Pathfinder have been addressed to help with older created cars, there remains a few issues that need serious attention for newer Mesh cars. As per SVC-8048 I have discovered that if a builder uses at least 4 contact points with linden ground where all 4 are set to Convex hull the car will not sink. A single prim does not appear to have the buoyancy to ride above the edge of the land no matter what the size of the prim.

For those that run race tracks, we’ve found that volume detect is handled in a much different way. When a collision occurs between a physical vehicle and a prim that uses llVomumeDetect prim, size matters. For example if a prim that measures 0.5m x 1.0m x 10.0m is used it will randomly trigger a collision event (PATHBUG-156) making the car suddenly jump or veer off to one side. A fix for this for now is to make the prims as small as possible, such as using a 0.05m x 0.05m x 10.0m prim size instead of the above. Another option is to drive over instead of through the prim. (Reference)

My friends that work with vehicles are experimenting to see what works. So, I’m not testing vehicles. I can fly and don’t really need a vehicle. I know for many the various vehicle experiences in SL are a primary reason to be here.