Second Life Pathfinding Performance

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I’m seeing a load of misinformation on Pathfinding performance. Back in May I wrote an article getting into Pathfinding (PF) performance. See: #SL Pathfinding Update Week 20. Scroll down and read the section on The Size of the Problem.

Navmesh w/X-Ray Enabled

PF has several different aspects. One could break it into two main parts. One is the part where PF figures out where everything is in the region and how to treat it, as what are obstacles and where are the paths. This is a slow and calculation intense process. But, it really only has to run at region start up, when a region’s ground topology changes, or things are built on the ground. It is sort of an initialization process.

Another part is when PF has to find what has moved, like a door opening. Things like a door that cut across paths are called cuts. PF has to find things that move and ‘cut’ the Navigation Mesh mostly referred to as Navmesh. The cut calc’s are very fast. They only need to revise the previously calculated Navmesh.

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Second Life Player Retention Week 32

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This is a long article. I think it may shape your thinking about Second Life™ and change how you deal with events in SL. So, I hope you read it and consider the concepts. Because while everyone has their ideas about Second Life™, ranging from; what it is to what it will become, what the Lab is thinking, planning, and doing… some basic paradigms have changed and few seem to have noticed.

The Inspiring Orientation – Learn to Fly

One area of thinking about Second Life important to a considerable number of users is what will retain more visitors, converting them to long term users, residents if you will. If you take a simplistic approach to things an answer and/or solution to player retention problems is likely to elude you forever, as humans as a whole are anything but simplistic.

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Looking Ahead Week 32

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Viewer Development

Viewer development process changes a bit. The Lab is changing the release process a touch too. More likely now we will see Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developers releasing betas and development viewers rather than production releases, the later being the stable version intended for general use.

The Lab has gotten much more metric driven about their crash rates. They are putting more effort into holding the lid on the Linden Viewer crash rates. This means code in the Beta and Development viewers are likely to see more testing and changes before new code makes it into the release viewer. That is good thing, but may slow things down.

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Groups Editing Update II

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Baker Linden gave us another update on how he is coming along with fixing group editing. There is hope but there are some issues to be solved too.

Baker said, “I’m in the middle of debugging the server code.

For announcements, I’m pushing legacy viewer support to the back burner.  The new group data format is similar enough that some things should show up in the group list (I haven’t tested that yet), but not everything  [will show up] ([i.e.,] currently group roles, and potentially other pieces of information).

 I could also be lying to myself about that as well; it may be totally incompatible — I’ll have to wait and find out when I get to the viewer side of this. This is why I’m pulling it off the list — if it works, fantastic; if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t.

I think it’s not worth the time spent to support legacy viewers; I’d rather ship the fix, allow TPV to support the new format and allow people to actually use this feature. It’s just a matter of reformatting the data, but that extra work means more time spent on it and not delivering the feature.

 I doubt it’s going to be that big of an issue.”

Remember. He is new.

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Second Life Viewer Change

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Hypergrid Business has an article by Maria Korolov titled: Linden Lab cuts viewer link to OpenSim. This is about a rather subtle change in the Lab’s viewer that creates a not so subtle result.

Error Message from Version: Second Life 3.4.1 (262681)

To use the viewer on a grid other than the Linden grids a small change is made in the desktop icon used to start the viewer. If you right click on the icon and select Properties, you will see a field labeled: Target. It is in the Shortcut tab. The instructions there tell the computer how to start Second Life™.

Knowledgeable computer users will recognize the text as a command line instruction. If you open a command line window you can type in or paste in the text you find there as a command and Windows will start and run the viewer.

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#SL Direct Delivery & Market Place

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I used to write regularly about Direct Delivery (DD). But, there just isn’t much known about what the Commerce Team is doing with it. None of the Lindens outside the Commerce Team know whats going on, or they won’t talk about it if they do. So, about all one can say is it sort of works and the Lab is working on it.

Merchants are frustrated. A number of them have gone looking for a better choice. Some have closed up shop. But, no one has built a better market place system. There is certainly a demand for a better market place.

My first article that carried the term Direct Delivery was published in mid April 2011: SL Market Place – Direct Delivery. Direct Delivery was on the verge of starting closed beta. In October of 2011 DD made it into the Le Tigre release channel in the main grid. (#SL Direct Delivery in Testing) In mid January 2012 DD made it to Open Beta testing on the Preview Grid Aditi. (Direct Delivery Beta Post) DD launched in mid March 2012. (Direct Delivery Launches)

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