#SL Mesh Update Week 49

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Several interesting things are going on this week. One is the coming change in the Content Creation/Mesh Import User Group. The number of questions and problems with mesh is decreasing. Mesh is working pretty well. So, the Lindens plan to widen the focus of the group to include more general content creation. Expect to see a blog post at some point announcing the change in focus.

New Meeting Location in Borrowdale - A Return

Meeting Location

The location of the User Group (UG) moved from the ADITI grid to the main AGNI grid. The UG meeting agenda and location can be found in the Wiki on Second Life Content Creation/Mesh Import User Group.

The meeting time is Tuesdays’ at 12:00 noon. That can change so check the wiki for the latest information.

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Second Life Prim Twisting Tutorial

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Ener Hax at “i live in science land” posted about a tutorial on prim twisting. The tutorial was made by Ayumi Cassini and posted in 2009 on Ayumi’s blog as: The ultimate guide to prim twisting. It and the in-world Ivory Tower Library of Primitive are the best sources of information for building with prims.

A Single Twisted Prim - Amazing

In our early entry into Second Life’s age of enthusiasm for mesh building, prims are still the primary material for most building. Understanding what can be done with prims gives one insight into which is a better choice for any build.

Check out the tutorial. I’m impressed.

#SL Server Update Week 47 & 48

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This week has been a bad one for region restarts. There was a problem with the update rolled out to the main grid. The update had to be rolled back later in the day. This means most of the upgrades running in the release channels didn’t upgrade. So, what happened?

Roll Fail

Since this release has been through QA and came from a release channel, how did it get past the testing and yet be so bad it had to be rolled back?

Oskar and Steven Linden explained at the recent Beta Server User Group and Maestro in the Deploys thread in the forum what happened. It seems a region would crash and begin its restart, which is what it is supposed to do… well… not the crash part. The new problem triggered the simulator to restart all the regions in the host. In the logs this looked like an estate manager restart of the non-crashed regions. Since no one reported problems during the test week on the release channel and the restarts didn’t register as a warning in the grid monitoring reports, no one noticed the problem. It was too small to see in the release channel.

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Linden Realm Tools

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I suspect most of you know Linden Realms opened to the general public in Second Life. If you have been to a Realm you may have noticed new features. Teleporting has changes in that you walk into a Portal and it will teleport you into the game. This is a teleport on collision feature. It is a feature we have in OpenSim scripting. It is coming to Second Life. Exactly when or how it will work is unclear. The Lindens are considering how the feature can be used by griefers and how they may limit its abuse.

Linden Realm Game Portal

There is all so the HUD that attaches automatically. Many of us are pretty sure we do not want mall owners attaching shopping HUD’s to us when we visit a mall. So, the auto-attach HUD feature is also being considered in terms of griefing.

There are also auto-run animations. Obviously those can be used by griefers to be annoying. So, those have to be considered in terms of griefing.

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#SL Viewer Status Week 48

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Main & Beta

The current main viewer for Second Life is version 3.2.1.244864. Of course, this version is available from the main Second Life download page. Also on that page is the Beta version of the viewer, which is now version 3.2.2.244666. And the link to the wiki page Linden Lab Official: Alternate Viewers with development, project, and alternate third party viewers is there.

Currently Second Life viewers are running slow. In my previous article I was researching how to get more speed out of my viewer. The information you need to diagnose your computer’s performance is there. How to get a Faster Second Life

Direct Delivery

The Direct Delivery Project Viewer is currently at version 3.0.2.239555. This viewer is currently for use on the ADITI grid where the servers are setup to test Direct Delivery.

Project viewers tend to come in two versions, the current Project Viewer and the Latest Build version. The latest build is similar to what many call a nightly build version. Today the Direct Delivery project’s Latest Viewer page is not loading.

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How To get a Faster Second Life

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Several people in the forums are asking how to get better Frames per Second rates and why their computer is so slow running SL. Several are asking about upgrading their computer for Christmas or getting a new one. So, I decided to write a HOW TO specific to Second Life so I could avoid repetitive forum posts…

Speed Hump? - Image by TheDarkThing - Flickr

Even if you never want to open the computer’s case, this information will help you know what to have your computer tech upgrade for you.

First consider what we are working with, other games have better graphics and performance than Second Life. When comparing SL with other games, one is wise to remember that most things in the SL world are made by novice content creators. Render efficiency is not foremost in their design goals and that shows in SL frame rates. Take a look at: Typical Second Life Frame Rate Performance by Graphics Card/GPU. The page was last updated in August 2011. It shows an nVidia 470 getting about 45 FPS.

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