Reddit & Sansar

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Seems Linden Lab® is ramping up marketing of Sansar™. Linden Lab’s Peter Gray is active on Reddit/r/sansar/. He announced that more people will be invited into Sansar this summer. Summer starts June 21… When that opens you won’t need and invite (really?) nor have to fill out a form. Just open an account.

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Yodai points out that we haven’t been hearing much about Sansar. Also, that some have purchased VR headsets just for Sansar. I know I got my Gear VR in part to be able to check out Sansar. Mostly to experience VR for me.

Peter in response agreed to answer questions. Some of his answers are interesting. For details read the Reddit. For a summary, read on.

The summer Sansar will work on Vive, Oculus, and PC’s. No word on Macs. Unofficially some are saying Sansar works in Bootcamp. There is no minimum system requirement yet. Informally they are saying basic Windows VR requirements. Since they say Oculus, I think/hope that includes Gear VR.

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How to Play PC Games on Gear VR 2017… Right…

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This is for NVIDIA owners… sorry AMD peeps. It’s a software limitation.

Stream Theater Start Screen – Post Setup

So, you want to see Second Life™ or any OpenGL game on your Gear VR. Well… you are going to have to learn a lot. You’ll also find few are telling you what the result of their tutorials or apps actually provides. Advertising hype is everywhere. If  O N E  PC or OpenGL game will run or even sort of run, then PC and OpenGL compatibility is the headline. Expect disappointment. I’ll explain what worked for me below.

Visual quality is the next point of disappointment. My S8 has a 4k screen. I normally run it at 2k to save battery. In everyday use, 2k is pretty much retina resolution, way sharp and crisp, beautiful. 4k is overkill. If I didn’t tell you which mode the phone was in, you probably couldn’t guess.

The Gear VR turns the phone up to 4k when connected. Most VR headsets are NOT 4k and thus most media is made for 2k and that media is fuzzy on my 4k screen. Looking at my 1k 24” Samsung monitor is way nicer.

Then there is ‘screen door’… This is a term from the VR-world. The headsets magnify the small screens to fill the field of view. In doing so the individual pixels start to be visually apparent. This creates an effect that looks a bit like looking through a window/door screen. With the S8 it is a very fine screen, but a visible screen. 

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Second Life – How to Lower ACI – A Script

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One of the complications in 3D rendering is working out how to blend the objects with transparent parts. Think of windows and SL hair. Designers can reduce the complication by how they use alpha layers and blending. I’m not going to try to explain how to set stuff up because I have yet to get it figured out. But, I came across a handy workaround for things we already have.

I buy hair, dresses, and other things that use blending modes. Most are no-mod. But, the script below can be used to modify them.

In the beginning of the video, I am wearing Magika’s Dreamy as purchased. This is hair that in the Linden viewer has an ACI of 4,699. Using the script reduces the ACI by 702. That is a saving of 15±%. This is my first try, so I have no idea if this is typical, minimal, or a max. You may find that high ACI items benefit more.

There is some degradation in the appearance. When zoomed out, it is barely noticeable. Only when zoomed in can you see the difference. Personally, the 702 ACI saving is not worth the loss of appearance.

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Second Life News 2017 w24 – New Shiny

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Servers

There was no roll to the main grid this week. The channel continues to run #17.05.26.326655.

Blue Steel will get a new package Wednesday, #17.06.01.326763. Includes internal fixes.

Le Tigre will get a new package Wednesday, #17.06.12.327066. Includes internal logging and features and an improvement to region starts.

Magnum also gets a new package, #17.06.12.327060. Shoutcast Player fix included. Other changes are an upgrade of the OS.

Tuesday done less left before WE 😜
Tuesday done less left before WE 😜

Shoutcast is the feature that many use to publish the name of the song playing in a music stream. There was some old time fundamental problem with how those scripts worked. Some fix in the server side created a problem with those scripts, broke them. (BUG-100737) The Lindens were not going to build the bug back in. So, they are providing a fix that works similarly. But, all the Shoutcast scripts will have to change.

The fix is something about the characters in the HTTP request stream.

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Second Life – State of VR – Gear VR

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If you are hoping I am going to tell you we have VR for Second Life™, I’ll disappoint you. However, it apparently is possible. But, it isn’t easy and the whole VR thing is a mess, especially if you want to do it cheaply.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmC4nDabAkw&

For an instance of a mess, when you place a phone in Gear VR it auto-launches the Oculus app. Doesn’t matter what app you have running, the Oculus app launches and takes over the device. A bunch of people tell you to insert to the headset without connecting the phone to the headset. WAY lame, but doable. However, without the USB connection made the phone can fall out of the unit.

So… you have to get Samsung’s BK Package Disabler (US$1.49) get around this problem. They have a free version if you rooted your phone. If not, you have to hope the retail package will install. If you did root it, no problem just delete all you phones accounts, installed the root-version of BK, and redo all your accounts… lovely.

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