Second Life – Page 217

November 24, 2012November 24, 2012

Some Information On What They’ve Done To The Graphics!

Yesterday I blogged about mysterious improvements to the graphics subsytem which had caused my settings to change from high to ultra and had also seemed to produce a performance increase. I mentioned how the lack of information about these changes were puzzling. I have asked some questions, read other blogs and received comments.

This blog post is therefore coming to you in association with Inara Pey, Honor McMillan, Coby Foden, Hitomi Tiponi, leliel Mirihi and Theresa Tennyson for their contributions in a thread on the official forum.

So what’s the skinny on the lowdown? Well first things first, it appears that if your graphics settings are changing from high to ultra, your graphics settings might not actually be changing, confused? Well it seems that the new rendering subsystem means the bar has been lowered. Honor McMillan makes observations in her blog post on the subject:

When I logged on my settings did show the move to Ultra – BUT, when I looked at them in detail there really hadn’t been much change. Just the $*(@&^%$ physics of course.

The choices I had been using seemed to have remained, so I think one can assume there will be no frying of graphics cards. At least not because the viewer says you’ve been moved up to the next level.

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November 24, 2012

The Future Of Machinima Looks Bright

Over at Venture Beat, Dean Takahashi has a post about one of the discussion panels from the Machinima-Expo. Dean was a panelist on the discussion, there’s a video in Dean’s article of the discussion. The future for Machinima looks bright, but will it ever make a mainstream breakthrough? That seems to be the crux of the issue.

Dean concludes that he is seeing little evidence of Machinima going mainstream but with lower costs for producing Machinima and an active indie scene, it looks sure to grow in popularity. This year’s Machinima-Expo does look to have been a roaring success, so from that point of view, the future does indeed look bright.

Machinima of course goes way beyond Second Life, there are apparently new tools for film making coming from Valve and the Unreal 4 Engine for game developers, the ability to make better Machinima is conntinually improving.

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November 24, 2012November 24, 2012

Things With Potential That Don’t Quite Work Part 1

This is part one of what will probably be a one part series, but you never know. Anyway, there are some odd tips and tricks around LSL and I’m quickly going to look at one of them. Ok so, here’s the scenario, Unhinged – A festival for Eku’s head, has more goings on in terms of DJ events, than you can shake a stick at. So say I wanted to list some upcoming events I’d maybe have a board with this:

An Image Should Be Here — Unhinged Events

However this is a fast changing list of events and before I know it, my board needs to say this:

Now if I were using textures of course, these boards inworld would look funkier, the thing is I can make them a bit funkier, however I’m not using textures, I’m using llSetPrimMediaParams tricks. This is an imperfect solution but one with potential because I’m using HTML.

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November 23, 2012November 23, 2012

Comedy In Second Life Is No Laughing Matter

There’s an interesting thread over at SLUniverse asking about comedy clubs in Second Life. In theory comedy seems a decent fit for Second Life, voice is available, streams can be arranged, you don’t need to wake the neighbours with your guitar strumming, as live musicians potentially do, yet, there seems to be a void and that thread points out some harsh realities. These realities aren’t only an issue for comedians of course.

One issue is material, whereas a comedian can tour a country with a set that audiences will only see once, a regular comedian in Second Life has less of a geographical challenge, I mean we can all teleport to where they’re performing and once we’ve seen a set, why would we keep going back to see it again? Basically we go to them, rather than they coming to us. Ok this would work well for one off shows, but it’s difficult to keep it as a regular slot.

Another issue is the sound of silence, or rather the lack of live laughter. Comedians will probably thrive on laughter, that’s an indication that their set isn’t bombing, in Second Life, that’s not going to happen. A barrage of on screen lol’s, text heckling and people telling each other to turn off their animations or gestures is likely to be distracting for the performer.

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November 23, 2012November 23, 2012

Ok What Have They Done To The Graphics?

Yesterday, I loaded up Second Life using the beta viewer, which is not at all unusual. However there was a required update, which downloaded and installed. When the client started again, up popped a message along the lines of; improvements to the graphics subsystem have introduced a change to your graphics preferences.

Hmmm thought I, what’s this all about? So I took a look at my preferences and found that my graphics preferences have been changed from hight to ultra … wait a minute? What’s this all about? I don’t want to overwork my graphics card, so I went back to the standard release of the viewer, fired it up and found my graphics were set to high, which is what I expected. Pressing reset in my graphics preferences, which sets your settings back to the reccomended position depending upon your detected hardware, kept my settings at high.

So now I’m confused, I uninstall the beta viewer completely, download it again and hit install. This time I just get a message informing me that if I’m new, I need to create an account. I continue and start, no message about changing my graphics preferences, which it seems was due to it being a new install and therefore not being required to inform me of a change in my preferences, as there were no old preferences to change in the beta viewer. However my graphics preferences were ultra, I pressed reset, my graphics preferences remained ultra.

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