Now first things first, if you’re planning on heading to FFR Radio Ship FaireChylde at Fantasy Faire to enjoy DJ’s, live music and possibly dance with a fifty foot woman, be aware that the ship has moved to the Heavesnlough sim and can now be found here.
Moving on to other matters Second Life related, Linden Lab yesterday blogged about a new and interesting viewer development. Well actually it’s not that new as it has been around since November in project viewer form, but now it is part of the latest update to the viewer and apparently helps one to enjoy faster scene loading, as the blog explains :
This update reduces the load and time it takes to draw objects in regions, meaning scenes appear more quickly and smoothly as you move throughout Second Life.
There’s also an accompanying video, which I’ll embed after the cut. The video is a Torley production, which makes me like it straight away. Anyway back to the project, the basic concept here is that objects that are closer to you should render first, meaning the scene should appear to load faster, that’s the theory.
This sort of concept may be new to Second Life, but it’s not new in itself. Web pages have long employed such techniques to give the perception of an image loading before it has actually fully loaded. This means people think the image is loading, rather than waiting for the image to fully load and reveal itself to you. These sort of techniques were more widely used when bandwidth speeds were much lower and therefore images loaded more slowly. However this is a new sort of concept in Second Life and one that very much makes sense because perception is extremely important.
I’m not too sure how well this will work in a dynamic environment such as Fantasy Faire when it’s going to be seeing grey people that you notice first, but from the video those annoying moments when you walk around and can’t move because the wall right in front of you hasn’t rendered yet should happen less often.
There’s also an improvement to object caching that should mean when you return to a region it should load objects from cache and seem to load faster. Obviously this will depend upon how dynamic that region is in terms of changes, but for regions that don’t change that much this should be of great assistance.
There are some noble goals at play here and it’s good to see Linden Lab addressing these issues. Project Interesting is a cousin of Project Sunshine, which was designed to introduce server side baking so that avatar textures would load more quickly, again this will obviously depend upon how many avatars are the scene.
Now Project Sunshine and Project Interesting are children, or maybe grandchildren of the daddy project, which is Project Shining. This project has been going on for a while now and my only real criticism is that Linden Lab haven’t talked it up enough, but it’s reassuring to know that Linden Lab are continuing to improve the platform and spending resources on doing so. How successful this all is remains to be seen, but it certainly looks good.