One of the best things to happen to Second Life since Ebbe Altberg became CEO is the return of the blog being used as a tool to impart useful information. Some of the information may not be everyone’s cup of tea but Linden Lab are now talking about their core product and it’s such a refreshing change from the sound of near silence that preceded this period.
A case in point is the announcement that Project Shining is now complete. Now Project Shining has been talked of before, so it’s not as if Linden Lab took a vow of complete silence, but these days Linden Lab are talking a lot more, which keeps these projects in the spotlight. Project Shining has been a deep project, and back in 2012 was explained as thus :
Somewhere below the regolith in the Linden Lab secret lunar base, some of the Lab’s top minds have been tackling performance issues in Second Life. The areas of focus range from infrastructure improvements to server-side texture compositing to object caching.
This year, Linden Lab is making the single largest capital investment in new server hardware upgrades in the history of the company. This new hardware will give residents better performance and more reliability. Additionally, we are converting from three co-locations to two co-locations. This will significantly reduce our inter-co-location latency and further enhance simulator performance.
The Shining project is the name given to a recent Lab effort to identify and measure delays and other problems with streaming avatars and objects and to propose and implement solutions. During the Shining project, several small improvements have been identified and deployed. The next small improvement from Shining to be deployed will be pre-rendering the starter Avatars to improve the new resident experience.
As a result of the Shining investigation, the project has been split into three larger performance projects: Project Sunshine, Object Caching, and HTTP Library.
All together, the hardware upgrades and the Shining projects should improve avatar and object streaming speeds significantly. Depending on your unique situation, your mileage will vary.
So investment in hardware, technology improvements, new rendering techniques and the implementation of AISV3, which is aimed at improving how back-end processing of inventory items works, are now all live.
To take advantage of all of these features you will need an updated viewer. I don’t know where the TPV’s are with implementation of these features, but the official Linden Lab viewer should be the place to check out if you’re unsure about that.
Linden Lab do deserve some praise here, under both Rod Humble’s watch and now Ebbe Altberg’s. There has been an impression in some quarters that Linden Lab were winding things down with Second Life, yet Project Shining exemplifies that Linden Lab are still very much enamoured with their premium product and understand its worth to the organisation.
How well these improvements work is another matter of course, sometimes things don’t work out quite as well as one hoped, sometimes new issues are introduced by the improvements and there are other issues that are simply not going to go away any time soon, such as group chat!
However these remain encouraging times for the Second Life community because Linden Lab are definitely still showing some love for the product, the big question now of course is what is the next big Project for the Linden Lab techies. They deserve some breathing space before moving on to the next big thing, but hopefully their banging on things will continue.