Second Life Content Creators Should Pay Attention To Penny Patton

Skara Brae Statue

To some Penny Patton is like a broken record, calling for people to change their camera angles, change the way they use textures, change scale, change their perceptions. However Penny’s content creation tips for Second Life should be heeded, even if you don’t agree with all of them. Penny’s site has a lot of good information but the post I’m going to highlight today is : Building A Better Second Life.

Skara Brae Tavern

Most of the tips Penny advises content creators to follow actually work to improve Second Life performance, for example:

Textures eat up bandwidth to download, processing power for the sim to retrieve them from the asset server and deliver them to your viewer, and then your videocard needs to store them in memory and render them. Too many large textures are one of the biggest reasons SL gets such poor framerates and why everything takes so long to rez.

This is undeniably true. Larger than needed textures hit performance, using too many textures will also hit performance too.

Skara Brae Buildings

Penny doesn’t just provide tips and sit back and hope people notice, she allows people to call her bluff because examples of Penny’s work exist within Second Life and there are no two ways about this, performance is generally extremely good where Penny builds. Textures load fast, you can move around, you’re not sat there waiting for grey buildings to rez.

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The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 8 – Draxtor Meets Pamela

Episode 8 of The Drax Files Radio hour is out and it doesn’t disappoint. Draxtor takes his avatar to the real world and meets Pamela. Pamela does not engage with Second Life, although she has heard of it. There’s a fascinating discussion between Drax Pamela as Drax emphasises the beauty of virtual worlds and Pamela extols the virtues of the physical world.

In reality this boils down to a richness verus reach argument with both parties making good points. Drax argues that virtual worlds enable people to link up and share advice with people all over the world, Pamela argues that the real world allows more tangible goodness and that people are less likely to be hiding behind a mask.

At the end I came to the conclusion that they were both right, but that the ideal scenario is for people to enjoy the benefits of both the real and virtual world. Of course some people aren’t in a position to do so and find one or the other more productive, but really, it’s a matter of balance if possible.

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Jira Wars Episode VI – The Return Of The Jira

In a galaxy far far away Darth Linden and The Empire had dealt The Jira Knights a crushing defeat. Removing their ability to effectively collaborate and greatly nerfing their powers.

The Jira Knights tried to protest, they tried to reason, but The Empire were having none of it and cackled into their bug fixing. The Jira Knights went into hiding, licking their wounds and wondering if they would ever be able to return to their old haunts.

The Empire held firm, until very recently when The Emperor resigned and a new Emperor arrived. The Jira Knights now had a new hope … wait that was episode IV, the Jira Knights saw this as a new opportunity and secretly sent a droid to greet the new Emperor in his office. The arrival of a droid certainly surprised the new Emperor, however he was even more surprised when upon touching a button on the droid a hologram of Princess Inara appeared with the message “Help us Ebbe Wan Kenaltberg, you’re our only hope“.

I haven’t been called that for … well I’ve never been called that” muttered Ebbe.

Princess Inara’s hologram frowned, which was quite impressive for a recorded message “You’re in Ciaran’s blog, play along.

Oh!” said Ebbe, looking around nervously, “How can I help?

Princess Inara informed Ebbe of the problems the revised Jira had caused not only the Rebel Alliance, but also The Empire and convinced the new emperor that it would be best all round if a compromise was made. The new Emperor agreed and was soon publically responding to questions about the Jira : “Funny, both engineering and product heads here also didn’t like that jira was closed and want to open it up again. Proposal for how is in the works! I hope we can figure out how to do that in a way that works/scales soon.

The plan was now in full motion and today, the rebel alliance scored a major victory when Linden Lab announced : Changes To Our Jira Implementation.

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The Drax Files Episode 17 – Zachh Barkley Oh Ho Ho It’s Magic

Zachh Barkley

Oh ho ho it’s magic, you know, never believe it’s not so, was a suitable introduction to my post looking at the work of master Wizard Zachh Barkley during the wonderful Fantasy Faire 2013 and it’s a suitable introduction for this post too because Draxtor Despres’ latest edition of The Drax Files features Zachh Barkely. Zachh is the owner of the Second Life store The Arcanum. I’ll embed the video at the end in traditional style, along with a bonus song!

The episode opens with Zachh, who is much younger than I realised, in his room. Behind him a sign reads “Wizards Only Beyond This Point“. Zachh told me he’d been participating in Fantasy Faire since 2009, which was the first Fantasy Faire. He admits to have been pretty young when he entered Second Life as an apprentice wizard.

The episode features action of The Wizard in action, casting spells, flying … on a broomstick, might be a question mark over lore there! Zachh claims that his brand is the biggest producer of magic in Second Life and if you don’t agree with this you may find yourself under a spell until you do agree … ok I made the part about the spell up!

Zachh explains his early exposure to game development, how he collaborates with other users in Second Life to bring his ideas to life and he also uses the LSL Portal, which is a much under promoted resource when it comes to Second Life scripting. Seriously, the LSL portal is choc full of goodies for people who want to script.

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Is There More To Project Zipper Than Meets The Eye?

The Linden Lab blog post about Project Zipper has so far met with an underwhelming response. Project Zipper, for those who don’t know, is a new Second Life project viewer that apparently improves the installation speed of the Second Life viewer.

My initial reaction to this news was “?!?!?!?! WTF!” I must admit that was my second and third reaction too. I’m not alone in this, others have expressed bemusement as to why this is an important improvement.

The Second Life client download and install times have never been something that has struck me as being problematic. Some third party viewers have larger download and install times, and I have never found that problematic either.

The largely bemused response is pretty much summed up in Inara Pey’s blog post on the subject, Inara tested the install times of Project Zipper and the official Second Life client on her system and the results were:

  • Second Life release viewer 2.7.2.286707: 35.6 seconds
  • Second Life Project Zipper viewer 3.7.2.286810: 16.4 seconds

Now you could look at this and say that Project Zipper installs in less than half the time of the current release viewer, which put in those terms is an impressive achievement. However it amounts to just over 19 seconds difference, which in reality is neither here or there. People on other systems may see better or worse results, but I’d imagine in most cases, people aren’t going to be blown away by this.

However a couple of folk have added a bit more detail, which makes this sound a bit more interesting.

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