Linden Lab – Page 184

May 25, 2012May 25, 2012

Reducing Resources

Hidden away on the Second Life Wiki are two very useful pages regarding optimisation, well they can be seen in that light anyway. One is regarding texture sizes and how much memory they consume. This is a useful guide but far from being the be all and end all, basically using 1024 x 1024 textures everywhere is silly, fortunately people generally use 512 x 512 but from the linked page we can see that a lot of them will eat resources too, which brings us to thinking about which textures we use and when we use them, do we really need 512 x 512? Well generally, it’s a yes but there are many times when 256 x 256 or even 128 x 128 would be fine.

The other page deals with pyhsics optimisation, this is a really handy page because it talks of using simple physics shapes to reduce load. The trick really is whether you can get away with only using a cube as your physics shape, say for example you build a nice fence with gaps all over the place and maybe it’s a bit weathered, could you just use a cube as the pyhsics shape? If you can, then the physics optimisation page is for you, if you can’t, then why can’t you?

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May 16, 2012May 16, 2012

Region Idling – Close But No Cigar

Region Idling has been announced, which is not the worst idea in the world. The basic idea is that when a region is empty,everything goes on a go slow and those saved resources are used elsewhere to improve user experience in other regions. This has potential, but like NeoBokrug Elytis of Wastelands fame, I have concerns and certainly feel that as a region owner, it should be my choice as to whether my region is part of the idling process.

This could be a step in the direction of lower tier bills, if your region is idling, maybe you won’t get charged as much for that period, one day. However I’m speculating there, I certainly like the idea of being able to turn my region off and pay less tier per month for it, but Linden Lab haven’t indicated that’s where we’re heading and that’s where the concerns come in.

My region may well be deemed to be idle, but it will be doing something, whether it’s talking to webservers,or acting as a delivery agent for remote notecard boards, generally, I have something going on and that’s what I’m signed up for. Mainland is Linden Lab’s estate, they call the shots and I have no arguments about my Mainland parcels being part of this process, because my landlord wants those regions to be part of this process, however I do strongly feel that I should have the choice as an estate owner as to whether my regions are part of this process.

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April 5, 2012April 5, 2012

Patrolling Prim Cubes Can Be Exciting

The first rule about NDA club, is that you don’t talk about NDA club. Fortunately, Pathfinding in Second Life is not in NDA club, which means I can talk about it, hurrah!

I’ve been taking a look at Pathfinding in Second Life, being able to select where my characters can walk and select whether objects can move obstacles or collide with static obstacles does not sound exciting, indeed it’s not exciting at all. However what is exciting, although it doesn’t sound it, is watching prim cubes race around your sim after you’ve engaged in a bit of setting up and scripting.

There are bugs with Pathfinding at the moment, which is no surprise as testing is only just getting extended to sim owners, we’re back into the more variables the more issues arise territory, but the support I’ve received on the issues I have had with Pathfinding, have been absolutely superb, the team behind this are extremely enthusiastic. Unfortunately I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to poke around with it, but I’m getting there.

Now, so far I’ve managed to set some paths and then with the aid of the Pathfinding LSL functions I was able to create characters and set them on patrol on my sim.

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April 5, 2012April 12, 2012

It’s Still All About Tier

Ah Thursday, not just any Thursday, but the Thursday before the Easter Holiday weekend, where I can now put on my slippers, sit back, and not worry about my day job until Tuesday. This also means I’ll be blogging … unless Football Manager 2012 hooks me too much again. Hopefully I’ll talk about Kitely later but for now it’s the Second Life shoppers paradise that I’ll write about.

The rumour mill suggests that Linden Lab are looking for ways to get people shopping inworld again, not that people have stopped shopping inworld, but the rise of The Marketplace has caused concern for inworld ventures. I’ve spoken about this before, I am not a huge fan of The Marketplace but it’s here, it’s convenient, it works (usually, there have been glitches lately) but it undermines some key aspects of Second Life, such as store rentals and sales which help fund roleplaying sims, Arts sims, Club sims, social ventures, hangouts yadda yadda yadda. Personally I think the horse has bolted now, the time for some joined up thinking was months ago.

The Marketplace isn’t the only reason for concerns on the viability of social and arts ventures, Styles Of Edo have announced they are closing after five years of trading in Second Life. This is a Mens fashion store for those who aren’t familiar with the fashion scene. When I originally published this post, this paragraph suggested Styles Of Edo was closing due to not making enough sales to make tier, this is not the case and I apologise for any confusion, I have not spoken to anyone from Styles Of Edo and do not know why they have chosen to close, however there is a comment from Chrissy Ambrose in the comments of this post. Stores and Sims in Second Life close for a variety of reasons, new ones arise from the ashes and we carry on, times change, tastes change and culture changes.

Deja Letov posted in the official forums on their views on why getting shopping back inworld is a great idea, however again we’re back to inworld shopping not exactly being dead and my view that the horse has really bottled, we are too far into the bricks and mortar challenge here, the online shopping experience in an online world is now very appealing and yes there is something wrong with that picture because Second Life is a 3D virtual world and The Marketplace is a 2D Shopping site.

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April 4, 2012

Going Underground

I was reading a post from Hamlet Au over at New World notes regarding Mesh terrain, which you can read here. However what caught my attention most was a comment from Masami Kuramoto:

“What mesh brings to the terraforming table is the option to use subtractive modeling. Think caves, tunnels, subway stations, underground cities. It’s all possible now.”

I’m not quite sure what Masami means, but the idea of sims being to have cave tunnels, subway stations and underground cities is something that could really add a new dynamic to Second Life. Think of exploring deep mines or dungeons. People have long wanted to build underground in Second Life, the problem is, you can’t, you can’t build at a base level and then raise the terrain, that causes chaos, you get error messages or items returned to your lost and found.

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