Ciaran Laval

December 6, 2011December 6, 2011

Region Crossing Improvements In The Pipeline

Taking a look at this week’s server deployment I notice nothing that stands out and excites me. The new profile system is getting closer to whereby anyone on your inworld mute list won’t be able to hassle you on your web profile, that will be fully rolled out when the code is in all versions of the server release.

However there is something in the works that looks interesting regarding region crossings, the truth is that this will be a long time in the works before it makes life much improved, but they are getting there with something called “Threaded Crossings Project“, keep your eyes on the Blue Steel Release Notes for this. The more technical term for this is: “threaded RPC/thread state machine mechanism” I have no idea what this means, but I’ll keep an eye on it anyway, to do so initially I had to go back to the Beta Server user group meeting of November 17th, there wasn’t one last week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA.

If you’re unsure of what the issues are with region crossings, Carmilla Linden sums up the current problems in their opening comment in that meeting : “The existing region crossing code is a horrible piece of crap” after that it gets quite geeky!

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December 2, 2011

The Revolution’s Still Huge Bandwidth Away

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has produced a couple of excellent discussion posts recently. The first points out why Skyrim is nothing like Second Life. The reasons are of course technical, Second Life is a dynamic world, quite possibly the greatest dynamic virtual world on the planet. Skyrim is more static, I’m sure at some point there will be updates to this visually stunning and engaging looking single player game, but it is a single player game, the content is downloaded and it is far easier to get top notch performance in those circumstances. This isn’t intended to take away from the excellent game of Skyrim, but the reality is that dynamic content created by thousands of users is far harder to optimise.

The first post, where Hamlet points out how long it takes scenes to rez in Second Life is an important introduction to his second post, where has asks why the Linden Realms games aren’t included in the client download, because that would improve performance for people who are playing Linden Realms games, that Linden Lab controlled area is not as dynamic as other areas of Second Life, this is an important point to note. There was a time when Linden Lab’s tiny client was ahead of the game, downloading patches for the likes of World Of Warcraft could take ages, but with the rise of broadband internet, Linden Lab could make their client larger without much of an inconvenience to users, the Mac client is already bigger than the PC client and I don’t see many complaints about that.

The second post includes comments from former Linden’s Pathfinder and Qarl as well as a comment from Linden Lab CEO and Aston Villa fan Rod Humble.

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December 2, 2011December 2, 2011

New Licensing Method On Marketplace

I’ve had a busy week off the field, so have had my Second Life time severely curtailed this week, which was a shame as I had a lot planned, and all the more disappointing as I intended to put my day on Strike on Wednesday to good effect in Second Life to make me feel better about losing a day’s pay!

However, I’ve been glancing around the forum and blogsphere and notice a little introduction to the SL Marketplace, which I spotted on this forum thread over at SLUniverse, started by Voodoo Radek. There’s a new licensing feature: “User Licensed” which looks like it’s designed for full perms items, when the system permissions are not the permissions you’re intending to sell the item as, for example textures need to be sold full perms so builders can apply them to their builds, but texture makers don’t want people reselling or giving away their textures and often don’t want the builds those textures are applied to being sold full perms, which is where this new permission comes into play.

So rather than the standard copy/Modify/No Transfer permissions you’ll now see on listings, things like this:

If a merchant had ticked User Licensed as an option, there wouldn’t be a cross through User Licensed, if a merchant has ticked to see the product description for permissions, it would look like this:

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking there may be some confusion between User Licensed and see product description for details!

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November 26, 2011

Dark Of The Moon Party November 26th

Isle of Dee Presents: Dark of the Moon Dance Party – November 26th 1pm -3pm SLT

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