{"id":4290,"date":"2014-09-30T18:49:56","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T17:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=4290"},"modified":"2014-09-30T18:49:56","modified_gmt":"2014-09-30T17:49:56","slug":"second-life-improvements-on-their-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=4290","title":{"rendered":"Second Life Improvements On Their Way"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linden Lab have announced in a blog post<\/a> that some improvements are heading the way of Second Life. The improvements aren’t exactly what you’d call sexy but they do have the potential to be rather impressive, if all goes to plan.<\/p>\n

The first change mentioned is with relation to how graphic settings are detected. Linden Lab are doing away with the old graphics table and using a new benchmark to detect your graphics card instead. On first glance this seems to be more accurate, you may see something like this :<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a>
New Graphics Card Detection<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The point of this is described in the blog post from Linden Lab :<\/p>\n

Maybe this has happened to you: you got an awesome new graphics card, fired up SL\u2026 only to discover your graphics settings are set to Low, and can\u2019t be changed? No more! This Viewer does away with the old GPU table and instead uses a quick benchmark measurement to detect your GPU to assign appropriate default graphics settings on startup. The settings on shiny powerful hardware should really let that hardware shine.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My graphics settings stayed exactly where I expected them to but yes, the new tool did produce more accurate results regarding my graphics card. However if you want to test out this new feature, you will need to download a project viewer, which you can get here :\u00a0http:\/\/wiki.secondlife.com\/wiki\/Release_Notes\/Second_Life_Project_Benchmark\/3.7.17.294710<\/a>\/ There’s a Jira issue linked to this entitled Death To The Gpu table but that’s not viewable.<\/p>\n

The next change discussed is to do with the login screen, which has been covered brilliantly by Inara Pey already<\/a>. I recommend reading Inara’s blog post about this because those using the Second Life viewer will see these changes in the near future and Inara’s post has plenty of details on those changes.<\/p>\n

The changes currently in the works for the login screen include the addition of a my favourite places dropdown to allow you to login to, well, your favourite places directly from the login screen. This is on top of still having the last location and region option that are already there, but really, read Inara for more information.<\/p>\n

The final part of the blog post covers two projects that compliment each other and should bring improvements to the Second Life experience.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A Content Delivery Network (AKA CDN) for a new texture and mesh asset service is already being tested on a limited number of regions and the initial results are reported to be looking good. The idea here is that meshes and textures will be delivered more quickly and users further away from Linden Lab’s US data servers should be large beneficiaries from this. The distributed nature of a CDN means that this does indeed sound like a feasible goal.<\/p>\n

Finally Linden Lab talk of the Http Project<\/a>. This has been a project that has been ongoing for a while now, with the aim being to improve communication between viewer and grid services. In the pipeline for the HTTP project is something called pipelining … I’m not making this up! I’ll let the blog post explain a bit more :<\/p>\n

We will soon put out a viewer that will pipeline HTTP requests for texture and mesh fetches, improve inventory folder and item fetches, and have some general adjustments for using a CDN-enabled grid.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now these changes may not sound very exciting, but they are part of a process to improve the Second Life experience. Whereas changes to the login screen and graphics card detection may seem a little bit superficial, if they improve the experience for even a small number of users they will be worthwhile. I have seen posts in the past from people complaining that Second Life isn’t detecting their graphics card correctly, so that’s a real issue for some.<\/p>\n

The latter changes regarding faster loading Mesh and textures complimented with improving HTTP performance are more exciting in the long term, although those improvements are likely to go somewhat without fanfare due to their under the hood nature. However this is proof positive that Linden Lab are still committed to Second Life. These latter two improvements are the ones with large potential, if they go as planned then this should improve performance but as with any technical changes, there may be a blip or two on they way so a degree of patience and good feedback on the Jira is probably called for.<\/p>\n

This is why it’s good for Linden Lab to talk about their changes, people are more likely to show a degree of patience if they know that Linden Lab are actively looking to improve Second Life. Silent surprises often don’t generate as much good will.<\/p>\n

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