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February 2008
Zoning in the New New World
apollo [blog] Mon 25th @ 06:23 EST
ldpw, mainland, sl-general
One of the joys of Second Life is the ability residents have to create and control their own surroundings, but it is also true that when many people with divergent tastes and goals occupy adjoining land areas things can quickly degenerate into chaotic build jumbles. Of course it is possible for groups of like-minded residents to band together to retain control of their environment, such as the Luskwood community on the SL mainland or the set of private sims that make up the Independent State of Caledon, to name two examples quickly, but these kind of endeavors are somewhat infrequent when compared to the size of the Grid overall.
There are many problems with trying to effect this type of project, especially on the mainland where it can be very difficult to acquire contiguous blocks of land and where resident control of the sim at the Estate level generally doesn't happen. This situation often leaves SL with a distinctively jumbled sense of style; full of wonderful creative energy, raw, primal and free. While rampant creativity is certainly not a bad thing, it can make for a confusing or disjointed experience for visitors and explorers of the Grid, and often leaves SL bereft of a publicly owned "showpiece" build.
Linden Lab has previously attempted to remedy this by creating zoned sims, where key infrastructure is provided by Linden-managed land and the overall theme and style of the sim is enforced by a Linden, but these projects have often been on a small scale like Boardman or undertaken as a short term project like the Shermerville sims were originally. Now after a break from their previous zoning efforts, the Lab has recently begun discussing The Linden Department of Public Works:
The Department of Public Works is a new program being launched and is all about improving the experience for users living on, or visiting the Linden Mainland.
It will be intriguing to see how this latest zoning effort plays out. The early information surfacing about it makes it seem as though it is very well planned and has a clear focus. With the right resident builders signing up, this could be a wonderful showpiece for SL.
We're Back
apollo [thearidians.org] Mon 18th @ 15:32 EST
downtime
Generally it seems like we're back, although there might be some outstanding little quirks I need to investigate.
August 2007
Into the Void
apollo [blog] Mon 20th @ 10:03 EDT
hatchie haven, sim, wip
We are in the process of designing and building our first private island, with the help and consultation of some very talented individuals. You can see preview/development photos in this new gallery and can expect more updates/information at some point.
Re: The Almighty Voice Client
apollo [blog] Tue 7th @ 08:41 EDT
sl client, voice
I've avoided pontificating about the negative impact I suppose Voice - with a capital V - will have on the SL experience, mostly because I assume that those who are sane and rational will quickly discover the fundamental social shortcomings of the technology, while those who perceive this as a Good Thing will not be swayed by my quaint and outmoded textual arguments. That said, on reading Ordinal today, I couldn't help but chortle at this:
Those of you who wish to partake in the receiving of other-worldly voices - and coughs, and feedback, and the sounds of errant other-world children, and so on and so on ad nauseam - may do so widely, without even having to pay any sort of Pharmacist for this Altering of the Mind.
--Ordinal Malaprop, A Momentous Day (For Some)
Ms Malaprop also expounded at great length and with much aplomb, citing most of my various concerns and serving practical examples that directly correlate to my personal reasons for generally refusing to use the voice feature and I heartily recommend investing a few moments in reading both of her posts on the subject. For those seeking insight in 30 words or less, however, I refer you to the infinite wisdom of one John Gabriel, but please do mind the naughty language in that last link.
I suppose I should add, for the record, that I can imagine situations where the voice features would have some genuinely practical use, but mostly I cannot fathom the need to by default automatically enable voice across the entirety of the grid at large. This can only lead to the situations alluded to above.
H4X0ring Around With Postcards & IMAP
apollo [thearidians.org] Tue 7th @ 06:14 EDT
coding, photos, postcards
By the gracious, or possibly tenacious bug triage efforts of Torley Linden, the bug that forced all SL Postcards into 640x480 with a fairly aggressive JPEG compression setting has now been fixed, as demonstrated in the original size version of this delightful photo from the IoW.
It's kind of interesting that along with Torley's championing of the issue, it also required the efforts of Zen, Jose, Milo, Beast and Joshua Linden to push the fix through programming, QA and onto the main grid. That's a lot of Linden involvement, but well worth it from my perspective.
In any case, the "H4X0ring" mentioned in the title of this post involved some minor changes to my photo gallery script to take into account a change to the postcard e-mail format. That's all taken care of now, so Aradia and I can get back to sharing still captures of our journey through SL. Thanks go out to Torley and all the other Lindens involved.
July 2007
Relay For Life
apollo [blog] Sun 29th @ 13:09 EDT
charity, relay for life, rfl
This weekend the Relay for Life event comes to Second Life. They have an Official Website for the SL branch of the event, which is currently ongoing:
The American Cancer Society Relay For Life began in May 1985 when a colorectal surgeon ran around a track in Tacoma, Washington, for 24 hours, raising $27,000 to support the American Cancer Society. Today Relay For Life is held in more than 4,600 communities in the United States and in 23 countries across the globe.
Support a worthy cause and check it out today.
June 2007
Memory Leak Fixes
apollo [slupdate] Mon 11th @ 08:15 EDT
client, patch comments
I can scarcely describe how happy this announcement makes me. In amongst the various fixes for this release are these gems:
Fixed VWR-966: Minor memory leak in llfloaterpreferences.cpp and a tiny leak in llstatup.cpp.
Fixed VWR-908: Various memory leaks in the group dialog.
Fixed VWR-364: Viewer memory leak.
Memory leaks are often a problem in complex software and can be one of the hardest things to track down, while also being one of the major offenders as far as lost performance is concerned. In simple terms, once the SL client consumes all the available physical RAM in a given computer, the Operating System has to use temporary space on the computer's hard drive in lieu of "real" RAM. Hard drives have much slower access times than physical RAM, so a PC afflicted in this way will begin to chug and churn and stutter and performance will be reduced to virtually nothing whenever the contents of memory has to be paged back and forth between RAM and hard drive.
Memory leaks contribute heavily to this state because RAM that should be freed up is in fact held onto and then more RAM is used on top of that and so on until there's none left. So fixing bugs like these should hopefully have a tremendously positive impact on viewer performance and hence a positive impact on the overall user experience.
May 2007
Several Years Later
apollo [LSL] Wed 23rd @ 04:30 EDT
object communications
According to the SL 1.16 release announcement, they are adding the function llRegionSay to the scripting language. What does this new feature do?
Says the string msg on channel number channel that can be heard anywhere in the region by a script listening on channel.
This is a very useful feature and one that I was quite shocked to find missing, back in the days when I used to script in SL. I still believe there should be a better inter-object communication system in addition to chat listeners, but this function should help to peel back a layer of complexity when trying to construct any system with distributed nodes. As long as those nodes are in the same region, of course.
Lowfi Hiatus of Sorts
apollo [slupdate] Thu 3rd @ 10:32 EDT
linden, town hall
I didn't consciously decide to take a hiatus from this site, nor am I consciously deciding to return to this site from the hiatus that I didn't [consciously] decide to take, but I thought it was worth mentioning this Official Linden Lab post about an upcoming SL Town Hall event, which features their response to recent problems and resident concerns. I'm not going to comment on any of it, because I feel that's unnecessary: we'd be beating the expired ghost of the previously deceased horse on that one.
February 2007
Wormhole Solution
apollo [blog] Thu 22nd @ 11:45 EST
musing, sl, technology
I have avoided commenting on the quality of the SL experience of late and I feel that doing so now would only serve to firmly beat an extremely, terminally deceased horse. What I would like to say is that this is an acceptable short term solution and that this will eventually evolve into a more permanent long term solution. However, given the monumental technological barriers to overcome with distributed datacenters and multiple asset server mirrors and the like, the fact that this employment position is merely being advertised now leads me to believe that it is going to be a very long term solution.
This forward planning is heartening though, given that it would seem to suggest that Linden Lab have their financial ducks in order and are planning for the long haul of Second Life. What concerns me is the period between the short term and long term solutions. Basically I can imagine that the situation is going to functionally remain the same for some months assuming that the "big picture" variables do.
One "big picture" variable that will change soon is the "official" SL client. I have been advocating the First Look client for some time now, and a few hiccups during the beta phase aside, it has in general terms performed consistently better than the current "real" SL client. First Look makes the subjective experience of being in SL much better because it uses local system resources much more efficiently. It also seems - although I haven't taken steps to verify it - to handle network traffic more efficiently too which should serve to mitigate some of the horrendous packet loss we have all been experiencing of late. It was mentioned some time ago that the major code changes in First Look will be rolled into the "real" viewer in a future release, so this should ease things somewhat too.
Will the contingency plans and the new viewer code be enough to reset the SL user experience back to the more manageable times of 6 - 8 months ago, before the truly massive growth spurt? More importantly, if Linden Lab can manage this feat, will it be all too short-lived, or will it persist until their much longer-term plans come into effect?
The fact that I'm even able to pose these questions should inspire some degree of hope for the future. Admittedly none of this will help when I go home and log in tonight, but perhaps in the coming weeks and months it will have a positive impact. At least I can honestly say that I feel like Linden Lab is trying to fix things, and that they have everyone's best interests at heart. That doesn't mean that I'm not frustrated with the current state of affairs, but then again I can't imagine anyone being happy with how things are right now, so it seems needless to [over]state it.
Note: The title of this post came from a first draft where I had a joke about an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, but I edited it out because it felt forced.
January 2007
Points of Interest
apollo [blog] Tue 30th @ 07:50 EST
first look, musing, torley
Following an old rule of thumb, I neglected to update for a few days because I had nothing really significant to say. Today I have a few random points to make, so here's a handy list:
- I haven't tried recent updates of the First Look viewer recently as some people are reporting issues with it and while I don't mind helping with beta testing I've come to think of the First Look client as the "in development" real client and the really real client as, well, unusable from my perspective.
- Torley has a most fantastic list of cool places to visit.
A short list, yes, but perfectly formed.
Yummy Photos
apollo [thearidians.org] Thu 25th @ 20:25 EST
apollo, aradia, photos, snapshots
My sweet Aradia has been adding some really cool photos to our gallery lately, which I think show off how cute and hot her lovely avatar is. Aradia always pays such wonderful attention to detail and finds the loveliest skins and outfits. She has a great eye for a photo too. I've been adding some photos myself, and one of them even reminded me to talk about how hard it can be to take thematic photos in SL. That's a topic for another post though.
Comment Recycling
apollo [blog] Thu 25th @ 11:35 EST
musing, torley, virtual reality
I was reading Torley's blog earlier, in particular The Majesty of Science and Alternate Virtual Reality and somehow these posts collided with the fact that I've been re-reading A Brief History of Time recently to produce the following:
Sometimes I think it's fun to think of the scientific viewpoint of the universe in philosophical terms, for example the classic "Bugs Bunny" cartoon where he can stand on thin air because, as he says, "I never studied law."
Perhaps then "we" - as humans - only experience the world/universe the way we do because we "know" things on a fundamental level, as in we are born with certain fundamentals "hard wired" into our being that simultaneously prevent us from perceiving outside our physical realm while enabling us to be - in the way that we perceive "being" - in the first place. That line of thinking of course implies that if "we" - again, as humans - could somehow break away from those fundamentals then by definition we [humans] would cease to be human, because those fundamentals are what define us as a human entity even as they limit us. Yet if we could transcend those limits we would still be sentient and alive, but perhaps not in ways that we would describe those qualities in our base human state.
Returning to the "Bugs Bunny" quote, I find it fun to think about because essentially gravity is a limitation of our physical presence; we're made of matter and matter responds to gravity. This is built in on a fundamental level and to "unlearn" this would, in the context of what I just described, mean freeing ourselves from our physical being. Given that SL is completely dependent on the physical realm I'm not sure that it, or other virtual systems like it, will usher in a revolution or ascension of humanity, but that if we reach a point where, for example, someone writes a true AI that passes the Turing test and then that AI reproduces independently; that might teach us some things about the nature of existence.
I know the last paragraph kind of jumps from Point B to Point J with nothing in between, but all I'm really trying to say is that watching a sentient organism evolve in a world that is much different from ours could be enlightening. SL is much different from the real world in the sense that, while the real is based on matter and energy, SL is based on information so constraints that apply to our physical world simply do not apply there, such as the rule that matter cannot be created or destroyed.
Yet at the same time it is still bound to our world because, for example, even information in SL cannot travel faster than the speed of light because the underlying subsystems that convey the information are [currently] limited by that speed.
Really Simple Archival
apollo [thearidians.org] Mon 22nd @ 16:16 EST
archive, site features
I added a really simple archive page to the site today. I intend to expand it further at a later date with a search function of some sort and a real tag cloud, but at least it's now possible to see everything that's been written here. Note that if you scroll down to the bottom of the journal there is a link "View Previous Content..." which points to the archive. Eventually there will be a navigation menu link for it, once it has better features.
LSL: Too Much Kissing
apollo [LSL] Sun 21st @ 12:02 EST
lsl, mono, musing, scripting
Whatever your position on Microsoft might be, I happen to think that some of their ideas are well-founded and some of the design decisions they enable others to make are useful too; it would not have been fun to wait 20-odd years for a mouse with more than one button, for example. One of the products that I believe they consistently get right is Visual Studio and the technology that supports it.
I use the .NET platform extensively at work because our organization is primarily Microsoft-centric. I use decidedly non-Microsoft technology for this website though and I like both approaches in their respective environments. The point of all this? Well according to the OLB we're much closer to a mono infection now.
My hideous geek-style sense of humour aside, this announcement can only mean good things for SL. It's no secret that I'm not the biggest fan of LSL as a programming language and I'm also not particularly fond of how sluggish it is or how detrimental it is to simulator performance. I'm glad LL focused their energy into fixing some of the more pressing problems first, but I see the move to mono as pretty significant too.
With the First Look client and the recent network protocol changes they are already well on the way to fixing at least 60% of the sluggish feel of SL, subjectively speaking anyway. Making LSL vastly more efficient would, obviously, significantly reduce simulator lag associated with running scripts but given that a good percentage of simulator lag is caused by scripts in many cases, these changes are going to have a significant impact.
After the FL client becomes the real SL viewer and after the mono engine comes online, the only significant causes of [performance degradation] will be bandwidth and the monolithic asset server cluster. Changes to the SL protocol that are underway and restructuring of agreements with providers could and are making inroads into the former, which leaves us with only the latter as a major threat to the future scalability and current operation of the system. Well that and the login servers, which can be said to be under some strain at peek times if the occasional long login queue is any indication.
My point in all of this is really to say that 2, 3 and 4 months ago one could have easily been forgiven for predicting the imminent implosion of SL under the crushing weight of a million or so free accounts, but it honestly seems like the system - SL as a whole - is beginning to stabilize. The single biggest "win" for SL as a whole will be making the asset system fully scalable and capable of handling the current and future load, but this push into mono for LSL is still going to be a pretty big win on performance criteria alone.
All that and I didn't even discuss how eventually this change will gift LSL developers with a more robust, industry-standard language capable of realistically applying current programming techniques such as classes and objects and perhaps even genuinely real arrays, that is if I understand correctly that the intent is to move away from the LSL syntax completely one day. I can only dream.