SecondLife : Current State of SL Server's : Mayhem or Method To The Madness ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I attended Andrew Lindens weekly SL Server meeting yesterday, it was quite interesting, to say the least. The turnout was great, quite a few people I have not seen since my involvement with the AWG and former Zero Linden's Meta Verse, Inter-Op meetings back in 2008 - 2009 or so were there.

   

    The meeting started out with a discussion on why Group Chat is still so incredibly Borked ! My Gawd, it has been broken since 2005, you would think that 7 years is more than a reasonable enough time frame within which to fix the problem. Anyways as usual the Proverbial Buck was passed around as to whom or what was responsible for this thorn in LL's side. Everything from why the IRC client Jabber ( this was my proposal to the AWG back in 2008 ) was tried, but according to Andrew supporting it was to hard. Then last year XMPP was given the green light briefly, but that was ultimately determined to be unworkable as well. So as it stands right now, its a virtual toss up, either fix the current ( and antiquated ) existing system, or do a complete start from scratch, trash the existing system ( which obviously does not work ) and go for broke. The problem here seem's to be no one knew who is currently heading up work on that project. In other words the Lab is still kicking the idea around, or more simply stated, don't hold your breath !

    The next topic oddly enough next turned to support for V1.x  I'm not even going to bother going into this subject, because The Cool Viewer and Singularity have managed to backport huge amounts of V3 code into their 1.x viewers already, and will more and likely continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

    Windlight was next up for discussion, apparently there are some obscure problems rearing their ugly little heads occasionally now and again. Also something or other about why the World Map seems to be screwed up lately.

    Then the Biggy, Region ( Sim ) crossing's and why they are still screwed up ! There are a lot of good reason's ( excuse's ) for this problem. I have long held the belief that lousy Load Balancing on the back end is the main culprit, and a bunch of other stuff dealing with script size's and things I just quite frankly don't understand. However, not everything is within the Lab's control. I'm talking about the Client computer's with their various Internet connection speed's, for one. And there is nothing the Lab can do about that, EXCEPT, Maybe, Larger Region's, say 1024 x 1024km as opposed to the current 512 x 512km. ( As a side note several Open Sim vendors are successfully experimenting with, and doing just that as of now ) This just being a Band-Aid approach and would not eliminate the problem. We would just have less of it. Unfortunately just like the Group Chat issue, this idea is still in the state of being kicked around.

    Look I know that I can be a bit cynical, and sarcastic with my opinion's sometimes, and I know that this stuff is the proverbial Rocket Science crap that would drive most folk's completely bonkers trying to figure it all out.

    The part that just blows my mind is, why are they ( we ) still talking about and trying to solve the same damn problems that people have been bitching about since I first came to SL in 2005 ? Personally I Do Not See Any Method To The Madness.

JayR Cela :(

SecondLife : Mesh Clothing : Path Finding and Steam : What They Have In Common : And The Great Hail Mary Pass ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    So what could all three of these subjects possibly have in common ? They are all bombing out, failures for the most part, or at least that's the way it seems so far. Let's start off with the first item mentioned in the title of this post " Mesh Clothing " Yesterday I was attending Oz Linden's Monday morning meeting, approximately 45 minutes of which was taken up with a discussion about Mesh Clothing, and that I found to be rather odd, but never the less quite a few idea's were expressed as to why the current lack of support from the Lab so far. My personal opinion and the same of a few other people attending was and is the simple fact that the majority of Fashion Designer's have not exactly flocked like wild geese to a fresh water pond in the middle of a drought stricken landscape yet. And with good reason, designing with mesh requires an entirely new mind set, different tool's and a steep learning curve. Common sense will tell you, it's gonna take a while before things settle down in this area of SL development. Accordingly the Lab has decided to place the Mesh Deformer Project on the back burner for now.

    Next on the list is Path Finding, don't even get me started on this one. The subject took up the last 15 minutes of the meeting, according to Oz this is a Server Team issue, and out of his realm of control. It is however a High Priority issue, and once it has had all of the kink's worked out some very cool new things will be introduced immediately following, or shortly afterwards. He could not elaborate because most of the cool new stuff is still under wraps right now, but he seemed very confident that it will be worth the wait.

    Now we come to the controversy of putting SL on Valve's the Steam game distribution channel, this is either going to Work, or Bomb Out Big Time and sink like a Lead Balloon. Why do I have this opinion ? I'll tell ya why, there are several reasons. #1 The majority of games available on the Stem network are either FPS - PvP -MMO's and MMORPG's, with graphics that are vastly superior to what is currently capable in SL.  #2 Professionally developed and designed story line's, game play and very active user groups along with very well developed forums, none of which SL currently has.

    All one has to do is take a look around the current SL landscape. The place is literally ( slowly ) turning into a ghost town. There is so much land for sale it's crazy, abandoned property litter's the landscape, entire long time well established groups are just up and leaving, migrating to various Open Sim based grids. With greatly reduced tier pricing, and now that Hyper Grid is entering phase 2 later this year, ( phase 2 will sport much better IP protection capabilities ) entire new and larger worlds with greater possibilities will eventually become available.

    I think the Steam move by LL is kinda like the last few seconds of a NFL football game where the Coach and Quarterback decide to go for the Long Bomb Hail Mary Pass, and hope for the best.

JayR Cela

SecondLife's Survival : The NPSL Group : Nonprofits in Second Life : Can They Save SL ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    It's not very often I get involved in SL politic's lately. Those days are long gone, or so I thought. Recently my dear friend Gentle Heron, of  the Virtual Ability group in SL invited me to a meeting with a relatively new group, or not a group yet. Nonprofits in Second Life, I have no idea.

   I guess the thought is to save SL from it's self, or try to either get the Lab back involved ( Haaaaa !! Good Luck On That Idea ) or to get people more involved in their SL communities. All I can say is Good Luck.

    Open Simulator and Hyper Grid will eventually grind SL into the dirt, its gonna take .... hmmmm.. I'm figuring about 2 or 3 years.

    But I'm just a kook, Hell I have only been in SL for 7 years, and all I can tell ya is this, and I will sum up my opinion in a nutshell.
 
     Most if not all of the original LL employee's are long gone......

    Those people actually cared and were very active within the community....

    And those day's are long gone :(

    Take a look, at the past.

    There were ton's of LL meeting's every week, the original Log In Page had a Daily Blog, people spouting off left and right. Now we are down to a measly 6 so called User Group's meetings per week.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:User_Groups

    And an Official LL SL Blog that is a Major Joke. Oh Hell I'm not even going to go to that waste basket.

    We got a number of very cool things over the years, but ya still cant depend on crossing a Sim Border without getting flung off into the wild blue yonder, and the price of setting up a new presence in SL is expensive, monthly tier fee's add up too.

    Personally I feel like I am on a sinking ship.

Perhaps not !

    The NPSL group does show some promise, and they do have a Web Page. I will encourage you all to take a look at. That is if you truly love SL for what it is. ( An Artistic Environment )

http://nonprofitcommons.org/

    So let's take a look at what the Old Time SecondLifer's have to say :_)

Transcript September 21 2012 NPSL Open Meeting
http://nonprofitcommons.org/content/transcript-september-14th-npc-meeting-brian-kaihoi-mayo-clinic




 

JayR Cela :_)

ATARI 2600 LIVE'S AGAIN : LOL : Ya Gotta Check This Out :_)

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I just ran across this afternoon, and thought I would share it.

    My Real Life age is showing here. Haaaaa !  OH Well these things were a blast, just about everyone had an ATARI 2600 game console's back in the early 1970's

    Take a look here for a good laugh
http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-puts-a-spotlight-on-atari-2600-case-mod-pc

   Confirmed Atari Nut

JayR Cela :_)

Why People Read This Blog ? / I Have No Idea

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I still can not figure this out, for one reason or another I started this blog, on a whim, I certainly don't make any money off of it.

     And Yes I am opinionated.

    We get about 2 or 300 hit's a day.

    And I want to thank everyone that takes the time to indulge in my Insanity.

JayR Cela :_)

SecondLife : Do We Now Have Segregation ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    It's not often I get really pissed off. But the new Re-Bake bull-shit is not only idiotic and unnecessary. WTF ?

    Time to clean house !

    I can only rant.

   Viewer 3 Is ?, And I will continue to make sure it ?

 
JayR Cela

Secondlife: LL and their JIRA

Mister Acacia is online

OK, just a quick follow-up. First, this post, along with every other one I put here, is my own personal opinion. My posts do not reflect the opinions, stands or missions of this blog, The Phoenix Firestorm Project, or any other person or persons.

I would like to personally encourage all users in Second Life to report every bug they find, even possible bugs. Use LL's viewer, find an issue and report it.

There is a possibility that LL has or will alienate their users and the number of bug reports will actually go down. This might be misinterpreted (spun) to suggest there are fewer bugs. They already spin their user base by reporting how many (new and total) signups there are, conveniently avoiding the number of accounts that have been closed (by the user or LL), or which are alts, or which are abandoned (user signs up, logs in with their viewer and then never logs in again). Maybe they're trying to make SL look good to potential buyers or partners and at the same time trying to solve a different problem with their JIRA.

So, to help LL understand just how many bugs there are, I encourage you to report them. Every one, even if you think it's already been reported. And especially if you reported it on a previous version of their viewer and it persists. The inability to "me too" any existing reports only hurts the lab. Unfortunately that hurts the people who use the JIRA most, but I imagine some data is spit out by JIRA for the executives, and if it's showing total reports, then that number should be very high.

My apologies to those who have to filter those incoming reports, but your bosses need to see more activity now instead of less.

Mister Acacia is offline

Totally Off Topic : Not Unusual For Me

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I'm just sitting here reading that LL has decided to get rid of the JIRA. All I can say is good riddance, that mess has never proven to be of any use to anyone !

JayR Cela

Second Life: JIRA: It's not what it used to be

Mister Acacia is online

Earlier in the week, Linden Lab has made changes to their JIRA, and it seems only management understands how the changes might help. Basically, users may no longer comment on any existing issues. Users may not see any new issues except their own, and once their issue has been triaged, it will be hidden from your view as well.

The reason they did this is because people (me, too), tended to go off-topic, too often ranted against LL for either lack of communication or their obvious lack of concern.

Apparently the people who chose this aren't the people who use JIRA. This is unfortunate, and you need to let them know if this affects you. But do that correctly. If you want access just to rant or soapbox or preach or argue or discuss, then you're barking up the wrong tree. The JIRA is not intended as an open forum. It has one purpose, to report bugs and feature requests and to manage the work.

Let management know if this affects your ability to work with LL, or if it affects your desire to work with LL, or if this affects your desire to stay as a paying user.

Mister Acacia is offline

SecondLife : More Thought's On The Game's Of

By Avatar JayR Cela

    The past few month's or so I have heard, and read various opinion's about SL and a change in direction. I don't get it, why are people complaining ? Everything change's, that is something easily explained as normal evolution.

    Personally I am not really all that happy with the new Path Finding feature recently introduced into SL, but ya gotta give it time to mature.

    I don't speak with Oz Linden as much as I should, but I can tell ya the guy is working his ass off, and buried deep in documenting all of this stuff.

    The addition of game designing tool's into SL is not only a great idea, it will also help propel it into the future as a Go-To platform for entrepreneurial minded individual's interested in Game Design and future careers in a very rapidly growing industry.

    10 years ago a very good friend of mine, who had worked his way up the latter within IBM and I had a very serious discussion about my future, at that time his advice to me was. If you want to have a secure future in the evolving computer based world. "Get Into Video Game Design"

    I wish I would have taken his advice seriously.

JayR Cela

SecondLife : Concert : Cypress Rosewood : Take-A-Pill & Relax Music Tonight

By Avatar JayR Cela

     Are you ready for some Take-A-Pill & Relax Music tonight ? If you are, hop on over to my place this evening.

    My friend Cypress Rosewood will be firing up his Synthetic Keyboards tonight to south your soul, and wrap up your day with some truly mellow music.

 

      I have several dance ball's and a dance machine set up and plenty of seating available.
Copy this SLUR and paste it into your web browser, that should get you here.
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mallard/21/31/45
 Starting time is 8:00pm SLT
If you have any difficulties, just IM me, and I will send a Limo / LOL :_)

    This is a LIVE Show, not some pre-recorded stuff that seem's to be the norm in SL. Cypress will truly mellow you out. So stop on over, Chill Out, Relax and get Mellow.

JayR Cela :_)

SecondLife : Ace's Spaces House's

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Well it is no secret that Ace is one of my favorite people in SL. she has a large number of modern style home's at very affordable prices. Another very cool thing is that you can visit her shop and rezz each individual home, and take a walk around in it. It kinda remind's me of late 1950's early 60's Sci-Fi stuff.

 
   These homes are simple in design and low prim count. I think the thing that impressed me the most is Ace herself, when I had a problem earlier this year an I act-incidentally  deleted half of mine and Cathy's home, Ace was right there with help. This is not an advertisement, I just feel that every now and then ya meet some very wonderful people in SL. So I will leave it at that.

    You can visit her shop here via this SLUR
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Deco/169/160/22

JayR Cela

Virtual World Games : Are You A Star Trek Fan ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I just could not resist trying this game out, having been a Star Trek fan since the original series first aired in the late 1960's. This particular game is based around the numerous paperback's published over the past several decades, and can actually be quite fun. The design team from Cryptic Studio's have done a good job at making this Free To Play MMO very open ended, basically it boils down to this, each time you play the game ( depending on how much time you spend ) you are literally the director of your own personal TV episode. LOL I'm not kidding ! But ya gotta be a Trekkie to really get into it.

    There is an extensive customization system for Starship design, which is very cool. I will say this much, with all of the FTP games I have been testing lately, this one is going to stay installed. It's kinda neat when there is nothing on the tube ya feel like watching, you can fire this game up and create your own little on-line TV show.

    There is plenty of CGI to keep the story going, and countless mission's to embark upon.

 
    Be prepared to spend a lot of time learning the in's and out's of this game. It will probably take you several days just getting everything set up properly.

   
    It is being distributed by Perfect World Games, so if you already have an account with them, your current user name and password will work in order to log in.

    This is a cool game. You can download it here

http://mmoattack.com/free-online-mmorpg/free-mmo/star-trek/

JayR Cela :_)

SecondLife : Cypress Rosewood : Live At JayR's Home

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Yes that's right, this Wednesday at 8:00pm SLT My dear friend Cypress Rosewood will be performing a live concert.

     Everyone is invited, we are just working out a few small detail's, and I will have more information tomorrow.

JayR Cela :_)

Viewer 1.x : Your Choices : My Final V1.x Post ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    I was giving this some thought today, I believe the general consensus is that V1.x is a dead issue. I know for me it has certainly come down to V3 based FireStorm as my personal favorite. However there are still some very nice V1.x viewers, a few are no longer in development, but you can still download them.

     All of these viewers are based on The SnowGlobe Project, originally a LL open source initiative intended to advance V1.x to the next level. As you know the Lab abandoned the project in favor of the ill fated V2 Viewer, a complete disaster to say the least.

    So Sit back and take a look at the current state of V1.x, starting out with the abandoned project that started it all.

    The last version I could find for download was Snowglobe 1.4.2.3626 

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Old_versions

    There is a 1.5.x release, I tried it out back in August of 2010, but have been unable to locate a download  site again. So as far as I know the following are either based on V1.4.x or V1.5.x, anyway's for one reason or another I was unable to get it running, Oh Well / no big deal. Anyways SnowGlobe eventually evolved into the Ascent Viewer reviewed here on this Blog in September of 2010

http://jayrcelasecondlifetechnologist.blogspot.com/2010/09/ascent-viewer-14127-for-secondlife-r.html

    I believe this ended up becoming the Astra Viewer I did a post on the most recent version 1.6.4 August 3rd 2012

http://jayrcelasecondlifetechnologist.blogspot.com/2012/08/virtual-worlds-astra-viewer-for-open.html

     Since Astra and Singularity are pretty much the same design team I downloaded the current version V1.7.1 ( 2888 )

http://www.singularityviewer.org/home

    I have to admit it was disappointing, I could not seem to get Antialiasing to work, resulting in ugly jaggy  edges, regardless of the viewers settings or my video card's utility program.

      









    The Cool Viewer fared much better in this department, currently there are 2 versions available V1.26.4.28 Stable and 1.26.5.7 Experimental. I tried the latter. No problems here, this is easily the best of the bunch.   http://sldev.free.fr/

    Somewhere along this timeline the Imprudence viewer came onto the scence, they made some great contributions to the Open Source world and SL and Open Sim, Radar, AO Over-rider, are two that come to mind. But that has been a dead issue for a long time now. The team last I heard was into OS server development.

    There is also the RealXtend viewer, *Yawns* this was developed for a now defunct VW. I had an account there back in 2009, at that time they were introducing a custom viewer called Naali, that was a tremendous failure. I believe now they are doing a few things in the Virtual World Server area, but who cares, I certainly don't. If you want a really lame viewer you can get it here.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Other-Programming-Files/realXtend.shtml   

    There is also the Rainbow Viewer by Boy Lane it is and was developed for his personal use, it's pretty nice, but there is no compelling reason for me to download and install it.

http://my.opera.com/boylane/blog/

    Then there were the Kristen S-series 1.x viewers, the last one I tried was S-19, it was pretty good actually, good luck trying to find it as a download, most traces of Kirsten seemed to have vanished from the Web.

    Dolphin had an excellent V1.x series viewer the last version available V 1.5.51.3627 can be had here.

http://dolphinviewer.eregion.de/download-and-install/

    Then of course you have the Phoenix Viewer, nuff said ? Sadly I do not believe you will see any future development with the Phoenix viewer, and personally I cant blame the Phoenix, FireStorm team for making this wise decision.

    There is a point I am trying to make here. Viewer 1.x is a dead issue for SL, if you are into Open Sim, go for it, and in my opinion there is only one logical choice. Henri Beauchamp's Cool Viewer

JayR Cela

Windows Power User Freeware Configuration Tool : Autoruns.exe

By Avatar JayR Cela

    If you are a die hard Windows power geek, you may already have this wildly powerful utility. autoruns.exe comes as a Zip file Autoruns.zip and can be found here.

 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

 






 
    This can really come in handy tracking down all sort's of stuff that may be hampering the performance of your Windows Box. Like things auto starting in the background, good for hunting down nasty shit like virus's and such too.

    In closing I will offer this advice, be sure and create a System Restore point before fooling around with this utility, it is possible to do some serious damage to your installation, and may result in the inability to boot properly.

    LOL/ * Have Fun*

JayR Cela :_)

SecondLife : EXODUS Viewer 12.08.14.1

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Let me just start off with, this is a keeper, I really like the way the Exodus Preferences work, it's a very logical setup, quite easy to follow.

 






   

    You can log into 22 diferent SL grids, however there is no grid manager to easily allow exploration of any Open Sim based Virtual Worlds. The Web Page  list several things of interest.

 http://exodusviewer.com/

Visual C++ 2010 runtime now included as part of installer.

Visual presets and raid advisor lists format have been changed to be more conformant with LLSD, with backwards compatability, but due to this change new presets/lists will not work with older versions of the viewer.

Fixes include

• AMD and nVidia black/white screen issues on some configurations.
• GMA 945 and GMA 950 crashed while starting the viewer.
• The nearby panel now actually updates sorts automatically.
• Overflow of L$ in the Japanese version.
• EV-62: Webkit on Linux doesn’t work.

    My only real complaint's are the dam Camera Control is way to big and not re-size-able, and the Inventory is strictly stock LL. "oh well :(   Also having the Visual C++ runtime  included during installation is very cool. I recently ran into a problem with a FireStorm install that required version VC++ 2005 as a separate download on a newly  setup Win XP system. So I'm glad to see this feature included with the Exodus Viewer.

 
    I like the built in Help that includes a unique Minimal Statistics read out display, and a direct link to the viewers homepage, a support chat room and a Exodus specific Support Forum.

    All in all this is a well done branch from the stock LL version of the SL viewer.

 
JayR Cela :_)

Virtual World Gaming : Why This Blog Is Changing Directions : Part 2

By Avatar JayR Cela

     Recently a couple of people have asked me why the gradual change in direction of coverage on virtual world subject's covered here on this blog. The answer is pretty simple, at least in my opinion.

    SecondLife is a dying architecture, people are loosing interest left and right, sim's are being abandoned on a weekly basis, LL simply want's to much money for what can be had  in Open Sim for a lot less money or in some cases for free, and that  will more and likely end up being the future. And the Free To Play model for on-line games is at worst an unstoppable force.

    So I will try to cover as many things as I am able too, and that is about all I can tell ya right now.

JayR Cela