Blake Sea Ferry Scheduling Conflicts

This is what happens when two ferry boats try to occupy the same dock at the same time.

I should have had my fins on!

Ghosts of the Blake Sea

The Blake Sea is haunted!


That's the only explanation I can come up with for the avs that are always there, in the same spot, no matter what time of the day or night it is. The three or four I've checked don't have anything -- or at least very little -- in their profiles.


What's even more mysterious are the green dots on the map (at least on my map), again never moving, that don't have anyone at that location.


Haunted, I tell you!

Montbard Ferries

While out swimming in the Blake Sea, I discovered the Montbard Ferry Services, a small fleet of ferry boats plying the waters between Montbard, Windlass, and Half Hitch. If you want a relaxing cruise, go to the dock at Husky's Beachhouse and Marina in Montbard. Ferries run every 30 minutes to Half Hitch.

Do you want to date my avatar?

Wrath Paine posted a wonderful music video by The Guild. The Guild, in case you haven't stumbled upon them yet, is a series of sitcom episodes about online gamers and their foibles both inworld and in real life. Check them out: you'll recognize a lot of people you know, and probably yourself as well.

Goodbye Mertopia

I got a notice today that Mertopia (Blake sim) is going away, and the sim will become rental property. Mertopia was the home of the Secrets of Atlantis group: although not very active, I hope they find another home soon.

Calling All Prims

Out of curiosity, I looked through the release notes for the new 1.27 server release currently being installed on the grid. One item in the notes caught my eye:

LSL HTTP-In

• Allows prims to become mini web-servers. Objects acquire a url, and then process http requests for that url.
• For details, see: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_http_server

There is already a function in the LSL scripts to request data from external Internet addresses: llHTTPRequest(). What this new functionality does is the opposite -- it allows an Internet site, anywhere in the World to send data to a prim in Second Life.

This is probably old news to those who are more diligent at keeping track of the latest developments in SL than I am. In any case, it raises some very interesting possibilities.

An external Internet site can send data or commands to an SL object at any time, without having to be "polled" periodically by the object for updates. An object can respond to Real Life events, or be controlled by an external program!

In combination with llHTTPRequest(), it allows any prim in SL to communicate with any other prim. (Yes, I know there are other ways to do this already: for example you can use llShout() when in the same Region.)

Since the URL addresses assigned by the new llRequestURL() function are temporary, any communications with an SL object will have to be mediated by an external site with a known URL address that would listen for messages from the object with the current URL address, and then use the latest address to redirect HTTP requests to that address. You could also *yuck* update the current URL address by hand.

*Rubs hands in gleeful anticipation* Now, how to apply this to mer products? RL hurricane warnings, maybe?

The Shadow Knows

There has been a virtual (pun intended) explosion of SL-based viewers lately; it seems everybody has nifty -- and not-so-nifty -- ideas on how to improve Linden Labs' open-source code. The Hippo Viewer, for example, has become the "standard" viewer for the OpenSim world.

Gwyneth Llewelyn has been playing with shadows. Dynamic shadows can be enabled in SL 1.23 -- if you have a high-end graphics card. As anyone who has played with ray tracing knows *raises hand*, shadow casting usually involves a lot of CPU processing time.

But Gwyn has found another SL viewer, by Kirstenlee Cinquetti, that sounds exciting:

[ . . . ] there is simply none of the SL viewers I’ve tried that have the same raw performance than her viewer. And thanks to Hyang Zhao’s work, I can test some of the latest versions of Kirstens Viewer on my poor underpowered Macs too.

It’s always a pleasure to install it, specially on the poor MacBook (not Pro), which gets some 5 or 6 FPS out of the latest batches coming out of LL, as well as on all derivative viewers. Kirstens Viewer just runs flawlessly over 15 FPS out of it — sometimes more, on empty sims. Of course I can’t turn most things on — even Basic Shaders will crash the MacBook, US$10 Intel cards are simply not up to it — but I can get pretty reasonable results. Enough for work; enough for demonstrations.

On my early-2007 iMac, however, things are quite different. You should take into account that Linden Lab works very hard to get a reasonable 15 FPS on almost all computers from the past 3 years — and except for the ones with too low cards, that’s what you should expect to get with “reasonable” settings. I definitely get that on the iMac — with Snowglobe, even with the Atmospheric Shaders on. This is actually quite reasonable.

Kirstens Viewer has allegedly a partial redesign of the whole rendering engine and the texture pipeline. Although I don’t see such a huge difference about texture downloads — LL has done enough improvements on their side as well — Kirstenlee has also incorporated the new lighting engine. Yes, the very same that allows unlimited lights in a scene, and uses new hardware-based tricks on the graphics card to give a boost in performance. The results? Even on old, outdated, obsolete graphics cards you should see an improvement — both in much nicer rendering (the new lighting system is astonishingly good), and in additional raw performance. For me, it means a boost of at least 50%, and when you have so few FPS, 50% does really make a difference (on a top-of-the-line graphics card you might see little difference — except on much nicer rendering).

I’m actually eager to see if Kirstenlee is willing to put her code in Snowglobe Now that would be something!

But I’ve left the most astonishing feat of the latest version of the Kirstens Viewer (S-17-2 build 198 as I write) for the end: shadows work… even on computers/graphics cards where they shouldn’t!

I downloaded the Kirsten Viewer and tried it out briefly this evening. When I followed the directions in Gwyn's blog to enable dynamic shadows:

1. Make sure you have a DirectX 10 compatible card (eg. nVidia 8 series or newer)
2. Make sure Atmospheric Shaders is on
3. Open the Advanced menu (if you don’t have it yet, press Ctrl+Alt+D)
4. Go to Debug Settings…
5. Type renderuseFBO
6. Change value to TRUE
7. Type renderdeferred
8. Change value to TRUE
9. Welcome to the world of dynamic shadows.

shadows suddenly appeared.


The CTRL-SHIFT-1 diagnostic window shows a pretty steady framerate around 15 FPS. Of course, this is in Arianti, which is a quiet sim with very little lag most of the time. I went to the Hollywood sim and got between 6 and 8 FPS. Turning off RenderDeferred in the Debug Settings to disable shadows let the frame rate go back up to 10-15 FPS.


Shadows will add an extra dimension of reality to our virtual existance. Let's hope that Kirsten's improvements make it into other viewers, especially future "official" SL clients.

Well, this just takes the cake -- er, pie...

The new SL Release 1.23.4 may have fixed a lot of bugs, but for some reason, LL decided to shuffle the contents of the pie menu, for no good reason whatsoever. Why is this important? For one thing, users have grown used to entries in the pie menu being in certain places, and this will cause all sorts of mistakes as people click on the wrong entries by force of habit. Every manual and help machima will be out of date and will have to be redone if they are to avoid confusion (Torley is probably bursting into tears as he looks over the dozens -- if not hundreds -- of tutorial videos he's done).

But the biggest complaints are from designers and builders who suddenly have to drill down through extra layers of menu whenever they want to edit an object while it's being worn. Several have already said they consider it a show-stopper; there are a number of jura entries requesting a return to the old pie menu structure: particularly VWR-12946 and VWR-13320. 12946 has a couple of xml files that restore the old pie menu structure; these replace the installed files in the ...\SecondLifeReleaseCandidate\skins\default\xui\en-us\ program files directory. Be sure to rename the old files rather than deleting them in case you have to go back. And add your vote to the jura entries!

New Mermaid's Dream store

I've opened a new Mermaid's Dream store in the Bluewarren Mall, to replace the one at Thera which had to close because they closed down the mer shops there. There seems to be more traffic there than at Thera, so hopefully it will be worth the L$275/week rent.

Meercat Manor

I ran across a mention in New World Notes of a viewer that can copy your builds out of SL and into other grids, such as OpenSim. It's called the Meercat Viewer, and is open source (free!). It only works with objects that you have full perms for, which is understandable. I'm going to give it a try; I have several things I'd like to move over to my private OpenSim world without having to reinvent the wheel each time.