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.

A Whole New World

The past few days, I've been experimenting with OpenSimulator, the open-source sim server that is compatable with the SL client. I hadn't paid much attention to it, thinking that I would need a dedicated server machine, but found out that you can host the server on the same machine as your client (of course, having a fast computer with lots of memory helps). Of course, having the server on a dedicated machine would have advantages.

Installing and configuring OpenSim isn't for the fainthearted technophobe, but there are some good tutorials on setting it up.

OpenSim comes with SQLite for database storage, but I decided to install MySQL which is better able to handle larger number of assets without a lot of lag. Here again, there is a tutorial for installing it and integrating it with OpenSim.

With a bit of head-banging and googling, I was finally able to bring up the server. So I made a copy of the shortcut for the SL client, and added command line options specifying the local OpenSim server IP address and port: "C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" -loginuri http://127.0.0.1:9000/ -loginpage http://127.0.0.1:9000/?method=login. I clicked on the shortcut, and found myself standing on a small round island in the middle of the default sim.

When you arrive in OpenSim, you are in the "T" pose, which is a bit annoying. However, as soon as you move, the walk animation kicks in and everything is OK from that point. Assuming that the noobie "duck walk" is OK.

After doing some random terrain building, I decided to experiment further and created a second sim on the server, next to the first one. This worked just fine, especially once I found out that the coordinates are sim-oriented (i.e. (1000,1001) is the sim next to (1000,1000) instead of (1000,1256) like I first assumed). So now I had two whole sims to play with.

I don't know how many sims I can support on my long-suffering Compaq without it melting its CPU down into a puddle of silicon, but two should be enough for my personal empire for the time being.


One of the big problems with OpenSim at the current time is that there isn't much in their library in terms of objects, textures, animations, and the like. You basically have to build everything up from scratch, and about all you can get out of SL is copies of modifiable scripts (by copy/paste into a text document on your computer and then in the opposite direction into a new script in OS), and textures for which you have full perms. I cloned Mare by going into Appearance and writing down all of the slider numbers, then applying them to my new avatar in the OpenSim world. This was a bit tedious, and I don't look right without my prim hair :-(

The contents of a sim can be exported to what is called an OAR file. Googling around, I found a very limited number of these available, some with trees and buildings in them. I was able to load these into one of my sims and get copies of the trees for my own inventory. Confusingly, OAR files normally have the extension .tar.gz, which indicates that they are actually Unix-style compressed files; this extension convention will probably be changed in the future. Caution: loading an OAR file wipes the previous contents of the sim, so be sure to save it into an OAR file of your own before importing another one if you want to save it!

If you don't mind spending 29 € (US$25 or so), there is a utility/modified client called Second Inventory which allows you to download items out of your inventory (only the ones for which you have full permissions) to your hard drive, and then upload them into OS. I don't have that yet, because I'm just experimenting right now and am too cheap frugal to spend any money on this.

If you get lonely or don't want to handle the care and feeding of hosting your own server, there are several public OpenSim grids on the Internet to explore -- here's a list. If you have your server on a machine that is visible to the rest of the Net, you can add your sims to one of the grids and "go public". I haven't explored any of them myself yet, but I will before too much longer.

OpenSimulator is still considered alpha software, which means that it's a work in progress, and I've run into several bugs and gotchas already; but nothing that is a real show-stopper in terms of playing around with it. I plan on reporting any problems I find, if they already haven't been reported: things have been and should go on improving rapidly.

There is a feeling of power in having your own private virtual world!

Tails To Be Sold Told

It's been a while since I've added any products, but I finally finished (if any of my projects can ever be said to be "finished") a new line of mer tails and put them in a vendor in my shops and on Xstreet. Called Nereid, they come in a variety of colors and include hip and dorsal fins. I've got 12 different color schemes (so far). Apparently, I seem to have hit some kind of limit on the number of images Blogger will let me upload for this post, so I can only show the first five:

Black/Blue
Black/Gold
Black/Red
Black/Green
Blue/Aqua

Blue/Gold

Blue/Green

Green/Gold

Lavender/Gold

Purple/Gold

Red/Gold

Silver/Gold

The Neighbors are Having a Ball

Or, more correctly, a couple hundred of them. I discovered the mess when I went for a swim this evening and found several errant spheres rolling around the sea floor under my dock. I pushed them back over the boundary of my property and retired for the night, shaking my head...