Eye on the Blog: "Project Interesting" Promises Better Rezzing Priorities

Recently on the official Second Life blog, Linden Lab announced the latest step of their "Project Shinning." This development now available in the new official viewer, promises a more sensible, or "interesting," way for objects to rezz. Hence the name "Project Interesting." What it promises to do is replace the seemingly random pattern of objects rezzing to a more prioritized one where those which are larger and closer to your avatar appear first.

... this project will greatly reduce the load and time it takes to draw objects in regions. Put simply, this means scenes will appear more quickly and smoothly as you move throughout Second Life. ...
We’ve already made the server smarter about sending the important, "interesting" stuff first, and today we’re launching a release candidate for a new Viewer that does a much better job of storing and managing the scene data on your computer. This will not only improve the speed at which a location loads, it will also help with overall Viewer performance.

It's a problem most of us can relate to, how often the objects most important to us are about the last ones to rezz, such as a door that remains invisible and can't be opened to let one through. So a development like this sounds good. But recalling what Server-Side baking did to the Second Life experience of residents with older computers, some can be pardoned for asking "what's the catch?"  And indeed, resident Bay Sweetwater suggested Project Interesting doesn't quite work well with Mac computers.


For the complete blog post, Click Here. Or Click Here if you're having trouble seeing the video.

Phoenix Viewer Support to End Dec 31st

Jessica Lyon announced on the Phoenix-Firestorm blog that support for the Phoenix Viewer would come to a close at the end of the year.

More on the story later. For now, check the Phoenix-Firestorm blog Here.

Phoenix Development May Stop Soon

To Phoenix fans, Tonya Southern of the Firestorm/Phoenix team has some less than pleasant news, "Viewer 1 is officially on borrowed time." In the latest post on her blog, she talked about a recent third-party viewer meeting with Oz Linden about some upcoming changes with Second Life. Specifically, Project Shinning. While it should stop "bake fail" in newer viewers, "it is incompatible with current viewers. … The result of the server-sized bake is that viewers that don't handle it will simply see gray avatars, with no way to fix them."

It was Tonya's opinion that the old Linden Lab Viewer 1, when this happens, will no longer be useable, along with third-party viewers not actively maintained. Aside from Singularity and possibly Cool VL, she didn't expect any other third party viewers based on Viewer 1 technology to continue, "Nobody else is developing a V1 Viewer any more."

And the Phoenix Viewer, which continues to be the most popular of the third-party viewers? Team Phoenix has yet to make a decision, but in Tonya's opinion, "it's time to say that we are not going to put any more effort into Phoenix."

"As far as I'm concerned, it's time to put Phoenix to rest. The developers don't like working in the codebase, as in many ways it's an unmaintainable tissue of hacks, the support team barely remembers how to run it, and Firestorm now provides essentially all of the function Phoenix has, and much more besides."

Tonya recognized this would be an unpopular change, especially those who won't or can't run Viewer 2 and 3 Viewers, but "there comes a point when making an old program run in a new environment simply isn't feasible." Her advice, those who vowed not to run Viewer 2 better change their mind or make plans to depart Second Life. Same thing with those with older computers, "Me? I'll be happily running Firestorm 5."

Tonya's post got a mixed reaction. While some agreed, others did not. It was similar with the article New World Notes did, people saying there was no way Team Phoenix would give up on the most popular Second Life Viewer.

If the Phoenix Viewer is becoming harder and harder for its team to work with, it may not matter much to them if they stop the updates. From the very beginning, they've been a volunteer project. Success or failure, they don't make any money, only prestige.

Fortunately for Viewer 2 haters, or those whom have no personal problems with it but their computers can't run it, Singularity and Cool VL are still out there, though Singularity hasn't had a Mac update recently. And what if down the road all V1-based Viewers stop working? For some, it'll be time to get out the credit card (though Mac lovers will feel a bigger bite on the wallet). Though it isn't hard to imagine some die-hard V2 haters, and sadly a few on older machines with limited budgets (or whom get sold a newer machine that performs worse), whom say farewell to Second Life. It should be interesting to see how many head to Opensim worlds.

Sources: The Tigress's Second Den, New World Notes

Bixyl Shuftan

Eye on the Blog: Project Shinning

If there's one thing virtually all Second Life residents dislike, it's the lag. The time needed for land and objects to rezz when you teleport to a place or move from one place to another. Frequently when Linden Lab unveils a new feature, the response from some residents is "stop with the bells and whistles and do something about performance!"

Last Friday, it seemed the Lab was finally listening to them. On the Linden blog, "Project Shinning" was announced.

This year, Linden Lab is making the single largest capital investment in new server hardware upgrades in the history of the company. This new hardware will give residents better performance and more reliability. Additionally, we are converting from three co-locations to two co-locations. This will significantly reduce our inter-co-location latency and further enhance simulator performance.

The Shining project is the name given to a recent Lab effort to identify and measure delays and other problems with streaming avatars and objects and to propose and implement solutions. During the Shining project, several small improvements have been identified and deployed. The next small improvement from Shining to be deployed will be pre-rendering the starter Avatars to improve the new resident experience.

Project Shinning according to the Lab has three parts. The HTTP Library section involves improving speed and reliability with a new code library. The "Open Caching and Interest Lists" involves taking the current system of caching objects between sims and the viewer and redesigning it to take better advantage of information it already has.

The biggest changes are with the third part, labeled "Project Sunshine." Avatar textures have been processed on each one's viewer and the data sent to the sim for other viewers to read. The process can sometimes be slow, and is the reason some avatars can appear gray for a long time, or briefly appear naked while changing clothes. Project Sunshine plans to change this with new servers to process textures apart from the sim's own servers to do the texture rendering instead of the viewers to improve efficiency and speed.

As a resident, I certainly would welcome such improvements. At social events that attract dozens of people, even after ten minutes not everything has always rezzed. Seeing an avatar briefly naked while changing, while perhaps amusing to me if it's a girl, can feel a bit embarrassing to the person behind the avatar. Girls moving to a place in private to change aren't doing it out of realism. Other residents have complained often and loudly about lag. This news from the Lab certainly gives the impression finally they're listening and doing something about it.

Tateru Nino concluded Linden Lab was serious about solving the problem, "These projects are big-deal items that must have taken considerable planning and pre-production before the Lab would even consider announcing them." She expected the project to be introduced over the next six months. Inara Pey wasn't sure, "no definitive time frames for the improvements have been announcements … there's a lot to be done and matters are complex enough that LL will want to proceed with minimal disruption to the grid and to users.

Hamlet Au greeted the news of Project Shinning with skepticism. He noted two announcements from 2010 and 2011 about improvements to help with lag, and commented while they helped with some residents, others have seen no improvements. Hamlet wrote his own viewer performance was getting worse, "I remain hopeful. At the same time, a part of me feels like Linden Lab's war on lag is sort of like my government's ill-begotten 'war on drugs' -- a battle ... which never seems winnable, and never seems to address the underlying problems."

People responding to them had a mixture of answers, some happy to hear the news, "It's about time." Others were cautiously optimistic. And some weren't expecting anything. Tateru Nino answered one reader whom expressed surprise the Lindens were still working on Second Life, "From where I’m sitting ... the Lab’s done more work on SL in the last 12 months than in any year previously. The problem is that it has become much harder to tell what it is working on, because it isn’t communicating."

Hopefully Project Shinning will mean a shinning improvement for our experiences in Second Life.

Sources: Linden Blog, Dwell on It, Modem World, New World Notes

Bixyl Shuftan