SL Tech – Page 336 – Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

OnLive Brings Second Life to the iPad with SL Go for iOS

Posted on October 14, 2014May 25, 2020 by Inara Pey

Important note: The SL Go service is to be shut down on April 30th, 2015. For more information, please read this report.

On Tuesday, October 14th, 2014 OnLive, the company behind the revolutionary SL Go service which streams the SL viewer and SL content directly to the user’s computer or hand-held device, announced the product is now available for iOS on the iPad.

Until now, the application has only been available for the Android mobile device platform, although OnLive have been working towards a release for iOS for some time. Now, the application’s arrival for the iPad brings with it the ability for iPad users to access Second Life with the full graphical richness of the SL viewer when on the move.

OnLive bring SL Go to the iPad (image courtesy of OnLive)

The press release announcing the launch reads in part:

OnLive, the leader in cloud gaming, today announced the release of SL® Go for iOS, a mobile viewer for Linden Lab’s Second Life® virtual world that extends the player’s Second Life experience to iPad® tablets for the first time. The touch-enabled app builds on SL® Go for Android™, which launched in spring of this year.

SL Go empowers Second Life residents to experience Second Life in full 3D and in real-time on any iPad running iOS 7 or greater, without the need for an expensive desktop computer. New and existing users can simply sign in over Wi-Fi or 4G LTE to enjoy a high-fidelity Second Life experience with amazing graphics quality, full shaders, shadows and full motion capability. Streamed from OnLive’s powerful cloud-based servers, which have been clocked at speeds as high as 200 FPS set to Ultra with Maximum Render Distance, each secure Second Life session enables users to rez quickly into their favorite sims to connect with in-world friends,participate in events, engage in combat games, and enjoy immersion in Second Life at a level never before possible on iPad tablets.

SL Go offers access to the full Second Life Viewer interface, including edit menus, inventory, preference settings and chat management, adding intuitive touch controls. All user customizations are saved from session to session, even if played on a completely different device or platform.Design a beautiful scene using SL Go on your Mac or PC, and then show it off to friends on iPad. Your world transfers seamlessly, making it mind-blowingly easy to stay connected with in-world events.

“Ever since we launched SL Go for Android™, the Second Life community has been clamoring for iOS compatibility,” said Rick Sanchez, VP of Product and Marketing at OnLive. “Now, residents can keep Second Life at their fingertips whether they’re at work, home, out with friends or traveling for the holidays. And with the iPad’s stunning Retina display, the Second Life world is beautifully rendered with breathtaking 3D graphics.”

SL Go on the iPad (image courtesy of OnLive)

Drax has produced a video to mark the iPad launch as well.

About OnLive

OnLive is the originator of fast-twitch cloud gaming, innovating the delivery of real-time interactive experiences over any network. With ground-breaking video compression technology, OnLive instantly delivers full-featured, media-rich applications anytime and anywhere, across a range of devices. The OnLive Game Service gives gamers the freedom to play their games on PCs, Macs, tablets, and HDTVs. OnLive Go brings the benefits of cloud gaming to MMOs, virtual worlds and other graphics-rich interactive applications. Having pioneered powerful cloud solutions for the most technologically challenging segment, fast-twitch AAA games, OnLive has hundreds of patents that cover its innovations. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California. More information is available at www.onlive.com and www.onlive.co.uk.

Viewer release summaries: week 41

Posted on October 13, 2014March 16, 2020 by Inara Pey

Updates for the week ending: Sunday October 12th, 2014

This summary is published every Monday and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:

It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information

Official LL Viewers

Current Release version 3.7.16.294959 (Monday October 6; formerly the New Log-in Screen RC – core updates: simple and clean login screen for new users, and a corresponding update for returning users) (release notes)
Release channel cohorts (See my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
- No Updates
Project viewers:
- No Updates.

LL Viewer Resources

SL Alternate Viewers wiki page – LL
Viewer Source Repositories wiki page – LL
Test Builds wiki page – LL
Supported Viewers wiki page – LL
Viewer release process overview – this blog
SL Viewer updates and reviews on this blog

Third-party Viewers

V3-style

Black Dragon updated to version 2.4.0.2 Beta on October 6th – core updates: bug fixes (change log)
UKanDo updated to version 3.7.17.28056 on October 11th – core updates: partity with Lab’s 3.7.17 code base, new official log-in screen updates, FMODex updated to 4.44.41 (release notes)

V1-style

Cool Viewer Stable Branch updated to version 1.26.12.20 and Cool Viewer Legacy Branch updated to version 1.26.8.78, both on October 11th – core updates: please refer to the release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Third-party Viewer Directory – LL

SL project updates week 41/3: TPV Developer meeting

Posted on October 11, 2014September 27, 2024 by Inara Pey

The following notes are drawn from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday October 10th, and shown in the video above. Time stamps, where relevant, have been included for ease of reference to the video. Note that items are listed according to subject matter, rather than chronologically, so time stamps may appear out-of-sequence in places. My thanks as always to North for the recording.

SL Viewer

HTTP Pipeline Viewer

[0:26:35] As noted in part 2 of this week’s report, the HTTP pipelining viewer was looking close to being ready for deployment as an RC viewer, possibly in the next week. However, it hit a final QA snag, and in Oz’s words, “Monty is busily correcting the problem and getting it back in the queue.” Or as Monty put it in chat “:(“. Apparently a workaround for a CURL bug “tends to disable pipelining”.

Benchmark and Experience Tools Viewers

[0:27:20] It is hoped that these two project viewers will be updating and moving into the viewer release channel as release candidates “pretty soon”.

Viewer Build Tool Chain

[0:41:51] The tools upgrade project for building the viewer has been subject to a few delays. Currently, the Lab has just about finished putting together all the build prerequisites for building the Mac version of the viewer directly on OS X 10.9, and are about to commence test builds of the viewer using the new tool chain. This has also led to some progress being made on updating the Linux build process as well. The windows environment will require further work, so it will be a little longer before things are fully in place.

Group Chat

[0:28:58] Again, as noted in part 2 of this week’s report, the latest updates for group chat are being deployed to various back-end chat servers by the Lab, and may be deployed to all of the chat servers in the next week.

While investigating group chat, the Lab has noticed that in general it is “unbelievably spikey”, with chat sessions having peaks of really good performance followed by troughs of really bad performance regardless as to whether the groups are regarded as being “good” or “bad” in handling group chat. There is no real pattern to these peaks and troughs, other than the larger the group, the more it seems to swing between the two extremes, and nothing to correlate them with anything in particular beyond the bad times occurring when a lot of people in a group are online.

Z-offet height Adjustment

[0:31:52] Work is continuing on the z-offset height proposal, which Vir Linden has been engaged upon. However, it appears the Lab has encountered some issues which have made it “a little more complicated” than had initially be thought. hopefully, these will be overcome, and they won’t bring the work to a halt.

CDN

[0:32:28] As noted in part 2 of this week’s report the number of regions on Snack and utilising the Highwinds CDN for mesh and texture data servicing had reached around the 270 mark, but has since come down a little as a result of the Lab overloading the Snack sim hosts with regions running high volumes of users.

Metrics gathered by the Lab have been positive, and even though the Snack sim hosts were initially overloaded, the Lab feel they performed significantly better thanks to texture and mesh fetching being off-loaded to the CDN than would have been the case had the “old” method of texture / mesh fetching still been in use.

One aspect of the move to using the CDN is that until now, the sim host Apache service was being used for texture and mesh data handling and “lots” of other things which are timing critical to operations such as region crossings. With the move to the CDN, much (if not all) of the texture and mesh data handling is removed from the Apache service, making it easier for it to better handle time-critical activities.

If all goes according to plan, the CDN support will be expanded to the BlueSteel release candidate channel in week 42 (commencing Monday October 13th). This will allow the Lab to gain data on performance using the CDN support which can be directly compared with historical data available for region / sim host performance in BlueSteel. Those regions already running on Snack will continue to do so alongside of BlueSteel, so that around 5% of the main grid will be using the CDN service.

Continue reading “SL project updates week 41/3: TPV Developer meeting” →

SL project updates 41/2: server, HTTP, Group Chat

Posted on October 10, 2014September 27, 2024 by Inara Pey

Pigeon Island, Neverending (Flickr) – blog post

The following notes are taken from the Server Beta meeting held on Thursday October 9th, 2014. The transcript is available here, and the support agenda notes here.

Server Deployments Week 41 – Recap

Server deployment thread
The Main (SLS) channel and the Snack RC received the same server maintenance package as had been deployed to the three primary RCs in week 40,which fixes a bug related to viewing parcel details in gaming regions
There was no deployment to any of the primary RC channels (LeTigre, BlueSteel and Magnum).

CDN and the Snack RC

There are now some 270 regions on the Snack RC and which use the CDN for texture and mesh data fetching. The majority of these are mainland regions, although there is still no public list of all of them. Those who would like their region added to Snack are asked to contact the Lab at cdn-test@lindenlab.com.

If you’re using a TPV that can display region details in a dialogue box following a region crossing, you can use it to identify regions using the CDN, or you can check the About Land floater for the region you’re in. In both cases look for “Second Life RC Snack” in the region’s descriptive text. If you see it, the region is using the CDN.

Group Chat

Simon Linden’s work to both reduce the volume of additional group chat information messages (people joining leaving group chat sessions, updates to the group members list as people log-in or out of SL), and the frequency with which they are sent appears to have satisfied the Lab that they will produce some measure of improvement. There has already been a deployment of the updates to some of the back-end chat servers, and according to Maestro Linden, it is anticipated they should be on all of the chat servers some time in the next week. There may be more to add to this following the TPV Developer meeting.

HTTP Pipelining

The new HTTP pipelining viewer (referred to by the Lab’s QA team as the “weaponized” viewer, it is apparently so slick), is due to hit RC status. “Project Drano”, as Monty Linden, who has been spearheading the HTTP work over the last 2+ years, jokingly calls it, offers both improvements of its own and should further assist in data downloads via the CDN. Commenting on the viewer, Monty said:

The next viewer adds HTTP pipelining support to mesh and texture fetches. This allows multiple asset requests to be issued without waiting for intervening responses from the server, and it goes very far towards making client-to-server ping time irrelevant in throughput metrics. It’s a huge step on its own making our services perform as well as they can. Combined with CDN it’s even better. I won’t mention specific numbers but a region can show up in a very few seconds … Right now, we plan on skipping the project viewer stage. We’re going out the door [as an RC] once it passes QA (maestro heading that up).

Mesh fetching via the CDN should see an improvement because the viewer-side throttle of 100 meshes/second has been removed (this won’t affect non-CDN regions, as the throttle is also applied server-side on those).

As well as the core HTTP work, Monty has also done some work on inventory fetching within this viewer, particularly the code which is used to initially populate the inventory floater. This has been converted to use HTTP, and reduces the number of connections it uses. Again, no precise figures were given, but it should lead to improvements in inventory loading in situations where inventory data has been removed from cache (see the Firestorm wiki for information on removing inventory data files from cache). In one test with no inventory data, Monty saw a 100K inventory load around 10 times faster with the new viewer.

Whirly Fizzle (based in the UK) carried out inventory load tests for an 105K inventory between what was at the time the SL release viewer and a pre-release version of the HTTP pipelining viewer, both starting from a clear cache, and achieved some impressive results:

Second Life 3.7.16 (294015) Sep 10 2014 11:08:26 (Second Life Release)
- Session 1: 16 mins 28 secs
- Session 2: 17 mins 53 secs
- Session 3: 17 mins 18 secs
- Session 4: 17 mins 51 secs
Second Life 3.7.17 (294571) Sep 26 2014 12:32:36 (HTTP pipelining viewer)
- Session 1: 2 mins 29 secs
- Session 2: 2 mins 17 secs
- Session 3: 2 mins 11 secs
- Session 4: 2 mins 27 secs

I tend to have a very organised inventory, old / no longer used items are boxed, and anything not used in 6 months is similarly boxed (see: zdrop). Thus I only have an “active” inventory of around 10K (9,140 items at the moment), out of a total of around 70-100K. However, even with a “small” inventory like that, and working with a cleared cache, my results were impressive. The latest project version of the HTTP pipelining viewer (3.7.18.295146) averaged 9-10 seconds for inventory to download compared with an average of 2 minutes 50 seconds to 3 minutes for the current release viewer (3.7.17.294959).

Again, overall mileage on inventory downloads will vary, hence why Monty is hesitant to mention figures. However, it is thought that those with excessively “flat” inventories should see particular benefit (although they’d also be better off nesting their inventory into groups of folders).

SL project updates week 41/1: server, viewer, CDN

Posted on October 8, 2014September 27, 2024 by Inara Pey

Sailing through Columbia River - blog post — Sailing through Columbia River – blog post

Server Deployments

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest updates and news.

On Tuesday October 7th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the server maintenance package deployed to the three primary RC channels in week 40, which fixes a bug related to viewing parcel details in gaming regions
There are no planned deployments / restarts scheduled for the three primary RC channels of BlueSteel, Magum and LeTigre
On Wednesday October 8th, the Snack RC, which is currently being used with the CDN project, should receive the same server maintenance package deployed the Main (SLS) channel.

SL Viewer

On Monday October 6th, the new log-in screen viewer was promoted to the de facto release viewer, version 3.7.17.294959. This viewer offers a revised log-in / splash screen for both new and returning users, based on feedback gathered during A/B testing (release notes).

CDN Update

There is still no list of all the regions now running on the Snack RC and using the CDN for mesh and texture data retrieval, although Bay City – Sconset is one to add to any unofficial lists out there. It also appears that a number of Blake Sea regions may have been added to Snack, and are being blamed for region crossing issues.

The CDN service itself shouldn’t result in any worsening of region crossing issues, but Simon indicated that in moving regions onto the Snack Rc, the Lab, “inadvertently overloaded the servers on the Snack channel…. In this case, we picked a bunch of popular areas and put them all on the same machine, which was bad” (this overloading also might be related to BUG-7444 – note the comment from Maestro Linden). “We did get some very good info on how things get overloaded, however,” Simon added. “…And possible future work to keep us busy.”

In the meantime, it is still not clear when a wider deployment of CDN support might take place. However, there do not appear to be any major blockers to a possible wider deployment to one (or more) of the primary RCs. It will be interesting to see if anything is announced for week 42 (week commencing Monday October 13th).

Viewer release summaries: week 40

Posted on October 6, 2014March 16, 2020 by Inara Pey

Updates for the week ending: Sunday October 5th, 2014