Category: SL Tech

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday September 27th. A video, courtesy of North, can be found at the end of this report. The numbers in braces after each head denote the time stamp at which the topic can be listened-to in the video.

SL Release Candidate Viewers

SLShare

[03:00]

Following my coverage of the release of SLShare, the opt-in capability for those wishing to link their Second Life accounts with their Facebook accounts, A question was asked as to whether the feature would be available to TPVs. Speaking at the TPV Development Meeting, Oz Linden provided comments which answered this question more fully, and and Merov Linden gave further information on the functionality in general.

“One of the design considerations is that this is a feature you [TPV developers] can all integrate without any problem,” Oz said. “All of the actual connections to Facebook, all of the handling of the requisite authentication tokens and permissions and [the] relationship with Facebook itself, is all handled server-side. So the code that’s in the release candidate viewer is something that you can integrate so that you can also make this feature available on whatever schedule you would like to.”

He went on to confirm that given this, no Facebook information for users of the service is exposed to TPVs.

As to how soon it might be before the SLShare RC is promoted to the release viewer, Oz again reiterated that it depends on how well the various candidates currently in the release channel perform. Currently, the metrics for the viewer look good, according to Merov, so it may still leapfrog its way to becoming the release viewer. However it is more likely that it will not become the de facto viewer for at least another two weeks.

Despite the negative reactions to the feature which have appeared in the comments following blog posts, etc., reporting on the functionality, the Lab believes SLShare is already “getting a lot of use”. This view is based on the numbers of people who have pro-actively gone and downloaded and installed the RC viewer manually.

While this may be a case of the Lab greasing the wheels a little bit (downloading and installing the viewer isn’t necessarily the same as running the feature),  Firestorm are reporting that they’ve had at least one request for the feature to be added to their next release.

During the meeting, a series of questions were raised on the feature:

• Will the feature become opt-out in the future, rather than opt-in? Merov Linden:  “It’s opt-in. We’re not doing anything [behind] the back of the residents.”
• Will the feature create a Facebook account on behalf of anyone using it? Merov Linden:  “There is no API to create an account on Facebook on behalf of someone.”
• Will it lead to a merging of the current SL feeds with the Facebook feed?  Oz Linden: ” No, there is no connection between the Second Life profile feeds and the Facebook feed. They have no relationship at all … In theory one could probably build a viewer that did that, but we’re not planning on it.”

(Further questions passed unanswered due to the region in which the meeting was being held being subjected to a griefing attack which left it in a poor state and prompted a change of meeting venue.)

Viewer Statistics

[33:26]

The Lab has been putting together a new statistics reporting system, which is now starting to be used to generate a range of reports. Commenting on some of the information which is coming out of the system, primarily in response to questions asked at both Open-source dev and TPV dev meetings, Oz indicated that:

• Almost one-third of regions within SL have at least one materials-enhanced object in them, which is described as “dramatically faster” than the adoption of mesh
• The number of avatars wearing materials-enhanced mesh / prim clothing is “steadily climbing”
• The number of people who have Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) enabled on a “class 3” (mid-range Graphics cards) or above is just under 20%

One of the problems here – from the Lab’s point of view at least – is that both Singularity and Firestorm have ALM turned off by default for almost all graphics settings, except perhaps High-Ultra, and Ultra. The flip side to this is the view that the Lab enables ALM by default on cards which are barely able to support it, with the result that people’s SL experience suffers through poor frame rates.

In the past the Lab has pointed to data which tends to show that viewers running on low-end graphics cards card do indeed suffer performance issues with ALM active; mid-range GPU show little difference in performance between running with ALM active or not and have “reasonable” fps rates; high-end (“class 5”, as they call them) cards  – e.g. ATI Radeon HD 7800, 7900, 8900, 8950 + similar, nVidia GTX 460/460SE, 465, 550TI, 580, 660/660TI + similar – perform significantly better with ALM active.

The problems here are how one defines “reasonable” frame rates and how one interprets ALM. For the Lab, it would appear that “reasonable” frame rates is anything in double figures – e.g. above 10; many users would disagree with this. At the same time, many users still appear to equate having ALM active with having Shadows enabled (which actually leads to a far larger performance hit), but the two are actually quite separate. As had been pointed out a number of times in these pages, ALM can be active without having to enable shadows.

Nevertheless, part of the new viewer statistics system should enable to Lab to gather and present performance numbers for cards with and with ALM enabled, filtered by viewer, so that TPVs can better judge matters for themselves.  In addition, Oz is going to be looking at ways and means of doing systematic testing with cards in order to generate more meaningful statistics, and which may allow for other factors which influcence performance (other avatars in the same region, the amount of movement going on, viewer settings, etc.).

Understanding Viewer Performance

[45:41]

A further problem with the viewer is that it is complicated, and while there are many tools to help monitor performance, people either focus on the wrong tools or cannot find those that would be helpful to them in diagnosing an issue when they do encounter unexpected performance drops.

To this end, Oz floated the idea at the TPV Developer meeting for TPV devs to give thought as to which tools and information feeds within the viewer would be useful to users to help them understand what is going on, and how best to present said tools, etc., in a way which would make sense to users and enable them to make use of the information they are seeing.

Continue reading “SL projects update week 39 (3): viewer, interest list, HTTP, SSA and more” →