Guess what? This seems to be the month of SL clients competing on bleeding edge features and speed improvements! After my previous post — now outdated! — on comparing Linden Lab’s open source “Snowglobe” viewer with Kirstens Viewer, KirstenLee Cinquetti hasn’t been asleep. She obviously got hold of the open source ultra-fast texture download code and new rendering pipeline from Snowglobe, added the “Worn Items” tab from Imprudence, and created an “unholy union” which gave us… dramatic performance. Again.

Comparing Snowglobe and Kirstens Viewer S18 is inevitable, of course, and your own experiences might be quite different. Remember, this is not for the faint of heart; both are so impossibly fast that I’m wondering if someone hasn’t sneaked in a new iMac on my table and are secretly laughing behind my back! On the other hand, many people will grumble and complain that it doesn’t work for them, or that they have some odd issues that never popped up before. That’s all right; we’re talking about products not designed for the casual, mainstream user — but for someone who couldn’t care less about a few minor issues and just wants poor, raw performance out of their computers

That’s really what I’m after I used SL in 2004 with… 2-3 FPS. I slowly got used to push sliders and click boxes on the Preferences tab and was insanely happy when I managed 6-9 FPS out of the same computer! When I switched over to a “new” iMac back in early 2007, I was happy when I first saw SL running above 15 FPS, sometimes (on empty sims and very low settings) even going all the way up to 20! Then Windlight — now called “Atmospheric Shaders” — was incorporated into SL, worked well for a while during the testing phase, but the final release simply made my poor underpowered iMac go back to the more familiar 9-12 FPS range.

That all changed until KirstenLee Cinquetti came along with her viewer and launched her new, improved rendering pipeline and better handling of the texture download — and Hyang Zhao ported it to the Mac. All of a sudden, I finally understood that 30 FPS is something even an old iMac is perfectly able to do without sweating, or burning holes on your motherboard.

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Read the rest of Kirstens Viewer S18 Strikes Back! (1,196 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: kirstens viewer, shadows, snowglobe, textures

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On my last post, I’ve covered the amazing possibilities of dynamic shadows and the new lighting system, even on under-powered graphics cards and low-end, old computers, thanks to KirstenLee Cinquetti.

This time, I’ll be showing you a video comparing the standard SL viewer (1.23.4) with Snowglobe (1.0.2), LL’s open-source-driven-and-contributed “separate” branch of their main viewer. The main feature it has right now (as well as some user-contributed patches) is downloading textures via HTTP (e.g. a “Web” request). All textures on all other viewers, right now, use LL’s own texture streaming protocol (based on UDP) developed, oh, probably in 2000 or 2001 (it’s hard to say!). Textures are right now just “another asset”, and you get all sorts of packets from sims for all kinds of information: avatar movement, asset download, linksets, instant messages. This means these packets may come out of order, or even get lost, and require retransmission. They can also time out “forever” if you’re unlucky (so a texture remains unloaded and displays as a gray surface).

The new mechanism is more complex, and it’s not very easy to figure out if it’s fully implemented or not (LL says it isn’t; but the results on the video below tend to show otherwise!). It allows a texture to be retrieved using a common HTTP call (just like a normal Web browser) directly from LL’s asset servers — or, in the future, from anywhere on the World-Wide Web (which has the huge advantage that you could, in theory, serve them from your own server — or from Flickr or Picasa! — and bypass LL’s own asset storage entirely). Thus, in the future, providing superfast storage for textures will be a line of business

Right now we’re just at the first stage: bypassing LL’s cumbersome protocol and just retrieve the textures via HTTP. The difference is… astonishing. You can watch a comparison by yourself on the video below and judge for yourself. Yes, I’ve tried it on very texture-intensive sims: Hair Fair 2009, Neufreistadt, and Armidi.

You’re probably better off if you check “HD” on the YouTube video and increase the size of the display to watch the many annotations I’ve left there

The important thing to remember is that you have to go to the Advanced menu, look for the Rendering submenu, and check HTTP Get Textures. Or else, the only thing that will load faster is the Map (gosh, I took ages to figure that out!).

Enjoy it

[UPDATE] Soft Linden believes that actually none of the textures (except for the Map) is being read via HTTP Requests… yet! Which makes all of this even more amazing, since it’s just a cycle of texture optimisations in the code (not unlike what KirstenLee Cinquetti did with her own viewer). If that’s the case… it means that once that code is in, Snowglobe should be even more faster! :-O

To figure out if some textures are being downloaded by Snowglobe via HTTP, press Ctrl-Shift-3. If you see any textures using “HTP” as the status, those will be loaded via HTTP. Soft might be right — I’ve tried it for a bit, and didn’t catch any textures with that status. Almost all are NET, SIM, or INI, although, granted, this happens so quickly under Snowglobe that it’s very hard to catch… in any case, if any textures are actually being downloaded via HTTP, they must be very few.

[UPDATE 2] Rika Wakanabe has plurked about her thorough tests (using a packet analyser) and has proven that at the time of writing (meaning: SnowGlobe 1.0.2) there are no textures being downloaded via HTTP yet, except for the map tiles. The code on the viewer is all finished, though, but on the server-side, nothing seems to be done yet, and there is no word from Linden Lab on when this might actually be developed. Interestingly, this might give the OpenSimulator developers something to think about and beat Linden Lab at their own game

Related posts:

1. Pushing the limits
2. Kirstens Viewer S18 Strikes Back!
3. Shadowy details! [UPDATED AGAIN]

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2009. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: snowglobe, textures

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I do really have a lot to talk about — the past two weeks in Second Life® have brought so much change that I’ve simply been unable to write anything much about it … and, well, unfortunately my colleagues and clients hate when I blog instead of a) sleeping; b) doing some work for them, so I’ve tried to refrain myself from writing much…

But at least I have to share with you something. Great changes are ahead for the SL client (and hopefully for the simulator software too). We’re not going to see much yet about those, because 2009 is still a “stability” year for Linden Lab, which means that most of their teams are focusing on making everything more stable.

2010, however, will be a year for dramatic changes.

And how dramatic? Well… I’ve been given a sneak preview and been heavilly NDA’d not to talk about it. Breathtaking simply doesn’t describe it properly. But I can safely say that you can forget about all and any competition until late 2011. They will have zero chance of catching up. In fact, if I were drowning in venture capital as all those SL-wannabees seem to be, I’d drop all development, start downloading the latest SL client from the open source repositories, and don’t waste investors’ funding into a stupid new product that nobody will use after 2 or 3 years. I’d put all that money to beat SL with… SL itself (and yes, that would mean developing a “competing product” using the code base from the SL client, and, of course, OpenSim).

Programming geeks, however, are so keen in reinventing the wheel — instead of polishing it and making better products out of existing wheels — that they’re just missing the point, and wasting time and money. For the next two years, nothing will ever come close to SL.

In the mean time, while the Big Announcements are pending — and will remain secret for a long, long time — a few changes are already announced. If you haven’t tested it yet, try the new branch of the SL client (on that page, look at the bottom right corner). Codenamed Snowglobe, it has a completely different development approach than LL’s “stable” version: it’s an open source-driven effort (even though most of the developers are still LL’s), it’s experimental, it releases code all the time, it includes all the latest patches popular with other viewers, and it also includes very experimental code that is left out of the “stable” branch. It’s pretty much at the same speed of development as in 2003-2005, with an added advantage: there are lots of non-LL developers on it too.

This first development cycle is mostly focusing on Philip Linden’s own developments. He has been playing with the map, and offloading the map textures to Amazon’s cloud computing-based storage. This means that textures, in the future, will not be downloaded only from LL’s servers (or co-location facilities) in California, Texas, and wherever the new grid will pop up, but from around the world, from the Amazon server cluster nearest to you At this stage only map textures are being downloaded, but many report a huge difference.

A nice side-effect of this approach is that textures will (in the very near future — all textures, not only map tiles) be downloaded using HTTP, that is, the standard Web protocol. What this means for offices or campuses (or even homes where several SL residents share the connection!) is that they can put one standard HTTP proxy in front of their connection, and cache all the textures in it — and forget about texture lag. If you can afford an old computer to act as your proxy server, using, say, a cheap Linux + Squid solution at home with a spare PC , and have a large enough disk, the cool thing about it is that you might be able to cache a huge amount of textures locally. Not only will that save you a lot in download traffic, but, of course, once one texture is downloaded, it will be available for all computers in your home/office/campus. That will make a huge difference!

But that’s not all. Another huge leap ahead is the introduction of dynamic shadows in SL. Oh yes, I know this is not “news”, since it has been showed off quite a long time ago on the Release Candidates. It’s now part of SL 1.23, but cunningly hidden away, because, really, it just works on high-end cards. To activate them, you should follow these instructions (many thanks to Jenny Thielt who provided me with a nice notecard!):

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.

To disable dynamic shadows, all you need to do is to change the renderdeferred value back to FALSE (you can also change the renderuseFBO value to FALSE too, if you want).

Pretty neat… if you have a top-of-the-line graphics card. What if you don’t?

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Read the rest of Pushing the limits (894 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2009. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: kirstens viewer, shadows

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Thunderclap Morgridge has contributed to the Second Life® Wiki by creating a list of “known” trademarks that have or had a presence in Second Life. It is by no means complete, but feel free to add to it if you’re aware of more (specially outside the US).

While we’re hoping that Linden Lab starts to gather a Business Directory that can be used as a reference for everybody, all these independent efforts to catalogue and classify the types and kinds of business use in SL are definitely important. The simple and plain truth is that we have no real clue about how many companies are in SL right now, and, more important, what they’re up to.

Granted, Thunderclap’s focus is more to give people something to think about when they see a “brand” simply copied from a RL brand, and allow people to see if the RL brand owner is in SL to alert them to trademark infringement. Unlike copyright infringement, trademark infringement is met by Linden Lab with immediate deletion of all content in violation. The reason is that you can immediately check and confirm if a trademark is improperly used. Copyright issues require a round of subjective analysis, since it’s far harder to establish ownership of an “idea” — copyright only covers the implementation of an idea, you can’t copyright ideas by themselves.

Trademarks, by contrast, are not “subjective”. Either you’re using a trademark legitimately or you aren’t. Thuderclap’s list should help people to identify at least some of the common ones that are in SL legitimately — but if you see any item for sale outside those companies’ virtual presence in Second Life, you can be pretty sure they are not legitimate uses of them and report the creator to LL — or to the legitimate trademark owner.

Note that everybody can register their own trademarks, too — it’s not just the “big brands” that can do it, but any individual can do it as well. Sadly, to register a trademark world-wide, it’s an insanely costly process. But if you have a very good SL-based business that depends on your brand awareness, which is something that takes months and years to do correctly, thus requiring a lot of investment (money and time!), you should consider registration too. In most countries of the world this is almost always done online, so it’s rather easy to do. If your brand means business to you, it has value; and protecting it is important and worth the expense — specially because you’ll know that any branded item copied by others will meet with instant content deletion by LL (there is no appeal and no discussion).

Of course, when people delete the brand and just copy the rest of the content, things are harder. But some content thieves don’t bother — they know the item is valuable because it shows a brand that people recognise. In those cases, it’s very very easy to get rid of the copied content.

Related posts:

1. Splitting Hairs Over Trademarks
2. FICbert
3. Petition to Linden Lab on the Policy of Trademark Enforcement

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: trademarks

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My friend Ana Lutetia has invited me to write something about lag on her blog. Since lag was what we mostly got this weekend, I hope you’ll appreciate an update on what I had written about the subject over a year ago.

Related posts:

1. Lag Myths Dispelled

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: arc, lag, myths

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