Zauber Paracelsus

New Blog

2011-08-31T15:05:00.001-04:00

Due to the nymwars, I have decided to move my blog to posterous, which conveniently has a tool to import my entire blog over from blogspot & blogger.

The URL for my new blog is at http://zauberparacelsus.posterous.com/

Lighting Tricks

2011-07-21T22:15:00.001-04:00

With the Second Life viewer, dynamic lighting is done by using "vertex lighting". If you enable wireframe mode (CTRL-SHIFT-R), you'll see the vertex points which make up an object, as spots where the wireframe lines intersect.

Now, vertex lighting has some problems in the area of accuracy. It is done by calculating the brightness of a light based on the lights parameters (intensity, radius, falloff), and then applying a gradient to the prim surface. With smaller objects, this isn't a problem. Larger objects, such as megaprims, will have a problem.

With megaprims, the vertex points are spread much further apart. If a light with a smaller radius is too far from one of these points, it will produce little or no light. Meanwhile, if it is close to a vertex point, it'll produce too much light. The white light in the snapshot below has a radius of just one meter. But because it is right on top of a vertex point, its lighting radius is far greater than one meter!

Now, take a look at the two snapshots below. In the before snapshot, you can see that 1) the torch on the left is casting a lot of light onto the floor, while the one on the right is casting none. The four torches in the background are casting little or no light against the floor. So, what's going on?

The lefthand torch is right near a vertex point, over-representing its light. The torch on the righthand side is centered between two different vertex points, under-representing its light. On the After image, the lights are all emitting light at the desired levels. What is difference between the two versions?

The lefthand image has a megaprim cube for the floor. In the second image, the floor is represented by a sculpty in the shape of a flat square. The cube prim has a vertex resolution of 4x4 per face. The flat square sculpty, however, has a resolution of 32x32 vertices. Because of this, the vertex points are much closer together, allowing for a more even level of lighting.

The disadvantage of this method, however, is that the floor has 64x as many vertex points (16 points vs 1024). So, this method will incur a higher rendering cost. This isn't much of a problem if you use this method sparingly, but using it all over the place will result in more lag.

Below is a copy of the sculpt map that I used to create the floor with. I'm releasing it into the public domain, so feel free to use it however you wish :-)

Flexible Meshes: The Sword That Cuts Both Ways

2011-07-21T18:58:00.000-04:00

So, Linden Lab has decided to cut out flexible meshes, due to lag concerns. I think Linden Lab is wrong on this. Because, while it would mean more lag, it would also mean an opportunity to reduce it, by replacing the older flexiprims with a more efficient design!

Flexiprims have always been a major source of lag, and they are most commonly used for the creation of dresses, skirts, and hair. But, if you were to create a skirt from a mesh and use it as clothing, you could reduce the lag generated by the skirt for these reasons:

A flexiprim skirt uses a lot of flexiprims. One friend was wearing one with 18 prims, while another was wearing one using 51 prims!
Skirts use flexiprim cylinders. Each cylinder uses 98 vertices at maximum LOD, and 14 vertices at minimum.
By making them flexible, their LOD increases a lot. At minimum, a flexible mesh will have 56 vertices. At maximum LOD, it will have 216 vertices. And if you make them hollow, then the vertex count will roughly double.

As you can see, flexible prims on their own are rather inefficient. A few of them scattered about won't do much to affect lag, but they will increase lag when there are ton of them all over.

So, I've made the point that flexible objects are laggy. Why would sculpted meshes allow you to reduce lag?

The answer is simple: optimization. A skirt maker can create a flexible mesh skirt as one single object, but rather than having the vertex count of a few dozen flexible prims, it would have a vertex count equivalent to just 4-8 flexible prims, depending on how ornate it is. Mesh hair would also benefit from such improvements to LOD.

There will, of course, be people who would overuse this functionality and mesh itself, resulting in heavy lag-inducing objects with lots of needless and unnoticeable detail. My personal hope is that such "detail gluttons" will receive a very quick and very harsh lesson for their mistakes.

A Strange Occurence

2011-06-05T12:04:00.001-04:00

A few days ago, I had something bizarre happen. My video card began to show rendering glitches in the Imprudence viewer (a 3rd party game client for Second Life), where the vertices on objects and avatars began being distorted into massive planes. So, I shut down Imprudence.

I knew what caused the distortions, of course. It was GPU overclocking that I had forgotten to turn off after it provided only marginal benefit. However, after turning it off and restarting Imprudence, my rendering performance had dropped by at least half. So I just rebooted.

After rebooting, performance was at its normal levels. However, I noticed something strange right away. The viewer was using up half the normal amount of CPU usage it was using, but without any gain or loss in performance. I thought this was strange, even though I liked the idea of lower CPU use.

The next day, I figured out what had happened. On bootup, I'm shown a choice of which Linux kernel I would like to boot up with, and its a choice between the stock kernel shipped with Arch Linux, a kernel with the -CK patch set, and a fallback version of each kernel. By default, it boots with the -CK kernel, but I had been manually choosing the stock kernel for the past few reboots due to stability issues I was having.

This time, I had forgotten about the issues and it booted into the -CK kernel. I thought this was strange, however, because I never saw this in the -CK kernel before. So, I rebooted into the normal kernel, and saw that CPU usage was back up to its normal levels. I rebooted again and switched to the -CK kernel, and the CPU usage of the Imprudence viewer was back down to half the normal amount.

The only reason I can think of as to why I never noticed this before is because I had been using cpufrequtils, a Linux utility for CPU Frequency Scaling. What this does is it adaptively underclocks the system CPU during periods of low CPU usage, in order to reduce electricity usage and how much heat the system produces. Very handy on laptops, but also good for desktops.

However, I am not using cpufrequtils now because I had believed they were also behind the stability issues. Though, I now know that the issues were with the nVidia driver not wanting to play nice with xorg 1.10.

So, after doing some thinking, and reading up on the -CK kernel's BFS scheduler, I came to the conclusion that the reduced CPU usage was from BFS eliminating idle CPU time, but I lack the knowledge to confirm it. If anyone knowledgeable about BFS or the viewer code could tell me what is causing this, I'd appreciate it.

What is Explicit Typecasting?

2011-05-01T16:23:00.005-04:00

One of the basics of scripting and programming in general that you'll learn is variables: a nametag for a piece of data that you can store, modify, and use. Some of you may be familiar with the "box" example, where a variable is a labeled box with a piece of paper containing the information it has.

Now, variables can hold different kinds of information, or data types. Under LSL, there's seven data types:

Integer: A whole number, such as 42.
Float: A non-whole or decimal-point number, such as 2.5, 1.25, or 3.141592654
String: Text data, such as "Hello, world!"
Key: A special kind of string, used to reference the data for avatars, inventory, objects, textures, and just about everything. They are also known as a UUID, short for Universally Unique ID. This is the key for the default plywood texture: "89556747-24cb-43ed-920b-47caed15465f"
Vector: A series of three float values stored in the same variable. Used for colors, Euler rotations, and positions. Example: <1.2, 2.5, 8.6>.
Rotation: A series of four float values stored in the same variable. Used for quaternion rotations.
List: A special variable that allows you to store many other variables of any other kind under one variable. Example: ["hello", "world", 3.141, 42]

However, sometimes one variable may need to be used with another variable of a different type. So, what happens? What happens is Type Casting, where you convert one variable type to another. There's two different ways to do this: implicit typecasting, and explicit typecasting.

What's the difference? Implicit typecasting is where the variable type is converted to another type automatically. Explicit typecasting is where you give an explicit instruction for the conversion. So, if you casted an integer to a float, it would go from being 42 to 42.00. And if you casted that same integer to a string, it would become "42".

Under the old, buggy script engine from the original opensim code, implicit typecasting was allowed all over the place. This is problematic, however, because it allowed for sloppier code and is not meant for use in programming languages that have strong typing, such as LSL. So, under the new Phlox script engine at InWorldz, explicit typecasting is now being enforced, bringing it in line with Linden Lab's implementation.

This means that some scripts may break, if they were written in Opensim or InWorldz. But scripts written in Second Life won't break as a result of this, because explicit typecasting is already enforced.

However, the fix is rather easy: you just have to do explicit typecasting. Say, if you want to convert 3.14 to a string.

//This won't work under Phlox:

float pi = 3.14;

string text = pi;

//This will work under Phlox:

float pi = 3.14;

string text = (string)pi;

Pretty simple, isn't it? By putting the variable type in parenthesis before the variable, you can explicitly typecast most variables. However, there are a couple of exceptions to this:

Rotations and Vectors cannot be cast from one to the other.
Keys can only be cast to strings, and only strings can be cast to keys.
Anything can be cast to a list, but the reverse isn't true.

As well, there is one remaining element of implicit typecasting, which also exists in Second Life: integer values may be implicitly typecast to floats, but not the reverse. So, this piece of code is valid:

//This will work under Phlox:

float number = 42;

//This won't work under Phlox:
integer number = 42.00;

Also, there are two ways to cast normal variables into lists, though the 2nd method shown below is technically creating a single-element list:

//First Method:
float number = 3.14;
list data = [number];

//Second Method:
float number = 3.14;
list data = (list)number;

This blog post is a work in progress and will be updated as the explanations are improved, as needed. If anyone needs clarifications on parts of this or has suggestions on how to improve it, please contact me by IM at InWorldz, or post your thoughts in the comments section.

Resistance to Change?

2011-03-17T08:45:00.002-04:00

Well, yesterday Hamlet Au wrote a blog post that essentially stated that Second Life residents were resistant to change and because of that they were enemies to Second Life's survival.

What are my thoughts on this? Just a two:

1) Everyone won't agree on what changes are good or bad for Second Life. Second Life has a very diverse population. What one person considers a great idea, others will consider a horrible idea. Open sourcing the viewer, sculpts, meshes, and Viewer 2.0 all fall under this.

2) I've noticed that there's been a great deal of resistance to changes that Hamlet Au wants to see in secondlife, such as facebook integration and gamification. One must wonder if this affected Hamlet's reasoning at all.

A Geekier Way to Set Your Default Browser in Linux

2011-03-01T01:49:00.001-05:00

One of the things I've disliked about having programs from multiple desktops installed is that you need to change the default browser from more than one settings configuration. And then, some programs use their own browser settings, requiring you to use them. And some proprietary applications, such as skype, don't have any apparent way to change the default browser.

This can be very tedious if you like to change browsers frequently. I tend to try out the beta builds for firefox for a few days before switching back to chromium. So, I've put together a useful little trick for working around the problem. Here's how you do it under Arch Linux.

First, create a new text file named "browser" in your /usr/bin directory as root. Then, put the text below into the text file:

#!/bin/bash

chromium "$@"

Replace chromium with the command for whichever browser you prefer to use. Next, go to your /etc/profile.d folder (most systems /etc/profile) and create a new file, name browser.sh (or whatever .sh you prefer). Set its contents to this:

#!/bin/bash

export BROWSER="/usr/bin/browser"

And then sign out from your session and reboot. Most applications will use what you set in /usr/bin/browse as the default browser. For the ones that don't, you manually set them in the application preferences and the preferences for GNOME and KDE. After you've finished setting that all up, you will only need to change /usr/bin/browser in order to change the default browser.

However, the instructions above will change your default browser for the entire system for any applications that observe the BROWSER environment variable. If you have multiple users on your system, you may wish to instead export the BROWSER environment variable in the .bash_profile or .bashrc files in your home directory.

Strange Rendering Glitch

2011-01-06T17:59:00.003-05:00

For almost two years, I've been seeing a bizarre rendering glitch on my system. What happens is some textures in use by the second life viewer will suddenly start showing up with strange colored rectangles on them. At first, only one or two show up, but slowly over time more and more rectangles show up, and I start to see things like this:

More rectangles continue to be added to the texture over time, and persist until I either relog, or leave the area and come back after the texture has been cleared from the graphics memory. It has occurred with every viewer for Second Life I've used, and most frequently occurs with the default plywood texture.

I also see this issue occurring on my desktop background. It will accumulate rectangles until it is refreshed. I see this occur on other apps (like firefox or chrome), and those rectangles vanish after the screen or UI is refreshed. This occurs when I am running any 3D game or application.

I first started seeing this after upgrading my video card from a Radeon HD 3750 card to an nVidia GeForce 9800 GT, so I am assuming it is either a driver issue or a configuration error. My operating system through this time has been, with the exception of a brief switch to Ubuntu, Arch Linux (originally x86_64, now i686).

My first guess is that it is a configuration issue with my system's xorg.conf, which I've posted below. And as a note, I am aware that xorg.conf is not normally required anymore. However, my video card will NOT work without one, so I require it.

If you want to see the file with the indentation (which blogger wiped out) and the syntax highlighting, I suggest viewing this link instead:
http://pastebin.com/SbyhVUGZ

# nvidia-settings: X configuration file generated by nvidia-settings
# nvidia-settings: version 256.44 (buildmeister@builder97.nvidia.com) Thu Jul 29 01:59:48 PDT 2010

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Layout0"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
Option "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

#Section "ServerFlags"
# Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"
# Option "AllowEmptyInput" "False"
#EndSection

Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
# generated from default
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
# generated from default
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
# HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Unknown"
ModelName "DELL E171FPb"
HorizSync 31.0 - 80.0
VertRefresh 56.0 - 75.0
Option "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce 9800 GT"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Device0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
Option "CoolBits" "1"
Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "CRT-0"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
Option "metamodes" "CRT: 1280x1024_60 +0+0, DFP: 1440x900_60 +1280+124"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Oblivion on Wine 1.2.1 & 1.3.5

2010-10-21T11:29:00.003-04:00

Well, it has been a VERY long time since my last post for Oblivion on Wine. Close to a year, in fact. I've just recently started playing Oblivion again, and I think I've finally got the problem with frequent hard drive failure under control. Word to the Wise: Do not rely on SATA, if you value your data.

Now, to get things started. Here's the current environment of my machine:

Processor: 2.6ghz AMD Athlon X2 5000+ Brisbane
Memory: 4gb of DDR2-800 SDRAM
Video Card: BFG Tech GeForce 9800 GT, 1gb of video RAM, overclocked out of the box
Operating System: Arch Linux 2010.05, i686 architecture
Linux Kernel: 2.6.35.7
Video Driver: 260.19.12-1

Now then, this report is covering two different versions of WINE: version 1.2.1 and 1.3.5. Version 1.2 is the stable branch of WINE, while version 1.3 is the unstable branch. I initially was using WINE 1.3.4, and then 1.3.5. The game's performance seems unchanged from version 1.1.32, the last version I had tested with.

In terms of stability, it appears to be suffering from some reproducible crashes related to memory read (or is write?) errors, which briefly made it impossible to complete the Kvatch questline. This, however, may be in part due to the amount of mods I've installed, in particular Martigen's Monster Mod. Though, I am pleased to say that I no longer crash when activating the Aurum Assimilator from the Midas Magic mod.

I was also having a number of rendering errors. Stalagmites and stalactites in caves would suddenly vanish or appear elsewhere, people's hair would vanish. Perhaps the worst was monsters with hair would occasionally cause the entire screen to be filled with solid colors, the only thing visible being myself, spells, and the monster's head. This was worse with scamps while in the towers on the plane of oblivion, where the whole screen would go black while trying to cross a narrow bridge.

While trying to get Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars to install, I accidentally broke my wine installation. After a couple of full reinstall attempts (read: delete the .wine directory and start from scratch), I got it working again. This time, the rendering glitches vanished and I was crashing somewhat less frequently.

Eventually though, I decided to downgrade to WINE 1.2.1, the stable version of WINE. If you're on Arch Linux, you can find it as the wine-stable package on AUR. I found no changes in performance or stability between the two versions. HOWEVER, I did fine one thing that pleases me very much about version 1.2.1: OBSE works! It may be too soon for me to say that, but I have tested it with the keychain mod, and found that it worked without a hitch!

I'll report any apparent OBSE problems below, should I encounter them.

OBSE Issues
* OBSE appears to cause a crash/freeze when shutting down Oblivion.
* One hotkey mod I tested did not work completely (wouldn't detect 0 and 9 keypresses)
* The MiniMap HUD has rendering issues, when it displays at all.
* Not OBSE-related, but the numpad keys are not detected by Oblivion.

In addition, I found one report that OBSE works under WINE 1.3.4 if you use the wineconsole utility. I've contacted the reporter for further details.

More on OBSE
After upgrading to version 1.3.5 for a quick test, I've found that OBSE works without the use of wineconsole. However, in my case there is something special I must do in order for it to work. It must be launched while emulating a virtual desktop, like so:

wine explorer /desktop=Oblivion,800x600 ./obse_loader.exe

Launching it any other way causes it to crash on startup with 100% consistency (for me, at least). If I launch it by command line (with or without wineconsole), or launch it from its folder in a file manager, it always crashes. Even if I turn the "Emulate a virtual desktop" option on in winecfg, it still crashes. It seems using wine explorer to launch it is the only way I can make it work.

HDR Lighting
One more quick thing to report: under my current setup, HDR works! However, this is while using the Shader Model 3.0-capable shaders package. Scroll down to "bAllow30Shaders" under the graphics variables section, and you can find instructions on how to enable it here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_8.html

KDEmod's Build System: What The Hell!?

2010-05-23T10:28:00.000-04:00

One thing I've done a lot is compiled optimized builds of the software packages on my system, to improve their performance and memory usage. However, this doesn't make as much of a difference as it used to. I originally started using Linux on a dated 450mhz pentium3 system, and I'm now using a homemade system with a 2.6ghz AMD Athlon X2 5000+ Brisbane processor. That, and I'm using Arch Linux, which already has its packages built with some optimization.

So, the performance gains of an optimized build aren't as great as they used to be. But I still do it from time to time with frequently-used programs, as I am usually a heavy multitasker. KDEmod is a branch of KDE that I've been using since I started Arch Linux. It is more modular than Arch Linux's official packages, and is optimized for Arch Linux as well. It also has its own build system, separate from Arch Linux's build system.

However, I was only able to get it working with the 3.x branch of KDEmod. With the new 4.x branch, I was never able to. And today, I decided I wanted to compile an optimized build of Okular. So, I go over to the KDEmod wiki to check their build system's instructions. It has changed, a lot.

It requires you to install a chroot environment, which is essentially a miniature linux installation that runs within the main installation, but without any virtualization. For the few gigabytes of extra hard drive space that this takes up, KDEmod's build system is simply not worth it. Especially if you're limited on hard drive space like I am. I only have a 40gb PATA drive that is at least 90% full, so a chroot environment isn't an option for me.

And, at this point, I'm wondering if it's even worth it to use KDEmod anymore. I don't see any real advantages in it for me anymore. I don't even use KDE as a desktop environment: I use LXDE. I just have KDEmod installed for a few of the applications.

Pyramid Script

2010-02-26T03:20:00.000-05:00

The pyramids of ancient Egypt have fascinated mankind for millenia, and quite often find themselves replicated in some manner in Second Life. However, most people who create them don't give their pyramid geometrically accurate dimensions. An Egyptian pyramid's slopes run at a 52 degree angle, whereas most would make it at a 45 degree angle. However, using this small script, you can turn any prim into a geometrically-accurate pyramid:

//Converts any prim into a geometrically-correct pyramid with slopes at a 52 degree angle, the same as the pyramids of egypt.
//Written by Zauber Exonar
//Special thanks to Aamira Aeon for helping with the geometry

default {
    state_entry() {
        vector scale = llGetScale();
        
        //Making sure the base is square
        if(scale.x != scale.y) {
            if(scale.x > scale.y) scale.y = scale.x;
            if(scale.x < scale.y) scale.x = scale.y;
        }
        
        //calculating the height of the pyramid
        scale.z = llTan(DEG_TO_RAD * 52) * (scale.x / 2);
        
        //calculating the position so that the pyramid's bottom stays at the same elevation
        vector pos = llGetPos();
        pos.z = pos.z + (scale.z / 2.0);
        
        //setting primitive parameters for turning the prim into a tapered cube
        list params = [PRIM_TYPE, PRIM_TYPE_BOX, 0, <0.0, 1.0, 0.0>, 0.0, <0.0, 0.0, 0.0>, <0.0, 0.0, 0.0>, <0.0, 0.0, 0.0>];
        
        //Applying changes to the prim
        llSetPrimitiveParams(params + [PRIM_SIZE, scale, PRIM_POSITION, pos]);
        
        //Removing the script from inventory
        llRemoveInventory(llGetScriptName());
    }
}

You can view the script better here: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=nwmsttbs

Naturalistic Fallacy: Natural Doesn't Mean Safe!

2010-01-21T14:09:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while, you hear some health nut or organic produce advocate say "If it's natural, it's safe!" They repeat this without questioning it. But when you seriously think about it, you realize just how false that line of thinking. Scholars of logic have a few names for this line of thinking: "Naturalistic Fallacy" or "Appeal to Nature". It is defined as the mistaken assumption that because something is natural, it is safe or morally acceptable.

There are numerous arguments to disprove that line of thinking. Nobody in their right mind would believe that rape, incest, murder, or cannibalism are morally acceptable or safe. And those all occur in nature. But what about natural being safe? As I said before, health nuts and advocates of organic products claim that natural means safe.

So, what in nature is unsafe? A lot of stuff: Poison Ivy, Poison Oak, and Poison Sumac, for starters. Then we have Tobacco and Eggplant, which contain nicotine. Solanine, the alkaloid toxin behind Deadly Nightshade, which is also found in the leaves and stems of Tomatoes and Peppers. Any plant with the name "Bane" in it is generally going to be poisonous. The Castor Oil Plant, which contains the notorious poison Ricin. Then there's Hemlock, which causes stomach pain, vomiting, and paralysis. Hemlock is best known as the poison used to execute Socrates when he was sentenced to death. Another one is the Strychnine Tree, from which the pesticide Strychnine originates.

And then, there's mushrooms. There are hundreds of poisonous species of mushroom, many of which are deadly. Death Caps earned their name for good reason! And many of the deadly mushrooms look almost exactly like the ones that are safe to eat!

Poisons aren't just limited to plants and fungus, either. Many members of the animal kindom are poisonous too. Snakes are well known for their venom. The skin secretions of frogs are often poisonous or act as a painful irritant. Toads produce a milky cocktail of toxins and irritants when aggravated. Many insects have poisonous bites or stings. All spiders have poisonous bites, though very few species are able to cause more than mild irritation, but the more poisonous species (like the black widow and brown recluse) are very notorious. Scorpions are well known for their poisonous stings, too. Then, there are bacteria. Many species of bacteria make you sick because of the toxins they produce, such as the infamous E-Coli bacterium. And (unless you're a conspiracy theorist), viruses are natural too, and they are almost universally harmful.

If you thought that natural meant safe, are you still convinced?

Unlock the Limit on Object Movement Distance

2010-01-18T14:21:00.000-05:00

You ever notice how after you move an object 30 or so meters at once, you can't move it any further and need to release it and then start moving it again? Well, I've found out how to disable that behavior! Here's how to do it:

1) Go to the Advanced menu. If you don't have it, press CTRL-ALT-D (CMD-ALT-D on Mac, CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-D on Linux) and it should pop up to the right of the Help menu.

2) Select the Debug Settings option from the advanced menu

3) type "LimitDragDistance" into the Debug Settings window

4) Set it to FALSE, and close the window

Now, you should be able to move objects without having to start and stop frequently.

OpenSimulator's Fail: Admin Powers for Sim Owners

2010-01-04T23:40:00.000-05:00

For anyone who has run opensimulator at one point or another, you are probably already familiar with the "god powers", or the Admin menu. Like its name implies, it gives you some elevated powers that let you do things not normally possible. While very useful, they have a darker side to their utility.

By default, sim owners on OpenSimulator are able to obtain admin powers without restriction. There are three main admin powers that are of particular concern under the Admin->Object menu: Take Copy, Force Owner To Me, and Force Owner Permissive. The first two allow the sim owner to force ownership of a rezzed object to themselves, or to take a copy of it into their inventory. The last one, Force Owner Permissive, allows them to obtain creator permissions on a rezzed object: it effectively becomes full permission to them.

The implications of these abilities are obvious: a dishonest sim owner can become a content thief easily. All he needs to do is rez an object on his sim, or trick someone into rezzing the object, and can immediately take ownership and gain full permissions. But it doesn't just stop there. At least two online marketplaces for Second Life are branching out into OpenSimulator, allowing merchants to sell on opensim grids.

What does that mean? A dishonest sim owner can gain creator permissions on the ATM's and Vendors used by the marketplace, and gain full view of their networking protocols. Using this, they can steal funds from other marketplace users by spoofing their UUID's, or try and trick the system into delivering free merchandise to them.

Copybot can't do this: it can only "steal" the content it can see, and it is unable to grab the object contents because it can't see them. And even if it could see them, the permissions would prevent theft to a degree. But what can be done with admin powers is worse: copybot just rips what it can see. The admin powers let you directly grab the ownership of an object and change its permissions.

With these capabilities at the fingertips of sim owners, commercial activity within opensimulator grids simply is nowhere near viable. Virtual commerce can only be viable on grids that do not allow sim owners access to admin powers. To my knowledge, there aren't any grids which block access to admin powers. Not even professional grids like ReactionGrid block it. So, until we get grids that block access to admin powers, you can just forget trying to sell content on opensimulator.

An Explanation of metaLIFE's Fee Structure

2009-11-23T17:23:00.000-05:00

Since this issue confuses a lot of people, I'll take the time to explain it for everyone.

Primary Affiliate: This is ignored when you are selling your own items from a vendor. However, when you are selling someone else's items through your vendor, this is the percentage of the profits that you keep.

Secondary Affiliate: If you are selling someone else's items from a branded metaVENDOR, then this percentage goes to the brand owner. If you are selling someone else's items from a metaVENDOR that is not branded, then this percentage is kept by you. If an item of yours is sold from the web site or from the metaHUD, then it goes to the person who referred you.

Just as some examples, I set Primary to 20%, and Secondary is left at the default value: 5%.

If someone sells one of my L$500 phones through a branded metaVENDOR, I keep a total of 70%, or L$350. 10% goes to metaLIFE, 20% goes to the seller, 5% is kept by me, and then the remainder is kept by me.
If someone sells one of my phones through a metaVENDOR set to sell "All Content", I keep a total of 65%, or L$325. 10% goes to metaLIFE, 20% goes to the seller, 5% goes to the owner again, and then the rest goes to me.
If someone buys one of my phones though the website or the metaHUD, 10% goes to metaLIFE, 5% goes to the person who referred the buyer, and the rest is kept by me.
If I'm selling my phones through my own metaVENDORs... I keep 100%

UPDATE (11/26/2009):
The Fee Structure has been changed today! Now, there are NO commission fees on sales from the website or the metaHUD. The only fee associated with them is the 5% referral fee. If you have no referrer, then it's no fees, period!

metaLIFE's Single Object Vendor

2009-11-19T16:39:00.000-05:00

Today, I told Pauly Richez of metaLIFE about a feature I wanted: single-prim vendors networked through metaLIFE. I prefer selling items through single prims on a wall, rather than through a multi-panel vendor. It lets multiple people browse my shop without waiting for someone to stop using a vendor. But, when you update your products, updating multiple single prim vendors is a hassle, especially when you have multiple shops. So, I suggested this to Pauly Richez.

metaLIFE already has it. It's a single prim vendor. First, you rez it and grant debit permissions. Then, you select "My Content" from the menu. Then, you click navigate, and use the menu there to find your item. Or, if you're selling a lot of items, you press "Search" and enter your product's name into the vendor. Then, you're done!

Using this system, one can quickly set up shops that are easy for shoppers to browse, instead of waiting for one user to finish up with a multi-panel vendor. I intend to use this feature extensively. It is MUCH nicer to look at than a multipanel vendor, more eye-catching to shoppers, and I get more sales too!

Way to go, metaLIFE team!

XStreetSL and Linden Lab's Epic Failure

2009-11-19T00:23:00.000-05:00

I remember when I started a year ago in the SL Exchange, or SLX. It was a great concept for me: amazon+ebay for second life. I started using it, and I was making plenty of sales. Then, it's name changed to XStreetSL. Sorta interesting. I also started using the alternative marketplace, OnRez.

That was before 2009. Starting in January, XStreetSL and OnRez were both bought out by Linden Lab. XStreetSL became a Linden Lab product, and OnRez was shut down. Several merchants backed out when this happened, expecting Linden Lab to ruin it despite their promises for increased sales. How did that turn out for me? A huge drop in sales. Now, any time I get a sale in xstreet, I'm genuinly surprised.

In August, I was introduced to metaLIFE, an alternative to XStreetSL that had many features which reminded me of OnRez, such as in-world vendors. It also features an affiliate program, which is something I had been looking for after a long time. Since I've started, my metaLIFE sales have been at least twice what I earned in xstreet.

So, we come to today, with two announcements from Linden Lab. First, they're shutting down the mentors group. And second, they are adding listing fees to XStreetSL. Both decisions are too stupid to be real for me, and it took a while for it to sink in. L99 a month for freebies, L10 a month for non-free items, and a minimum L3 comission.

Just another scheme to line their pockets at the expense of consumers and consumer confidence. Smaller merchants are now leaving XStreetSL, as well as any merchants who cannot afford the listing fees for their products. I myself would be paying well over L$1000 for it, which just isn't viable for me. I've made a bit over L$4000 in xstreet since June 1st. So, 4k spread over 6 months just isn't viable. I make at least twice that in metaLIFE, but with the increased costs of operating in XStreetSL, it's just not worth it.

I've abandoned the xstreet platform. I'll be doing all my sales from now on in metaLIFE and through in-world vending. And if Linden Lab decides to make ecommerce sites like metaLIFE illegal (and they somehow evade antitrust prosecution from the US Justice Department), then I'll just switch to affiliate vending instead of online vending.

So, for now, goodbye, XStreetSL. I've tossed my xstreet magic box into the garbage disposal.

PS: A token of my esteem (or lack therof) for XStreetSL:

California's Proposed Ban on Divorce

2009-11-17T19:41:00.000-05:00

Short blog post, but posting it here because it's too long for twitter. Okay, this morning I read about some California politicians who want to ban divorces on the grounds of "protecting the sanctity of marriage". All I have to say to that is this: If a couple is divorcing their marriage, then there is a *VERY* good chance that their marriage did not have any sanctity in it.

Where's the sanctity in a marriage where there one spouse is cheating? Where's the sanctity when husband and wife are swingers? Where's the sanctity if there's no loyalty? Where's the sanctity if there's no love? Where's the sancity when one spouse is abusing the other, or their children? Can anybody answer that?

Reducing Your Lag!!!

2009-11-12T09:50:00.000-05:00

Here are the contents of a notecard I received in Second Life on how to reduce lag. Credit goes to Dave Carmichael for collectingt his information!

REDUCING LAG:

Find yourself jittering around when you walk? Or walking through walls and finding yourself in a whole other place, only to snap back where you were before? It's frustrating, very common, and we all hate it.

WHAT CAUSES LAG?

Could be any number of things. People sometimes complain of lag in bigger stores like Damage, and the biggest reason for it is the number of textures we have to use to show all the great products. We keep scripts minimal here, with few of the features known to take a great burden on the servers (a big cause of a laggy experience). All our textures are 512 pixels or less, and we are constantly looking for ways to reduce the burden on you (for example the walls of the entire store are completely untextured.)

WHAT CAN I DO?

Actually more than you think. One obvious reason for lag is having your draw distance too high. Most of the stuff I'm going to talk about has to do with your graphics settings which you'll find under "preferences" after you click the "custom" checkbox. Let's start there. To make it easy I'll number the things you can do under this graphics tab, assuming you've clicked "custom" for more options.

1. BUMP MAPPING AND SHINY: I have not found much difference with this being set either way.
2. BASIC SHADERS: This CAN cause slower response because it adds features like being able to see things "glow". Still, I would leave this on.
3. ATMOSPHERIC SHADERS: I haven't seen a lot of difference with this, and it has to do with the way light affects your SL experience. I would turn this off only as a last resort.
4. WATER REFLECTIONS: A beautiful effect, but if you can live without it, turn it off. It is a bit of a burden on your graphics card.
5. AVATAR IMPOSTORS: This is actually a lag reliever. It causes avatars to draw more simply when there are a lot of them and they are at a distance. Turn this ON.
6. DRAW DISTANCE: I know it's cool to see things that are farther away, but having this too high IS THE SINGLE BIGGEST CAUSE OF LAG. Turn it way down. I have mine at 64m.
7. MAX. PARTICLE COUNT: Again, particles are a huge part of the SL experience, but if you want a big speed boost, turn this way down, or right off if you can bear not seeing poofers and flames and things. (Make sure you go down under our dock and see the cool fish before you do this though ;)
8. POST PROCESS QUALITY: I have mine on high without much detriment to my experience. Experiment with this one, I honestly don't really have a good grip on how it affects things.
9: MESH DETAIL - This is a set of six different sliders that change how detailed things are in SL. Make them all as low as you can stand. Adjust them and look around then decide how low you can stand it without hurting your experience.
10: LIGHTING DETAIL: I can't stand having this one set to sun and moon only, but if you can, click it. I don't notice much difference myself.

There are other options on this screen but mine are grayed out, like hardware skinning and avatar cloth. Chances are if you can see these options you have a better processor or graphics card than me.

11. HARDWARE OPTIONS: This is a button most people don't notice. Click it and it brings up a new window. Here's what I have mine set at:
*Anisotropic Filtering: off
*Antialiasing: Turn it off, but if you want to take awesome photos, try turning it on only then. (it makes edges less jaggy)
*Gamma: Doesn't matter and mine's greyed out anyway.
*Enable VBO (vertex buffer objects): I leave mine on without any apparent performance hit, but try it off and see what happens. Could be that makes it worse depending on your graphics card.
*Texture Memory -** a big one**. If you have this set too high it is going to slow your experience down BIG time. I have mine set at 96.
*Fog distance ratio: Doesn't matter.

Okay hit OK and let's move on to "NETWORK"

The network tab is just two above the Graphics Tab where we've been doing all this. Click it and we'll mess with these settings.

MAXIMUM BANDWIDTH: From what I understand this tells how big the chunks of data can be that your computer is asking for from the server. The instinct is to have this maxed out. Right? Wrong. Put it below 500 and you'll see a huge performace boost.

DISK CACHE SIZE: I would set this at 500 MB, and just clear it evey once in a while. This is what I do now and i think it's the right choice. A huge Cache just seems to slow things down.

OK let's move to the AUDIO and VIDEO tab.

None of these settings matter except the "play streaming media". Click this off and your machine won't always be trying to play movies when you enter a sim. If you're like me, however, you'll want to keep "play streaming music" on. I like the toonz.

NEXT: let's hit the INPUT AND CAMERA tab.

Not much here, but there are a couple things that bring me a snappier experience. "Camera Transition Time" and "Camera Smoothing". If you have this at anything other than zero, your viewer will put a cinematic damper on your view as you pan around. This is just adding more burden on the system, and I just have it off, even though it can look cool. Put em at zero.

The only other thing to change is under the VOICE CHAT tab. Unless you actually do any chatting in voice, turn this off. It loads a whole other program that takes up both system resources and internet bandwidth.

Next let's talk about a few things you can do with your avatar.

AVATAR ATTACHMENTS

If you want to do not only yourself a favour, but all others around you, remove anything that has a script from your avatar. The reason I say this is there are quite a few scripts that have special instructions to pull information from the server. Everytime a function like this is called it lags the whole sim, not just you. Like what?

RADAR: this is a big cause of lag. Take it off or just sleep it.
BLING: If you are wearing jewelery, make sure it's no-bling. Shoes also. Why? Two reasons. The particles it uses to make the bling use up resources, AND most bling scripts have a voice command to turn them on and off. This is called a "Listen" command, and it is a huge burden on the servers. Take off the bling.
FLEXI: Do you love flexi? Me too. However it causes lag. If you are wearing a big ol 1000 prim flexi hairdo, with a robe and flowing wings with particles, please reconsider your wardrobe. It lags not just you but the whole sim. If you're curious about how much your avatar is a burden on the system go to the Advanced menu (CTRL-ALT-D to make it show up) and go to ADVANCED--> INFO DISPLAYS --> AVATAR RENDERING COST. You will then see a little number above your head. Note its color. A green color is good. The redder it is the more of a terrible citizen you are ;). For example just try taking off your hair and see how that affects this number.
GESTURES: Every time you do a gesture with a sound, it forces everybody around you to download your sounds and animations whether they can hear it or not. Do everybody a favour and go easy on the gestures.

I hope these changes improve your experience in Second Life and that you enjoy your shop at Damage.

Very sincerely,
Dave Carmichael
Creator of Damage

In addition to the above, there's two additional things you can do in the advanced menu:
* Advanced->Rendering->Run Multiple Threads, which yeilds better performance on multicore systems
* Advanced->Rendering->Fast Alpha, which reduces the transparency of distant alpha textures from 256 levels of transparency to 2 levels of transparency, which can yield a noticeable performance increase on older systems. One of my friends got lagged whenever she tried to type out a message. Enabling this option removed that lag.

Hints & Tips for New SL Merchants - Part One

2009-11-05T20:30:00.000-05:00

I've been in business for over a year now within Second Life, and lately I've been doing more work to improve and promote my business. I've learned a number of things from both strangers and friends that have help to improve sales, and some things to watch out for. I'm recording this information here in a series of blog posts to aid new merchants trying to get their business off the ground.

Part One: Product Signs
This is one of the first ones you need to get under wraps when you start your business. When a potential customer comes to your shop, mall space, or is browsing on xstreet, the first thing they see is the image you put on your item or product listing. Take, for example, the image below:

It's just a snapshot of a bomb resting on sculpted rock with a low-resolution rock texture. When a person is browsing in a shop, they just think "oh, a bomb". Would they guess that this is a tip jar which self-destructs when tipped? No, not unless they have a clue as to what it is. So, you may be tempted to use hovertext scripts. This, however, is not recommended, because it forces you to use up more space in your store, and the text shows through walls, which makes things look ugly and may make your neighbors angry. Some malls forbid you from using hovertext, so that makes things more difficult.

Which leads us to the right way to do it: take a snapshot of your product against a solid background, save the image to your hard drive, and open it up in GIMP, Photoshop, or whatever your preferred image manipulation program is, and work on it. Put a label on it, list the price, set the perms, and quickly state or list the products features. Make sure the arrangement is nice, and pick out a good font. So, you'll go from the vague snapshot above to the sign below:

This is a good example of a product sign. Customers will know what it is and what they're getting. The font I used is thematically appropriate to what is being sold. The permissions are listed as well. The product allows copying and modifying, and this is shown by displaying those words in medium green. However, it does not allow you transfer copies to other users, so it is marked "No-Transfer". The text is in a slightly dark red, and the text size is reduced. As well, the text is large enough to be readable when reduced in size:

Making the sign readable at smaller sizes is a good idea for a number of things. When the image texture is rezzing slowly in-world, it helps that it can be readable before being fully loaded. And believe me, this will come up quite frequently, especially on weekends or lagged sims. As well, readability at small sizes improves the sign's readability from distances, or when it's on a small prim used in a scripted vendor. Lastly, it's good for when you use the sign for product listings on xstreet, as they are reduced in size in lists of products and for the product pages as well.

Notice that I did not use "Lime Green", or RGB 0, 255, 0. It is lazy and easily spotted. That, and lime green can be difficult to read against bright backgrounds. As well, I did not use "Red", or RGB 255,0,0. Using it isn't as bad as lime green, as it is readable against bright backgrounds, but darkening it slightly improves readability, and improves the overall appearance.

Oblivion on Wine 1.1.32

2009-10-27T21:25:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been a while since my last report, so I'm gettings things underway with my report on Wine 1.1.32. As usual, here's my test system's specifications:

Processor: 2.6ghz AMD Athlon X2 5000+ Brisbane
Memory: 4gb of DDR2-800 SDRAM
Video Card: BFG Tech GeForce 9800 GT, 1gb of video RAM, overclocked out of the box
Operating System: Arch Linux 2009.02, x86_64 architecture
Linux Kernel: 2.6.31.4
Video Driver: 185.18.36-2
Wine: Version 1.1.32, compiled with the standard i686 flags for Arch Linux: "-march=i686 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe"

So, what's different in this version?

Performance: A bit better from what I can see, but I don't know if this is from a newer nVidia display driver or improvements to wine itself. It could be both, as Wine has had a number of direct3D improvements in the past few versions.

Stability: Major improvements here! No crashes during startup or when loading a saved game. The crash when opening the local map still exists, however, but it isn't as common. It seems to originate from opening the local map too soon after an indoors-to-outdoors area transition. So, in this case, the crash is one that can be prevented. As well, the Magic of Midas mod is still unusable, due to the crash that occurs when casting a touch spell on the aurum reactor.

OBSE: I have not tested it yet, but I will be doing a follow-up report on 1.1.32 in the next day or so, where I will include testing data. I've seen a couple of reports on Wine's bug tracker that OBSE is starting to work at random, but I haven't seen any direct evidence myself, so I will be looking into it as well, and see if I can grab any useful debugging data so that the problem can be fixed. For more info on OBSE and WINE, go here for the bug report: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13915

As well, I'd advise anyone wanting this bug fixed to vote on it. You will need to register if you haven't already.

Construction Kit: In the follow-up report on Wine 1.1.32 and all reports following it, I will also be doing reports on the stability of the TES Construction Kit. As memory reminds me, it was very unstable under WINE, so hopefully the stability improvements made between versions 1.1.24 and 1.1.32 of WINE will also improve the construction kit.

nVidia Display Driver: The new 1.90 series of nVidia's display driver has made it onto Arch Linux's testing repositories

A Day of Hard Work

2009-10-26T20:20:00.000-04:00

Today I just finished my work on setting up a chroot environment on my system. The result? Instead of relying on 32bit compatability packages to get 32-bit software to run in a 64bit environment, I can just instead run it within a self-contained 32bit environment. No compatability packages, and it's almost like running the software in native 32bit.

The biggest benefit I've seen so far is working audio and video streaming in second life. To get that, I had to run native 64bit versions of omvviewer or meerkat, which had problems with random freezing that didn't exist in the 32bit versions.

The other big benefit I see is being able to run Wine without issues, as it doesn't work as well when run inside of a 64bit environment. In the past, I had done biweekly testing with Elder Scrolls IV, Oblivion, with each new release of Wine. Due to bugs from running 32bit Wine under a 64bit system, I couldn't do any testing. Now that I have a chroot environment, I can run Wine without problems and can continue testing.

EDIT: Well, wine is unusable in the chroot environment. On the other hand, after clearing my .wine directory and starting from scratch, Oblivion has stopped crashing after the opening movie, so I should be able to resume testing now.

Another Failed Hard Drive

2009-10-26T01:56:00.001-04:00

Well, after a long period of being unable to play or test Oblivion, I have had a 3rd hard drive failure. Since then, I've been stuck on Arch Linux x86_64, which is installed on my backup hard drive. Today, I had an opportunity to try out Oblivion on Wine 1.1.31. The results? Disappointing. I've been completely unable to get Oblivion to run past the opening movie shown when you start a new game. Soon as it tries to do anything 3D, it crashes. Right now, I'm assuming it is because I'm running Wine on a 64bit system.

So, at this point, I have to get a replacement for my 3rd failed hard drive. The last one they sent me was a refurbished drive. That means that it is one that had already failed and was fixed. So, in all likelihood, they sent me back a refurbished drive for the other replacement. This would explain my bad luck with hard drives.

Get Greater Building Precision, Ala Greenlife Emerald Viewer

2009-09-15T18:08:00.001-04:00

For those of you who have tried Emerald Viewer, you've noticed that it allows you to edit objects and textures with greater precision. Namely, instead of being able to edit values out to three decimal places, you can edit out to four. But, not all trust Emerald Viewer, so how do you get this feature enabled on your favorite viewer? Easily.

To do it, first open up the folder second life is installed to*, and then navigate to the folder skins/default/xui/en-us/, and then open the file floater_tools.xml. From there, find all instances of decimal_digits="3", and then replace it with decimal_digits="4". After that, you can get further precision with other build tools by replacing all instances of decimal_digits="1" and decimal_digits="2" with a higher number. Aside from being useful for working on very detailed builds (such as jewelry), it also helps a lot when you're trying to correct prim drift.

*Second Life is usually installed to the following folders
Windows: C:\Program Files\SecondLife
Mac OS X: /Applications/Second Life.app/Conents/MacOS/chrome/
Linux: Usually /home/username/SecondLife or /home/username/Desktop/SecondLife

Zauber's Browned Coffee

2009-09-08T19:43:00.000-04:00

I never drink coffee plain, and usually put in hazelnut creamer. However, I'm out of coffee creamer and money is tight. A while back, my brother got me plain powdered coffee creamer. Why? He only saw "Coffee Creamer" on the list, and got it plain rather than hazelnut. Since then he hasn't repeated it, but the coffee creamer has been sitting unused for a few months. So I put it to use in making my own recipe for coffee.

You take a cup of coffee, and mix in a teaspoon of cinnamon, a tablespoon of brown sugar, and half a teaspoon each of coffee creamer and honey. Stir it well.