Author: Alan Kiesler

With the opening of D’mala, and a pending ‘meeting’ from DRC, I begin to wonder if its worth staying in Second Life as much as I do.

As much as I like the environment, its been a bit of a drain on a wallet that can only withstand so much nowadays. Without revealing the exact amount I spend monthly on SL, I’ll just state that going to a ‘paid’ Live – even at US$15 monthly – would be a great *drop* from what I spend today.

I’ve held back on the possibility of creating Age content, or helping any of the varying ‘big’ projects that have already arisen, because of the uncertain state of Uru. That changed this week, quite a bit, and am now prepared to step up to the plate.

I am happy with what I’ve accomplished in SL however, and if I do exit I shall do so gracefully, so that others whom I help or work with can get re-directed to other venues.

–Alan

A post I made at UO bears repeating here:

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What I’ve heard of the server software (from UU’s perspective) would not require too much major rework for scalability I think. You’re connecting to only one ‘Age’ instance at any one time anyway. So…

Put each Cavern instance (I heard 5? More likely 2-3 for ‘Production’) on a separate server or CPU/core; That should allow better connectivity and up to 100 or so instead of the average 45 (though total in shard was almost over 100 once?). Terrapin’s fog concept works well in this respect too; Never quite understood why you’d send/rcv movement data for somebody you can’t even see.

Relto/Nexus and anyone playing the Ages in ‘Prime’ fashion moved to one scalable cluster; Instances spawned should balance similar to game instances on something like Diablo II Realm Games. And ‘hoods on another scalable cluster. Since KI comms is mostly text, a meta-process similar to an IRC-daemon can be stuck on a medium-grade box.

I’d be curious to know what is getting reworked on Plasma. Because you could still do all this on *one* server and be compatible to the existing format. The all important crux is how much the network communication code got ‘fixed.’

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I think I’ve spent too much time in SL, and as a Unix SysAdmin, to come up with something like this…

;)

:link:

Yesterday, the 9th, has had several meanings for me the past couple years.

Other than the obvious (my birthday), its the anniversary of Uru Live’s Shutdown, for which I’ve been rather bitter and vocal about in the past. Because of that, and the activities of last year, it also became a symbol or indicator of what the year would be like, see what I would participate in.

Well, two things happened that day which could bode well for an exciting year.

First, Marie S. of the DRC posted a [small, yet appreciative][DRC] note for the day stating “we are anticipating being able to gather again with you in one place next week.” Yay! Very nice birthday gift, thanks!

Then, a couple hours later, Linden Lab (aka [Second Life][SL]) opened a new Preview. There were three basic things on this pending release:

– Estate (Island) Tools makover. More like overhaul, IMHO, and for the better. There’s more than what’s being discussed on the notes, even the wiki’s, to explain here. Suffice it to say, if you own an island sim (or several) there, you should be happy.

– A better ‘following’ camera when in a vehicle. Before it was locked (though settable by the scripter). This should make things more natural.

– Better communication on the backend, aka ‘Grid,’ for stability and scalability. Though mostly transparent to the client users, its a big step towards cleaning up the grid architecture and makes individual simulator ‘regions’ more autonomous. From the notes, many of the major functions are going through a couple central servers when it crosses the region boundries. This change will have the regions talk to each other direct, and thereby also make the grid more like a peer-to-peer network too.

There were also some scripting changes made, mostly in the data gathering for sims/regions and individual parcels.

As I said, a lot happened yesterday, and I’ve overall been happy. But between these two events, I can definately tell that my life just got *very* interesting…

–Alan

[DRC]: http://www.drcsite.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=235
[SL]: http://secondlife.com