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

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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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.

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.

Yes, it’s that time of the year to jump over to Hair Fair, 2009 edition, and shop until you drop… it has just opened a couple of hours ago for the private party, and the styles are just wet from the hairdressers’… well, almost!

The theme for this year is “Candy Land”, and, as usual, it’s packed full with the best hair designers in Second Life® — all crammed to fit in about four densely packed sims. If you have missed it last year (how did you dare!), the good news is that there is not much lag (at least for me… and I still have the same iMac from the past two years!), although the visual impact has improved immensely!

It’s simply the cutest thing ever Mostly designed by Washu Zebrastripe and Damien Fate, the high-quality, low-prim design makes this the sweetest shopping experience ever… literally so!

So now there is no excuse not to buy a new hairstyle. You can get a glimpse of them all here

As usual, besides the great shopping experience, part of the proceedings will be donated to Locks of Love. If you haven’t ever heard of them before — they are a not-for-profit that provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children in the United States and Canada under age 18 suffering from long-term medical hair loss from any diagnosis. What could be more appropriate to donate for?

I’m specially happy because this year my own company has been sponsoring the sims for the event as well as making sure that we get some proper metrics this year. CodeBastard Redgrave provided through her mechanizedLife development group the necessary programming to account for all donations and the auction devices. And finally, the amazingly talented Illclan provided Hair Fair ‘09 with the official video promoting the event

How to reach Hair Fair ‘09?

http://slurl.com/secondlife/HF%202009/78/223/28
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Beta%20Business%20Park/195/81/28
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Hair%20Fair%202009/91/182/23
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Hair%20Fair/166/135/28

Almost a year in planning — but built in less than two weeks! — the Presidency of the Portuguese Republic officially launched on June 9, 2009, their first virtual presence in Second Life®. Commemorating the National Holiday of June 10 — Day of Portugal and of the Portuguese Communities, also celebrating the death of Portugal’s greatest poet Luís Vaz de Camões, who fixed the Portuguese language and grammar (similar to Shakespeare for English, Goethe for German, or Dante for Italian) with his epic The Lusiads — this is not a “media splash” or a “let’s build it and they’ll come” kind of project, that is here one day and gone the next when the buzz has died. It’s something quite different. But it’s hard to explain why it’s different

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No, it’s not about Google Wave — but you still might find it entertaining reading! — Gwyn

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”

- Lewis Carrol.

INTRODUCTION

This essay, which is all about the evolution of search engines, begins (peculiarly enough) with the extraordinarily toxic rough-skinned newt, which can be found in the Pacific Northwest. Of all the things you might be tempted to eat, this orange-bellied critter is not one of them. It produces a nerve toxin powerful enough to kill 17 fully-grown humans. All of which seems rather over-the-top. After all, a fraction of the poison would be sufficient to kill most natural predators. Why, then, has the rough-skinned newt evolved such a powerful toxin?

Well, it has a nemesis in the form of the red-skinned garter snake. This snake has evolved immunity to the newt’s poisonous defences and can happily snack on it without suffering much harmful effects. So, the incredible levels of toxin that the newt evolved came about because of a kind of arms race. The newt evolved toxins as a way to avoid being eaten. The red-skinned garter snake evolved resistance. This set up environmental conditions that favoured newts with more potent toxins, which in turn favoured snakes with more effective resistance.

Scientists have a name for this kind of arms race. They call it a ‘Red Queen’. The name comes from a character in Lewis Carrol’s ‘Through The Looking Glass’. In the story, the Red Queen takes Alice on a long journey that actually takes her nowhere. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”. And that is what has happened to the Rough-Skinned Newt. Despite the enormous advances it has made in the evolution of toxic defences, it still gets eaten by its nemesis.

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Congratulations to Google — after the announcement of Google Wave, we can finally close the chapter on Web 2.0, or, rather, Web 2.0 Release Candidate. We’ve finally left 2.0 behind to enter the dramatic new age of Web 2.1.

You might say to yourself, “oh no, this is just another Facebook clone, why should we share Gwyn’s enthusiasm this time?”

Appearances are delusive Read on to understand why this announcement is so important — and, ultimately, what lessons should we, eager Web 3.0 enthusiasts, take from it.
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Creative residents protest against the way Linden Lab set up the test sims for Adult verification. Although some might have found it funny, most are a bit put off by the electric fences and special effects, reminiscent of a Nazi concentration camp.

I personally found it funny, but I can imagine the protesters who set up the boards above didn’t find it funny at all. Tateru Nino, after some interviews, is assuming that this is really just a “test area” and that Ursula (the new verified-adults-only continent, also known as Second Life’s Red Light District) will not look remotely like this.

A few of us who are in Second Life® mostly for business have long ago complained to Linden Lab, in the years of 2005 and 2006 mostly, how little they cared about businesses in SL, and how little effort they put in expanding and opening the virtual world to healthy business from the real world.

In those days, SL was viewed by LL as a “cool place” for designers, talented creators, and programmers, to build their own virtual world. They were expecting youngsters to flock to SL and start being creative immediately. That utterly failed to happen — in real life, only about 1 in 100 people are really talented and innovative, the remaining are passive consumers of entertainment, but not producers. And SL couldn’t grow just with the happy creative crowd, even if that crowd is staggering in its huge size.

The alternative was to start to pitch Second Life for serious business use (as well as for research and academic teaching). This took Linden Lab years to realise, and they were very reluctant to do so. The first step was creating the Developers’ Directory, but, of course, this has little impact, since none of those developers were “certified” or “acknowledged” or even “endorsed” by LL. It was just a listing, one of many others, which just happened to be hosted on a LL server.

Later, Linden Lab introduced the whole business-oriented site, Second Life Grid, and added a staff of Lindens to start forging connections with the business and academic world. There have been many hurdles. LL is always fearful of being biased and showing “favouritism” towards others. So businesses — businesses as large as IBM, Xerox, Microsoft, Sun, Dell, and others — have been treated pretty much like the average Jane Avatar. For instance, businesses had a hard time to get invoices, and had still to pay for their sims using a credit card or PayPal — an impossibility inside most corporate structures — and there was still this stupid need of having to create a “special” avatar just for the purpose of owning estates (while the ToS forbade password sharing). And although some Lindens were open to hear a bit more about businesses and educators, they were reluctant to get influenced by them.

Thanks to that, many examples that popped up in 2006/7 have shook their heads at Linden Lab and went away, the most well-known being MTV (who went to There.com again) and the Electric Sheep Company (who developed their own, Flash-based virtual world instead). But they were not the only ones, there have been horror stories about the relationship with Linden Lab by many dozens or hundreds of organisations.

This is now 2009, and M Linden definitely is pushing ahead the message that “SL is also for corporations and academic research too” (perhaps even putting too much emphasis on those!). Now things have really started to roll. LL pushes clippings about the use of SL in business almost every day. They sponsor case studies. They have created the possibility of licensing their software to run on your own servers behind a corporate (or campus) firewall. They sponsor business conferences and get in touch with educational groups regularly — now as part of their daily routine, not as something that they do “sometimes” when they’re in the “mood”. Their staff to address business users has increased and is professional and knows what businesses are after — and yes, the same is also true for the academic world. They started something called a General Solution Provider programme last year, getting SL developers together, and gathering their input.

The latest iteration of this effort has been going towards an accreditation/certification process for business-oriented developers in SL. While the programme is not perfect, Linden Lab, out of the hundred thousand or so content creators, the thousands upon thousands RL-based freelancers, the hundreds of companies listed on the Developers List, reviewed a bit over 40 applications for the Gold Solution Provider Programme, and 30 were selected.

I’m proud to announce that my own company, Beta Technologies, is part of that list.

Now a lot has been discussed elsewhere about the merit of this programme. It’s akin to, say, the Microsoft Gold Partner programme, or programmes from similar corporations. To apply for it (the list is not closed), you need to demonstrate a relatively high level of skills and competences — validated by experience, not by taking certification tests, but by actually having RL customers hiring your services. You have to demonstrate that your company is doing regular business with SL as a platform — i.e. not just created one virtual presence in, say, 2006, and going away. You have to show that you have different kinds of customers (again, not just one, or just one type) and are able to deploy any kind of project that heads your way. You have to demonstrate your ability to pull in customers from megacorps, governments, or renowned universities. You have to show press coverage, for you and your clients. It’s an extensive list of requirements, and, most importantly, Linden Lab will validate your claims and check your references, interview your clients, and examine your ongoing work. Some people in the past have mentioned that these can be easily “gamed”, and I guess that if you’re a one-person-shop with a handful of friends that have hired you out to glue some prims together, you might be right. But the Gold Solution Provider programme is a bit more demanding than that

Still, no matter the criticism, I believe that LL is aware that no solution is “perfect” and that this is just one step in the right direction: not shunning away businesses and academic institutions, but draw them under their protective fold. If this means coming up with more clever ideas — full certification is a long-due project that has been on hold for over a year now — that’s all good. The important thing for LL is to remain open-minded towards the concept that developers are good for SL since they directly bring new customers to embrace the virtual world, and indirectly more visitors — all of them, sooner or later, paying tier which is the core business of Linden Lab.