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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. Shadowy details! [UPDATED AGAIN]
3. No More Limits!

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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?

(...)
Read the rest of Pushing the limits (894 words)

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1. Trademarks in Second Life — where are they?

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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

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1. Worried about lag? Don’t be…
2. You aren’t a true SL fashionista if…
3. Instant Tutorial for Everything in the Second Life World

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1. Lag Myths Dispelled
2. Philip Linden on Radio Show
3. Half the Grid is Gone!

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Regions started to go down on their own and not get up automatically. This forced Linden Lab to get their teams working hard to restore around 8000 failed regions, with low rates of success. 6000 were brought up again, until only 2000 remained to get restored, and then another 6000 failed once more… and so on.

The result? Well, it was as bad as jumping to a brand new sim, with only a hundred prims in it, completely empty except for myself, and still watch time dilation floating around 0.4-0.7, and sculpty textures totally unable to rezz even after half an hour of patient waiting.

You can imagine how things looked back at Hair Fair, then — which was totally crammed full with avatars hopelessly trying to see anything. The usual Lag & ARC Nazis blamed everyone of bringing in their primmy hair and contributing to lag, while completely failing to understand that things yesterday were simply extraordinarily bad. Things were so bad, in fact, that I believe we had the lowest simultaneous number of avatars on the grid in the past year — since people were not only unable to log in, but they also quickly dropped out when it was clear that nothing would rezz, teleports would fail, and Group IM Chat was way more erratic than usually.

Linden Lab thus decided to bring in their emergency response team to deal with the issue. In an unusual feat of boldness, a decision was made to shut half the grid down at 11 PM yesterday. Now oldbies might remember the days when the grid, for “maintenance work”, was shut down several hours in a row — sometimes even taking days to get opened again. These days have been gone since Linden Lab introduced the Het-Grid — pretty much two years ago (the content of the original post is missing) — we now get “rolling upgrades” instead of a full grid shutdown. So an announcement that Linden Lab would shut down half the grid was quite unexpected!

And it’s definitely more serious that even they thought. After several hours have passed, at the time of writing this, a lot of regions are still down. It’s not been a nice weekend for most of us.

A big hug to the Linden Emergency Response Team as they delve deep in the code and probably in the dark corners of one of their main co-location facilities and work hard to get everything working again as it should!

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