Thankfully I’m semi-technical!

Oh gosh, my postings have been a bit negative of recent, having been down IRL, and suffering massive lag problems in SL. Thankfully I seem to have sorted the issue, and no thanks to the customer support of my PC manufacturer, Evesham Computers.

I bought the rather cool book Creating Your World, just after New Year and given my problems I looked at the chapter titled Performance and Fighting The Lag Monster. This made it fairly clear that I was suffering Client-Side Lag: something on my computer was not right. The thing is that I have a 3 year old Pentium 4, 3.2GHz and 1 gig of RAM, with a 256mb ATI Radeon9800 Pro video card. It’s 3 years old, but it’s still fairly substantially over the minimum specification for running SL.

My framerate was really low. I’d start off fairly good sometimes and then it would become crushing – less than 1 frame per second. One way of diagnosing Client-Side Lag is that the text that you type into chat doesn’t appear as you’re typing. If it doesn’t show up for a while after you press enter, but types in normally that is more like Network Lag: the problem is in the connection between SL’s computers and yours, often a bad internet connection or slowing of speed when half of the nation’s kids get home from school and log into the internet! The chapter has a fair bit of information beyond my couple of notes here, and I’d recommend it as a general guide to building, scripting and here, understanding that bit more about running SL.

I had a look at my motherboard settings to see how the memory was set up, as I was looking to buy more RAM and it is sometimes advertised with particular CAS latencies. While mooching around in the motherboard settings what else did i find? There was something called the AGP Aperture, and it said 64mb. Strange, if it’s got integrated graphics why are they turned on, I thought? A couple of days later I looked into this some more, and looked at the manual for my motherboard that I downloaded. It doesn’t have integrated graphics, so the aperture is part of the settings for the AGP slot that my video card sits in. Just as an experiment I turned it up to 256mb, and suddenly SL works. Wikipedia has a technical explanation of the aperture, but pff I’m only semi-technical. Bottom line is that it opens a window for texture memory to be juggled between the video card and system memory, and opening it up has worked a treat. Fingers crossed it bloody stays that way!

Oh, why am I unhappy with Evesham Computers? Putting aside that they sold me a really expensive and excellent computer – but with video editing software that I needed to pay extra for to do anything of use; and a 7.1 sound system, but the DVD player software would only play stereo unless I paid more money. OK, putting aside that, I had to have a power unit replaced last year, and the engineer that came out to replace it on warranty was super cool. However, there was something not quite right with the bootup sequence. I phoned customer support, and they had me load high performance defaults. Thanks to them the computer ended up trying to boot from the network before anything else, and I eventually fixed that myself. SL hasn’t been quite right for a little while, and it just got that bit worse of recent. Who knows, maybe the AGP aperture changed itself of recent, or a power outage affected the settings. Other than that, maybe it was Evesham’s inadequate phone support that caused my AGP apterture to throttle my texture memory so badly, and SL just couldn’t cope on the latest few updates to the SL viewer.

Suddenly I’m free again and I hope to make some more cheerful postings now that I can actually walk, talk and fly in SL again. I want to run, fly and splash in SL streams

BBC Click article on virtual worlds

Quick posting with a story on virtual worlds, from this week’s Click programme on BBC News 24.  As well as the text article, the actual programme is kept online until the following Friday, with a link on the text page.  The section on virtual worlds is 10 minutes in to the 20 minute programme.

I can’t help feeling that they’ve been a bit unfair here.  Their point about the technology not being quite there is a good one, but most technologies are driven by usage proving that it needs to get better.  You want an argument for why we need multi-core processors in our PCs in the next few years, and why we need investment in fast broadband?  Yes it’s frivolous for a lot of the time, but how many millions or billions of pounds and how many thousands of hours are invested into developing video games where people just run around and kill an artificial enemy?  I go to work, this is what I spend time and some money on, and so I create demand.

2006 BBC Newsnight article on virtual worlds

Given recent problems with lag, and reinstalling Windows, I haven’t really been around SL much this last week.  So I’m sat here at relatives tonight and googling around for people like Natalie Zelmanov and Cory Edo, looking for learning materials and SL blog entertainment.  This story came up, and it’s an article and video from BBC’s Newsnight programme on virtual worlds.  It’s from 2006, but it’s still interesting, and it made me giggle seeing the virtual Jeremy Paxman LOLing on SL.

Phillip as the Big H – surely not

I’ve just been browsing YouTube with the search term ‘machinima’ and came across this. Wild speculation on the politics of the resignation of Corey Linden, and the differences between he and Phillip Linden? Dunno, but it’s still a little funny.

 The video on the YouTube site.

Ziggy Quirk’s video on copryight theft in SL

A video from the RL woman behind Ziggy Quirk, fellow protester against copyright theft in SL.  I do agree Ziggy, and you totally rock for buying land next to the store, so that we can use it as a base to demonstrate on.

Link to Ziggy’s video on You Tube.

Down, down, down…blah

Blah! No not as in Tres Blah, who bring me good cheer with their girly girliness, but blah as in deflated, down, blahhhhhh. I’ve been feeling down IRL for some time, and we’re talking proper mild depression here folks. Yesterday really didn’t help. I was all fired up for the ongoing protest against copyright theft at Neo Body Fashions at Marwood, and for the last couple of days someone keeps bombing the sim and at least one neighbouring sim with chat spam coming from objects.

I’m pretty sure that it’s the pirates themselves, as I saw a guy standing on the edge of the crashed Marwood sim and his hand had a semi-transparent prim on it, which suddenly poofed with dots, the way our hands send out a stream when we build. Just at that moment chat spam started. He couldn’t talk very good english, and sounded rather like the Brazilian owner of the pirate store. Funnily enough, as the sim came back up, and we both entered, I had to walk the long way around and by the time I was there, one of the pirate’s group was in the store, big black cape and Friday 13th hockey mask. He disappeared, and something made me think that he was there just long enough to show his presence to file an abuse report, at chat spam that was probably caused by his group. The spam is mind boggling, and OK, now I know how to sometimes mute the object in the pop-out to the right of the chat window. But, I go there to protest, wave my sign, shout appeals not to buy there, and the sim gets crashed OVER, AND OVER, AND OVER. If there is a protester that is doing it, I wish they would stop, as it’s doing nobody any favours. Again, that’s why I suspect that it’s the pirates themselves. Wear down the protesters, make it look like they’re being persecuted themselves and file abuse reports. Blahhhhh.

SL seems to be sucking loads of CPU usage right now, and I suspect that a DSL filter is on it’s way out, as my phone is rather hummy. I wonder if that’s causing packet loss, and I’m a bit puzzled at my CPU usage being 75%. I have a 3 year old Pentium 4 3.2GHz, with 1 gig of RAM. OK, so now I could get a dual core, it’s 3 years old, but it’s easily up to SL specs. All told, SL is not working very well right now, and it’s no bloody fun.

Methinks it’s time to log out, watch a noisy movie, write the letter of complaint about the Health Service putting of therapy for my Gender Identity Disorder for another 6 months, and clear my brain. Then I’ll come back and logically start adressing things that may be screwing up SL. This video seems rather apt……

 

Here’s the link to the original poster of the video on YouTube if you want to favourite it.

More words on the piracy issue from Viktoria Dovgal

Here’s the words from a notecard giver, conveniently posted across from the pirate skin shop, Neo Body Fashion.  Viktoria Dovgal is credited as the author:

* What do you mean, stolen skins?
—————————————–

- This store has taken other people’s skins, captured the images, then illegally loaded them back up to Second Life under another name.

*Why should I care?
————————

- The real creators of these skins are already thinking about not making any more. It takes talent plus hours and hours of tedious work to create skins that look good. Second Life isn’t free for them, they need to pay for their land and people to help them run their shops. If you get stolen skin, it’s harder for the creators to pay their bills, *and* the fun is being taken out of it for them. If it’s no fun any more, there isn’t much point in making new stuff for Second Life, is there?

- Stolen skins are lower quality than the originals. Second Life uses lossy compression on uploaded images, so the stolen ones have been compressed twice!  JPEG removes details and distorts things to get its compression, and if you buy here you’ll get that effect doubled or worse.

- If you buy here, you’re getting stolen stuff.  Why pay for stolen stuff? They didn’t.

* So where are the genuine articles seen in this store?
—————————————————————-

Here are some landmarks!

􀀁
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* Is there anything that can be done about this?
———————————————————

- Along with buying only original content, help to convince Linden Lab to do something about content theft. See this article for how!
http://fabfree.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/serious-business-stolen-goods/

Thanks for reading.

Minu makes her point on YouTube

 Following my last post, here’s a video from Minu Palen, creator of Minu Model Skins. Put simply, designers of clothes, hair and animation overrides, etc, etc will simply leave a world that allows people to rob their creations. Why paint, build and program something that is just going to get stolen? Back to system hair, skin and crappy photo-sourced jeans anyone?

Protest theft of SL creators!

I said hi to my best friend, Anna Zwiers, last night and she said I’m protesting, and gave me this link. The sim was full, and by the time I’d logged in again, the shop was closed – perhaps embarassed by a sim full of protesters all day. However, they have relocated to a shop in (Marwood, SLRUL below). Why is this important? Please read on….

I’m not a skin connoisseur, but there is vast agreement among those who are, that the shop Neo Body Fashion is selling skin that has been pirated from the skin of Minu Model Skins, (link 2) and RaC Designs. The shop is even selling them for 1000L. I don’t know if that’s cheap for a full set of makeups, but it’s still a lot of money to rip people off for. Any creativity on SL is something that should be protected, but skin creation is a very painterly skill. It must take hours and people deserve to make money out of it and have their prices stand the test of market competition from other real creators.

This post has more news on skin thefts, and says that one creator, Emilia Redgrave ended up leaving SL. Apart from undermining the creativity and economy of SL, this sort of piracy is also going to lead to people being upset and just deciding that it’s not worth it. It does matter, to the creator and to the customer. Often when Silent Sparrow or Ivalde release something new, the group IM channel is awash with people saying thank you. I remember Neferia Abel being there to greet her effusively grateful customers on Christmas Day this year, as the place flooded with group members coming to pick up the final freebie of her generous 25 day advent give away. The creators are loved, and they clearly design because they love their art first, and the money is something that flows from that.

SL is awash with freebies, and if you know where to look, you can get plenty of fab stuff for free. Many of the really good content creators are helpful, and when I recently bumped into Cory Edo, she offered to answer questions on making textures. SL has a culture of learning and sharing. You can go to New Citizens International classes for free. But put it this way. If I spend those hours learning to use Photoshop and the GIMP more, if I go round with my camera taking pictures of RL buildings I like and want to be inspired by; what happens if someone just comes along to any future store I set up and takes photos of the outside of my buildings, then puts the ripped textures on their own prims?

Please join this protest, and take a bit of your time, even Away From Keyboard. A fellow protester will give you a copy of their protest sign, and this is one time when you know the lag is doing some good for SL! One more thing you can do is vote in the JIRA issue reporting, to tell the Lindens that they have to take action on this copyright theft. Thanks to Bamboo Soup for that link.

This is the SLURL to the latest location for the store.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Marwood/131/34/4711

and here, he has a little kiosk

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kios/243/56/23