Jahr: 2007

My experiences with the voice beta

There was yesterday the announcement about the public availibility of the voice beta version of Second Life. Since I had spare time and a new, shiney headset, I downloaded the special beta client and gave it a try.

The first thing you’re going to notice is that you are not seeing much difference to the normal beta clients at all. Voice capability is disabled by default, so you have to enable it by yourself in the preferences. The second thing I experienced is – it’s much better to enable voice in the so called push-to-talk mode – meaning, that you’re only transmitting audio into the game world when you’re pressing down some key. Otherwise all people around you can be hearning echos if your soundcard is not configured correctly, many computers tend to transmit much noise, well, let’s just say it’s a waste of bandwidth and computing power.

I know how voice is being handled by services like Skype. Skype automatically adjusts the microfon volume while you speak, so that the microfon level is always nice mannered and not too loud. In the Second Life beta you’ve got to adjust the microfon volume on your own, so you should better now how to setup the volume mixer under Windows or Macintosh. Yup, there’s no beta for this available at the moment under Linux.

Well, if you’ve got your settings then right you can enjoy the voice capabilites of the beta – or not. First you need to get to a region, though, that is voice enabled in the beta grid. There are not many available and you can see a list of enabled regions in the release notes of the beta client. According to Lindenlabs there are these voice enabled regions at the moment on the beta grid: Abbotts, Lusk, Pulveria, Spaceport Alpha, Morris, Da Boom, Tehama and Balance. BTW, it’s not advisable under Windows to use the Shift-Key for enable the push-to-talk mode, since this is per default enabled by Windows to enable some advanced features for people with disabilities after pressing it fives times. Better use another key or turn those features of in the system settings of Windows.

„My experiences with the voice beta“ weiterlesen

Croquet 1.0 released and something on Uni-Verse

The version 1.0 of Croquet has been released today; no beta anymore. This is for sure a great step for this project and I am excited to see to which place this is going to lead this project now!

BTW, I’ve found another 3d-project today on my radar: Uni-Verse. Founded by the European Union, developed by academic institutes, seems the purpose of this project more in the field of 3d-collaboration. It’s, like Croquet, also Opensource and the demonstration movie on their website looks very interesting. It has also interfaces to Maya and Blender – no wonder since the Blender foundation is involved in the development of Uni-Verse.

Gay Goreans

It’s really funny upon which things you can stumble upon into Second Life. Goreans are a big and well known community there. But, until now, I never knew that there are also gay Goreans around. I’ve stumbled upon a group called "Gay Gorean Coalition."

The purpose of this group is:

To promote & help gay rp’ers in the Gor community.

We meet the 2nd Saturday of every month at 1pm SL time. Place to be announced.

If you need help or wish to network with others, we are here to help.

SL never ceases to amaze me…

Interesting presentation about the underlying design of SL

Back in 2006 there’s been an interesting presentation about the underlying design principles of Second Life. It’s being hosted at the company website of MySQL.

The presentation goes about 45 pages. The most interesting page is for sure 25, because it gives a big overall picture about the underlying architecture of SL.

So, here without further fanfare, is this picture:

As you can see, there are quite many parts behind Second Life that we are normally not really aware of. The only part we can already build ourselfs is the viewer. This is now available as the real deal under the GPLv2 already.

But the rest – well… the most important part is the simulator. That’s the machine that’s computing the avatar movement and so on.

When it reboots it’s got to take it’s data from the central database. Once this is done, it should be more or less in an operational state. States and assets of the sim are being saved on an extra machine, the assets server. That’s just a big, clustered filesystem, so there’s not much intelligence on this machine at all. I guess it’s being used to save data in it which needs to become fast available, and of course there’s nothing faster then getting data of a filesystem instead of a database. A database adds for the same task many new layers the request must go through, so that’s quite a good way to speedup things for trivial tasks.

Well, the rest though is in databases, running under MySQL. The "Central" DB, the logging db and a database farm (for things like inventory and so on, I guess). But the simulator does not talk directly with those three databases normally; it talks to them through the dataserver. So, what’s the job of the dataserver? It is to cache requests and take load away from the databases and to deliver the content to the sim.

So, when we download textures, shapes and such, the sim first talks to the dataserver and if it is already cached, the server directly replies instead of asking the database.

The dataserver, though, is one of the bottlenecks of this architecture. Second Life uses at the moment a kind of homebrew protocol for the communication between the dataserver and the sim – this means also between the sim and the viewer. The result is, while it has done its job pretty well in earlier times, it does not scale really well, as it seems.

Scaling could be done, perhaps, but why take the effort in creating an own scaling solution, when you can change the protocol from homebrew-inhouse into a wellknown standard like HTTP, where good, proven and reliable scaling solutions exist already for a long time? So that’s the main reason why LL wants to get rid of this old, homemade protocol, and replace it with HTTP. The sim should be able to talk with the dataserver (in the presentation it’s replaced with a webserver) via HTTP, because it scales much better and more easily.

Ah, yes, and Wilkes gave us also one motto of LL in the presentation: databases are not special. So why optimize them, when you can scale more easily? Well, we’re going to see the impact of the new messaging system real soon since LL is putting a testgrid for it up right now. I hope it’s one step into the right direction to make SL a better experience for all of us.