Design

Nachdem Sleen und Zasta - zu Recht! - das halbfertige Aussehen des Blogdesigns mit der Schriftart “Vollkorn” kritisierten sowie den Mischmasch aus mindestens drei verschiedenen Schriftarten (!) an den relevanten Stellen habe ich noch einmal nachgebessert.

Um es kurz zu machen: Vollkorn ist wieder rausgeflogen, als serifenlose Schrift ist hier nun “Graublau Web Sans” im Einsatz und als Serifenschrift ab sofort “Gentium Book Basic”. Das sieht doch schon gleich mal einen Zacken besser aus und passt auch nun wesentlich besser zusammen.

Das Erscheinungsbild habe ich mit Internet Explorer 9.0, Firefox 11.0, Opera 11.62 sowie Chrome 18 getestet. Es ist überall identisch, wer allerdings veraltete Webbrowser einsetzen sollte der hat womöglich Pech gehabt.

Wie auch immer, mir gefällt es nun sehr gut so und ich werde erstmal bei den beiden Zeichensätzen bleiben, wieder etwas weggeschafft!

There’ve been some new developments in SL lately which are worth mentioning:

• IBM tested a transport of an avatar from the Second Life grid to their own grid, meaning it is now technically possible to teleport to an Opensim. Sounds quite good, but at the moment it’s just moving an ruthed Avatar, since assets are not shared at all between those and are unlikely to be ever shared at all. Otherwise expect a revolt of content builders in Second Life, but we’re getting closer to the Intergrid.
• Second Life is growing bigger and bigger. This is of course good for the company and stabilizes their economic model. There’s been a shift from premium users to land sales. If you don’t really want to own land on the mainland (and who does that really…) has no need to get a premium account at all! Seems also that in world economy is now recovering slowly of the gambling ban. Well, the prices for many stuff are quite high now, higher than they used to be in about one year for example, looking good in Second Life becomes more and more expensive…

And also something funny I’ve found in another blog: “Entering chat range: Prokofy Neva.” Quite a funny chat transcript about how to call things in Second Life and more…

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.