Macrocosm Draegonne

I am always optimistic, so there's that, I much prefer the feeling to the alternative. That said, im open to whatever outcomes as well. I think overall these are positive developments and could mean all sorts of different things will evolve and change for the better. In times of shifting and evolution, things are ripe for innovation and advancement, waves that can be quite positive & expansive, if rode well enough.

Oof, I totally missed all this until now. Well... I checked and my land is fine, and all this news seems potentially positive for growth and good stuff, also more wooky people in the mix seems nice too. I hope this will become another epic leap for SL growing into the future, its been going a long time, longer than most other games by far, I suspect it still has a lot of life in it to go for sure.

Brilliant, not only potential speed optimizations, but dramatic visual upgrades too. I'd bet removing the pre Ogl-4 stuff makes future transitioning into vulkan smoother as well. Im looking forward to see what more you come up with here, the examples are impressive so far. 🤩

Read around, you can see in the blog they're working on the transition to cloud based servers, which has been a big task. You can also go to community public meetings to see things discussed, they keep a schedule of those. Then theres the Jira tech management site, where you can see whats being working on, proposed, etcetera, theres lots.

Oh ok, thats the first time ive heard of that, though i've not gotten the chance to do it myself yet and see. I almost bought a server last year, but the person disappeared in the middle of the transaction, so we didn't close, which is probably for the best anyway, considering how tumultuous life has been for me since then lol. I would inspect the assets you're using and hunt for things that cause lag, you may find its a handful of specific things causing the majority of issues, either because of texture abuse, way too many triangles in the main mesh, and even in the LOD's, or all of the above on a single item, which tends to happen. You might find you can create a lot more headroom to breath by swapping them out for more optimized things. There's a lot of other performance tips on the forums as well that may be of help. Good luck on your sim hunt!

Perhaps if you made rules about how many prims allowed on the ground you could get around the 30k prim issue? (is that really an issue?) Then dont allow renters to build above say 1,500m, then you can create something different up around 2500+ so people wont load things from either when entering those different zones. Or simply just limit the prims allowance to reflect what you think will perform best at ground level. Im not sure of your situation, but the 30k prims allowance comes with more server resources, it shouldn't really drag any extra, its more about what are people putting down, texture density/reuse can help a lot, especially in a themed place, a lot of decor/nature things may be using the same textures/mesh anyhow, being sure LOD is proper on things, and mesh density isnt overboard are important too.

There is no "shortage", they're simply not adding NEW sims capacity... all the existing sims are fully functional, as are the ones they keep on the side for swapping. Going forward they only want to add new sims on the new infrastructure, which makes sense, since continuing to add hardware to the depreciating system is rather pointless. Moving the older sims to the new infrastructure should not be much trouble, and seamless to users as well, because they're priming the old servers with new code it seems. lol technical stuff can always have snafu's, though I suspect they'll work out most kinks before migrating existing servers. Oh, and You can generally find full sims for sale in the real estate forums here, or contact in-world realtors, private sales and transfers of the full sims is allowed.

Kyrah is right, its the variations we'd get. Indeed though, it would be amazing to have PBR in SL, and those variations made available to creators would be rather epic when you consider how that would transform new creations going forward, and of course they'd need some legacy shaders for whats available now, those using plain textures, those with advanced materials, and the auto-normal/specular settings. Could still maintain the 1024 size limit, but those shaders could have masks, detail maps, blend multiple textures, sub surface scattering, etcetera, etcetera. 😍

Thats looking pretty fabulous, great progress! I wish I could finish something myself... 🥴 I keep starting different things and bouncing around, life distractions & work tend to pull me away, but I love 3d arts and have been consistently learning & tinkering at least. Its such a massive array of skill sets, and I cannot settle into just one area,. I have finally started some SL projects I think I'll complete this time though. If I could only keep myself from drifting around in all the complexities and what ifs, planning, iterating and such. Not sure I can do that anyway lol, "its an INFJ thing" they say. I have become far better at meshing/texturing/lod and scripting though, so hopefully my creations will be decent enough to inspire me forward on to more. At least im having fun, thats the most important part by far. I just need to keep in mind that 'art is never finished, only abandoned' as DaVinci said. Good luck on your other projects, and crystal developments. 💚

Yeah, it will take lots of iterations and experiments, seems like one of the more difficult things to pull off, but you're making good progress. The translucent effect they used does look quite nice, im sure they tinkered for a long time to achieve it. On the Vulkan front, well im sure that will take a bunch of time, who knows though, they've already placed detection code in the viewers to ascertain whom among users already have a vulkan capable machine. Given that Vulkan was created by the same folks who created openGL (which SL is based on) there are a lot of useful ways to transition, keeping older stuff workable as its evolved and such. Who knows how long it could take, im sure they've got their sights set on a timeline, but wont release such info until its solid and certain. I always like to hope for the best, and be pleased with whatever is, this way im not often disappointed. Given the unique nature of SL and mega data transfer concerns, I would wager using vulkan to bring in more shaders would be high on the list, this way far more texture/appearance variations can be made using less and even smaller actual texture files, depending on the effect. The other biggie is the lighting IMO, that has a huge potential to make things look quite amazing with less resources. Ex. I put a request on Jira a while back for underwater caustics lighting (the way light goes thru the water surface and dances on things below), so people dont have to put up tons of spinning projection light-prims, you'd get a better effect, using far less resources. Anyhow, im rambling on again lol, I wish you good luck in your crystal making adventure!

Nice setup! I bet some geeks had loads of fun putting that together haha! Oh btw "bare-metal hypervisor" is a thing & quite popular in virtualization now, the reason they call it that is the main host OS is so tiny that it takes basically nothing from the other os's running virtualized concurrently, and that host os is installed at the hardware level, above everything else. I always thought it'd be cool to have one as a workstation to run multiple OS, because I love linux but require windows as my main OS. Windows basically remedied this though, at least in the win-10 pro version, you can enable a linux os to always be there running, command line and all, I believe its a debian/ubuntu variant, works great.

Bare metal hypervisor? I want one for a personal pc someday. I've heard certain types of SL regions are clustered onto servers, where the main heavyweight type gets a box to themselves, however, thats how the cloud works too, if you want dedicated hardware per application, its there to turn on, even on amazons AWS. Linden likely has data servers, chat servers, cache servers, and all sorts of various things in their mix and connected together, only difference is they're responsible for all the hardware, since they've built and maintain their own stuff. With the "cloud" they dont have to plug things in and maintain all that hardware, and can more easily load balance, moving things around, upgrade, etcetera, virtually on a nice UI & CLI.

AFAICT they've been running their own personal "cloud" for SL, virtualization has been around a very long time, its "mostly" hardware agnostic other than the brute force it can bring to bare, the cloud is more a marketing term than some modern tech. I'd argue its the considerably wide availability/access to mega data centers, with dwindling prices (as big fish monopolize & compete), thats what the cloud brings. There is a lot of great software that leverages it though, I love it and for many years have used the cloud for webservers. Its not that sl is old really, especially not as businesses go, whats more true is it has lasted longer than most games tend to do. They have kept up with upgrades, improvements, and code the whole way thru, constantly developing. Sure, they didnt jump head on into huge overhauls at every turn, thats expensive, and risky, both of which gets laid on a userbase in games, for good or bad. I'd argue that the choices they've made have been both lucky and solid steps. Given all this cloud power they can ease into the mix for infrastructure, to the software side with a Vulcan powered viewer 😜 ,and core code dev (you can be sure their code is no mystery to them, just read in Jira, they know it well). Anyhow.... im rambling on again lol damnit! ...what I mean to say is there's not really a limit, other than what they choose as the best speed and approach for things, its a conscious choice, always. Time has told they do that quite well IMO, otherwise SL would not have survived and thrived so long, or even have this chance to expand into a new era of offerings. Of course, things take time and effort, with legacy code you have a lot to bring along & evolve, but also a lot of refinement, braintrust, and awareness, thats something someone just flipping all the defaults on of the standard fare most games are made with do not have.

Looking good so far, I've thought about this myself, i bought some crystals from Candle & Cauldron a while back that are nice, their salt lamps are sweet too. She seemed to use copies of the mesh shrunken inside to create more depth, having the outermost layers be a bit more transparent stepping inward to inner sections adding more opaqueness. Looking at your final resulting test there, perhaps make the black area inside more transparent, and your specular map conform to the texture of the normal, or at least not a solid gradient on the inner shines, then on the outer flat "carved & polished" layer, have the solid gradient shine, but less pronounced, so it doesn't wash things out as much. Not sure if that helps any... lol... but it was something i was thinking about recently myself, so I thought I'd share. Maybe we will get more shaders to work with once the transition to vulkan happens? Probably. Side note: this reminds me of the bling craze that swept SL many years ago lol, people went overboard with it. 😂 Not saying you are, or even that it matters, just a funny memory.

Sweet thanks Whirly! Im glad it was fixed. Of course... my internet went down Wednesday, they were doing road work nearby and tore up our underground utilities, didnt get fully repaired until today. 😳 I know buddy, i've used it for many moons, but this time was different, I've never seen it go out for so long without notice. Of course I tried different viewers, and went to all the different sandboxes that were alive to test. If you see Whirly's timely JIRA above, the CDN went out for Aditi, and took most functionality with it, which makes sense given what effects we were getting. Disenchanted floating eyes with teeth people, shirtless headless boob people hunched over in despair....and nothing rezzing lol.

That sucks lol, my avi is loading fine, but I noticed some others at the sandbox with that issue, Maybe lindens are experimenting with aditi grid setup, or its just some other tech fires they have to put out. As much as I like to iterate I prefer to do so on beta grid, just in recent time I've made hundreds of uploads, it would suck to pay 10L for all those unusable iterations on the main grid. 😅

I looked and didnt see any announcements or warnings anywhere so I thought I'd make a post. Not sure if its just me, but I logged out and back in several times yesterday and today to check, so must be down at present. Everything works fine in the main grid, so its just Aditi as far as I can tell. Uploading any mesh results in a flat faceless wire-frame square, and any texture results in a solid grey image. 😳

Those sim crossings are nice, well, all except hitting that dead region 😂 though thats not really any fault to consider lol. I dont think ive ever seen sim crossings so smooth, this will make races of all sorts a lot better potentially. Is it your graphics card glitching when the boat blinks in and out? ive never seen that before. i used to work on real yachts/boats many moons ago, mechanical stuff usually, so im quiet fond of boats. I have to say thats a sweet boat, great design, sounds, particle effects, mesh and all, only caveat is its interior is a bit too low to the water level so you can see the water inside, and particle effects sometimes. too bad we dont yet have some sort of "occlusion" mechanism allowed to hide the water inside the boat for low riders, or even deep hulls, or submarines with spaces.

I dont think so, I think its only for adding entirely new regions, they have plenty to shuffle around for current needs, as was stated previously, they simply dont want to add more new capacity of the older systems.

I hope they had good stats on their inspections! For the majority, its simply needing a driver update lol... It will be extremely nice to have a fresh graphics system. It almost goes without saying there will come a time (if not now, soon) that catering too much to older systems becomes a detriment to current users & potential users. For windows (near 90% of real Computers globally) you must have windows 7, 8.1, or 10 for vulkan, which even win10 is going on 6 years, win7 is 11 years old now. Anyone using older versions are irrelevant, and... treading on dangerous, buggy, laggy, crappy grounds! 🤪 Same goes for antiquated OS, barely (if at all) supported by manufacturer, most have reached EOL, officially, even older linux branches. Im still excited tough, I dont care how long it takes, or if we as a community have to contribute, test, support, drive revenues to the project, etcetera, it will be an epic upgrade. Becoming more GPU reliant, multithreading, all the bells & whistles possible to make, etcetera, its more verbose, but more powerful, as im reading.... im not some code genius, but I tinker & dig a lot. If its insane costs, perhaps only have SL with the new vulkan digs to start, and let the older system persist on Opensim? hmm that might seem devious to some, but I dunno, im rambling, ill stop now lol.

I'm still excited to see what they can do with aws, thats all server-side, which might be able to improve region crossings, group chat lag, bring some additional types of sims perhaps, and of course be able to spin up new sims a lot easier/faster. I also saw a viewer note in a release recently about "Vulkan Detection" in the viewer, does that mean the viewer will get a transition from OpenGL? I think so, however long it takes. There are middle-ground way's to do it from what I've read, to ease the transition. More good things to come!

Hey thanks for the link, it seems to be working but doesnt really allow to build more than a few min before autoreturn, prims are limited to 10m size, also cannot seem to TP out of there, as im sure you noticed. Part of the testing setup I suppose, but its cool to see it working.

It is actually quite nice that mainland allows a lot of freedom, most often... unless someone else encroaches on what your idea of aesthetics are. In which case you could sell and move, or speak with them, see if some amicable arrangement can be made. This reminds me of my idea for Occlusion Prims 😜 theres many ways they can be used, but being able to hide hideous neighbors, skyboxes, internal rooms, etcetera would be nice, and boost performance too. Basically just an occlusion plane/cube that hides everything but sky/land/water/linden trees, unless you're within it, or on the other side of it.

Thats fine, however... not only did I have that there for nearly a year, but not a single person complained, including anyone from LL. Perhaps had it been a giant *****hole, with huge signs, poofing, flashing, exploding, inappropriate things, and other hideous *****, then it would have gone differently. And guess what? If LL had asked, I would have taken it down, no worries. I ended up buying mainland afterwards I had so much fun, win/win.😘

Interesting remarks here, I came to the land forum to see why the land around me in horizons had quadrupled+ in sale price, and was all the sudden more filled with people than I've ever seen. I got my lots super cheap in comparison. 😁 Im excited about moving to AWS, it opens up possibilities for user customization of region capacities, sizes, performance, etc. LL will likewise have a lot more flexibility in what they can do, not just the ease of spinning up/down instances, but also we'll potentially get new types of instances. It will be interesting to see how they handle mainland evolution as well. Anyhow, I wish the best of luck for LL in the cloud expansion, and continually increasing demand to match the new goodies. Long Live SL! 💚