Virtual World News on Bletaverse

Bletaverse Traffic Cones is a gridwide network of Cones. You can teleport from Cone to Cone and earn money at each Cone.

How

1. Touch any Traffic Cone. The Cone gives you a SLURL and asks you to teleport there.
2. At target you will find an other Traffic Cone. Touch it. The Cone asks you to proove that you are a human by saying a code:
   
3. Wait 10 minutes on the current parcel. Please move around and watch the place. The money is
   a donation of the owner of the place. Please use the 10 minutes to walk around and view what
   the owner has to offer.

Well today i downloaded the Beta of the new Second Life Viewer 2.

As announced by Linden, the focus for this viewer was improoving the user experience.
Therefore the UI completely changes. The viewer looks similar to a web browser now,
with kind of address bar on top and a search field on top right. The addressbar shows the information about the current parcel but also can be used to enter an URL and open the inworld browser, which is much faster and usable now. Its a great feature because you can enter an URL for research at anytime.

On the right you see the new sidebar. The sidebar shows everything about contacts, inventory, clothing and profile. Its kind of combination of all the small windows that were around in the previous versions. This keeps the main window free and you dont need the time to close the many windows anymore.

The chat input field is still on bottom left. If you do not click the arrow up you wont see what objects are speaking even if they send an IM to you. Clicking the arrow brings the public chat window up that shows all messages. A little bit confusing but i think it avoids the tons of spam messages that greeters and other objects are sending out.

Second Life Viewer 2 runs significant faster than the previous versions, also than emerald, although the current emerald graphics look better.

I must say Linden did a great job with the new viewer. I like the new look, it makes Second Life look modern and fresh. The performance is good, although the graphics are not perfect yet. I like the new browser bar on top, that can be used for second life and web browsing at the same time. The new sidebar keeps the main window free of all the small windows.

It seems i overslept this feature, but today a friend of me pointed me to the Shadow feature in Emerald Viewer. And wow! It looks very impressive.

I immediately switched from my MacBook to my QuadCore PC to try it myself. Well my Geforce 8800 seems not fast enought to handle this But anyhow it looks so awesome and this made me think about buying a new PC within the next time….

P.S. You can enable shadows by setting graphics to Ultra and Emerald->Page 2->Effects->Advanced Shadows and it works only with the new Emerald Viewer.

Emererald Viewer Homepage

The Bletaverse Traffic Cone Network is up and running now again. If you have not received your Cone update yet please contact Jan Maroon inworld or on Contact Page.

Bletaverse Traffic Cone Network runs now for almost one year without longer breaks. Now its the time for me to make some important and significant updates. I need one day where the network is completely closed (Friday). Network will be up and running at Saturday Februaray 13th 2010. Thank you for your patience!

Regards Jan

Browsing through XStreetSL is pain. Sure they got many many users each day, and many people are requesting the page at the same time – But – Isn’t there any way to make the homepage faster?

By the way: already 100ms when loading a page can make a significant difference in the bouncing rate: An example: Yahoo tested it and made the startpage 400ms slower manually. The result was that 9% (!) of all users closed the homepage before it was loaded fully. Bing and Google tested it with 500ms on their search engines with the result of 20% (!!!!) less search requests done by the people. So you seee its very important to make your page fast. There are even roumours that it also effects the Google Ranking. Source: T3N Magazine #18

Same with SecondLife.com: If you want to exchange some Lindens, or check your Transaction History you will need some time….

Answer is relative easy if you run a YSlow Test: The total weight of XStreetSL’s start page is 646.9K (!) for first time users,
and still 115.5K if you something in your browser’s cache (best case). The JavaScript File alone is 242.3K which is already more than the complete homepage could have. The Stylsheet File is 99.8K, hell what do they outline there?

If you look at XStreet’s Grade, you will see a Grade E with an overall performance score of 67 (of 100).
Lets look at the details:

• Grade E at Make Fewer HTTP request: Here they could combine the stylesheets and Javascripts and can save 5 requests by this way. The 17 background images can be combined to a big css sprite and this can save an other 16 requests. Easy job.
• Grade F at Use a Content Delivery Network: Second Life is a worldwide network, and Linden could affort a CDN.
• Grade F at Configure Entitiy Tags: I can understand this, painful setup.
• Grade F at Add Expires headers: Same like with Entity Tags: painful setup.
• Grade E at Compress components with gzip: Common, just add a
  
ob_start("ob_gzhandler")

  at top of each php file, especially for dynamically created JavaScripts and CSS files. Or use mod_gzip for apache.
• Grade D at put JavaScript at bottom:
  Well this can make the page loading faster since the content can be displayed while loading the JavaScript.
• Grade B at Avoid CSS expressions: Well not so important, but CSS expressions are not recommeded by W3C and can slow
  down browsing on clientside.
• Grade F at use cookie free domains: Well simply request these static files from a cookie free domain, and thats it!

Lets look at SecondLife.com(startpage), well it does not look very differently:

623.7K for first time users (woot!) , but good 9.5K if you have it in cache.
The JavaScript is enourmous 316.3K large, the CSS file is 276.6K.

Lets look at details: Grade E with an overall performance score of 57.

• Grade F at make fewer HTTP requests: 13 (!) JavaScripts, 7 CSS, and 12 background images. Optimizing this could
  save sensational 31 requests !!!!
• Grade F at CDN: Same like on XstreetSL.
• Grade F at Add Expires Headers, Grade F at Compress Components with GZip: same like on xstreet.
• Grade F at Put JavaScript At Bottom: well this can save a lot of time since they use 13 external JavaScripts.
• Grade D at Minify JavaScript and Css: Can be easily done with Minimize tools
• Grade F at configure Entity Tags, Grade D at Use Cookie Free Domains: Same like on XstreetSL

In addition, the JavaScript and CSS can be made much smaller by using better structures.

You see there can be done a lot to make the pages faster for all of us.

I know Bletaverse is not optimized on all pages, too. But i think Linden has much more man power and can easily
solve that problems. A good sideeffect should be the lower traffic costs.