How to use Traffic Cones

March 9th, 2010

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:
    enter_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.

BletaShop

March 8th, 2010

BletaShop is not available yet for public.

How to setup Bletaverse Adboards

March 8th, 2010

1. Rez the adboard.

2. Open the notecard _options inside the adboard.

Change the settings as needed.

Setting Description
price_per_week Price per week to rent the adboard.
max_weeks Maximum weeks to rent the adboard.
load_time Minutes to drop items until timeout occurs.
default_texture UUID of the texture shown when adboard is not rented.
rented_texture UUID of the texture shown when adboard is rented.

3. The adboard is ready to use now. You can resize the adboard and copy it.

Second Life Viewer 2 Beta Out Now – First Impressions

February 23rd, 2010

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

Second Life Viewer 2 Beta

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.

Second Life: Impressive Shadows

February 21st, 2010

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.

Schatten

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

Traffic Cone Network Up And Running

February 13th, 2010

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 closed until February 13th due maintainance

February 11th, 2010

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

Why are the Second Life and XstreetSL Homepages soooo slow?

January 25th, 2010

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.

The Future of Second Life – an infrastructure backbone of OpenSim worlds?

January 24th, 2010

When Linden made their Viewer Open Source in 2007, i personally thought it was not a good idea.
Don’t they digg their own grave by doing this? I mean, since that moment others could take Linden’s
viewer and create their own virtual worlds – OpenSimulator was the logical consequences of this step.
Did Linden Labs not know that this will happen?

These days i know more. I read in an article on Reuters why Linden did that. Reuters interviewed Linden VIP
Joe Miller about the future of Second Life beside thousands of open grids. The answer is easy:
Linden knew from beginning that someday an other virtual world will arise(Blue Mars, Playstation Home,….) They knew, to stay on top of virtual worlds, they have to create a standard, that Second Life stays compatible to other virtual worlds. By making the viewer Open Source and letting others to implement Open Source Server Software, they make their position even stronger than before. Most of other virtual worlds use Lindens viewer as base for their own viewers, or try to stay compatible to Second Life to use standard viewers. For example 99% of Emerald Viewer is made by Linden Labs. The OpenSimulator Software is still alpha, and it will take some time to make it as stable and as scalable as Lindens own Server Software. Meanwhile Linden Labs can work on much detailed problems.

So while OpenSimulator Software is on its way to beta state, Linden Labs can use this time for marketing, making the Linden Dollar stronger, work on new features and make Second Life more stable and scalable. Finally they stay compatible to OpenSimulator and can even use new features for their own grid, at least they can use the ideas. The Snowglobe Viewer,
that is made by an OpenSource Community and Linden Labs, is the place where Linden can use new features of other Open Source Viewers.

Reuters wrote:
“It’s an evolution from a company that sells virtual land to the infrastructure backbone of a diverse array of OpenSim worlds.”

Joe Miller:

“I could see Linden offering economic services, trading services, search services, [...] ”

“[...]We look forward to the day when the value of entering the Second Life Grid will be clear over the value of entering an OpenSim grid,[...]”

It reminds me on the sitution of the Web Server Software market. On the one hand there is the Open Source Apache Server,
powerful, fast and expandable, but you must be a geek to get full control. On the other hand there is the commercial Software
Microsoft IIS, and although there are millions of Apache Installations out there, there are also million people that use Microsoft ISS.

Sources:
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/07/11/interview-linden-prepares-for-an-opensim-future/

An Update:
Maria Korolov from hypergridbusiness pointed me to that OpenSim was not the direct consequence of making the SL viewer
OpenSource, which is correct i think. However, OpenSim profits massivly from this step.

Second Life Mesh Support Demo Video

January 24th, 2010

People speak often about the coming soon Mesh support for Second Life. But how will it look?

As you can see, this is really Second Life. At the end of the video there is also a short but very impressive demonstration of
real-time global illumination. I am looking forward for this new technologies.