Jul 5, 2008 Posted by Stuart Warf in Blogs

SL on Xbox?

Earlier this week I came across this blog entry by Dusan Writer which talks about a placeholder found on the official Second Life website at the URL – http://search.secondlife.com/.

placeholder page for XBOX, PS3, and iPhone versions of client when they launch next real soon now

However if you visit the site now it says

placeholder for search

So, what’s the deal? Well here’s what I think what happened

1. LL is working on an XBOX 360, PS3 and iPhone version of Second Life and someone in the departments placed the wrong placeholder at the URL instead of a placeholder for an offline search engine for Second Life
2. A PR Stunt
3. An employee who was bored and decided to have some fun without realising that it would be noticed

However if LL is working on a client for the Xbox, PS3 and iPhone then I will be happy for two reasons. I Have an Xbox AND an iPod touch. For those who don’t know the iPhone/iPod touch has the same operating system and hardware (minus the phone, camera and soon to be GPS) meaning it would work on the iPod as well.

On the Xbox and PS3 you can talk via a microphone or keyboard (at least on the 360 you can). Also the whole Flycam features that are coming soon could in theory work well with Second Life. Not to mention that they are dedicated systems for gaming making Second Life be smooth and free of system lag (sim lag will probably still occur).

Although this may never happen I think it would be awesome if it did. Here’s to hoping that the almighty lindens are working on it

Apr 13, 2008 Posted by Stuart Warf in Blogs

Avatar Rendering Cost

Another new thing in Dazzle in the Advanced section is called Avatar Rendering Cost. This helps to calculate the whole lag that an avatar is ultimately causing. This can help banish some myths about avatars and prim hair stuff etc.

My avatar usually doesn’t wear prim hair since the skin has hair painted on to it. All I really wear is 2 trainers (sneakers to the yanks) and a suit (which is actually a nod to the Tenth Doctor in Dr Who).

Anyway, I tried out this setting and found that my rendering cost was typically 105-110. Which is actually a brilliant score. Compared to Jane2 who at the time had a cost of 2500.

I also tried it out with some prim hair on and that brought it up to about 505. So in a sense I am happy because my avatar is grid friendly and stuff and in a world filled with lag. Especially events, I am doing my part to bring down my “Prim-Emissions”