It’s been a whirlwind during the last two months. I am sure the same is for you with the holidays and year end commitments at work and home. But we all made it and I wish everyone the very best of happiness and prosperity in the New Year.
Almost made it anyway! Many of you are likely like me, a few projects that should have been completed but somehow still on our plates (I would have thought the holiday food would have knocked some things off of my plate). Luckily, I had this week off from work but still could not complete all my projects. A few websites to make/complete and the Reaction Grid presence for our new endeavors (“our” being Ener Hax of iliveisl and myself, plus two other wonderful people – Nickola and DreamWalker).
I have been going on and on about how Reaction Grid is great and a suitable alternative for Second Life (plus a far better price point). The team at Reaction Grid are truly visionaries working hard on pushing the boundaries of virtual worlds.
Two weeks back I had the privilege of trying out their new interface that allows you to log into Unity 3D via Facebook. I still have so much to learn and am not really certain how to explain Unity. But it allows you to venture into virtual worlds with your browser and a small plug-in. Similar to a Flash plug-in and you are actually in a virtual world via your web browser!
That itself is huge news. No need to download a large client application or setup an account or worry about corporate firewalls. Kyle, from Reaction Grid, is also working on logging in via Twitter and LinkedIn. The ramifications are enormous of this move. He is also working on mobile device (phone) access.
A few weeks back, I did a video test and was blown away by the performance. Hard to quantify the difference but I could use 8x antialias vs. 2x, film at double the window size (so much easier doing this), maintain frame rates easily double that of Second Life, plus cross sim boundaries while filming with absolutely no issue. Suffice it to say that my experience and opinion is “wow!”
Over on the Second Life iliveisl estate, Ener has a dedicated sim tester who is an expert scripter and once a month does extensive testing of each of our sims. He has a standard script he runs to benchmark and compare our sims with grid wide performance. He came over to our grid that we have in Reaction Grid and his findings were impressive.
He has no vested interest in our Reaction grid endeavor and is truly into measuring performance with a far greater understand than I have. Pure curiosity drove him to test our little grida dn here is the bottom line quoted from the iliveisl post:
Out of curiosity, I took my sim timing test scripts over to the Ener and subQuark Reaction Gridvenue which runs on OpenSim. I don’t know that I had any real expectations, but did I get a big surprise.
They ran 30 times faster!!!!
That is an outrageous difference! And one soon to grow larger as Chris from the Reaction Grid team implements a new build of OpenSim. Nice job Kyle!
Well back to projects! Maybe I will get to mine this year (I always put mine last anyway and would have it no other way).
Happy New Year and much happiness and prosperity!