We updated Kitely today with many performance improvements. These changes make worlds start faster, and eliminate some performance problems that were introduced when we upgraded to OpenSim 0.7.6.
Worlds Start Faster
Over the years we’ve made several non-trivial optimizations to the OpenSim startup sequence to enable Kitely worlds to start faster than regular OpenSim regions. Today’s update includes several additional optimizations that result in significantly reduced startup times for worlds that contain many meshes, sculpties, and/or assets. The lag that sometimes occurs when a new world starts has also been reduced, so newly started worlds will become responsive much faster than they do on regular OpenSim.
Better Maps at No Performance Cost
One of the big changes we’ve made is to how we create the world map. At the same time as the update to OpenSim 0.7.6 we also switched to a new module for creating world maps, called Warp3D, that produces much better results than the old maps. However, we underestimated how much CPU power is required to create these maps, so this change consumed a lot of resources that competed with running the regions. To solve this problem, we now create the world maps on different servers from the servers that run your worlds. This means that you’ll still enjoy the very high quality Warp3D maps, but now without incurring any performance hit as a result.
Materials Work in Kitely Market
Another important update in this release is that we changed the way Materials work. The new implementation (which we’ll contribute to OpenSim) takes less storage and works faster, especially if the same material is used in many prims. This is almost the final iteration of Materials that we’re planning, so it is now okay to start using them in Kitely Market products. Please note that materials that you create in Kitely will not be visible on other grids (e.g., if you Export OAR and then Import on another grid) until OpenSim integrates our changes.
Other Improvements
We fixed the following user-reported bug: when changing the material for a single face of a prim, sometimes this changed the material for the entire prim instead. This fix will be contributed to OpenSim.
By user request, when users edit terrain we now consider them to be active, i.e. we won’t disconnect them due to inactivity.
