Second Life Viewer Ideas & Progress

With the new transparency at Linden Lab we have lots of information about what is being done with the second Life viewer and servers. This article is about the things I’ve come across that are in progress at the development level.

Merov has added code to measure the performance of llkdu.dll and its alternative OpenJPEG. For now it appears KDU is 4 times faster than OpenJPEG at decoding compressed images. The performance measuring code is being improved for use with OpenJPEG and JASPER. This will help TPV and LL developers make viewers faster.

Lots of thinking is about how the new HTTP Texture Get and Jpeg2000 work together and how to get the best download, image decode, and render speed from the new process.

A new KDU license for LL is winding its way through an update process. You learned about KDU in the Emerald scandal. It is the part of the viewer that unpacks Jpeg2000 images so you can see them on your screen. The new version should make rendering a bit faster because the new KDU is faster.

Fixes to Voice Chat problems (improper shutdown) are in progress.

More planning on how to triage problems placed in the JIRA is in progress. (Q and Esbee Linden)

Residents are still complaining that there is no new code being released for the viewer. Seems they keep looking at the old system. New code is published here: https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/viewer-development – Technically there are no code drops as with Snowglobe. Now all changes are added to the hg repository as they happen, meaning several times a day. The hg repo is what all LL viewers are compiled from.

Those setting their viewer graphics on LOW are finding a flicker problem with water.

Requests for better caching are being considered. Places like your home would be cached for longer periods to make rez’n faster. Places added to your Favorites would be cached for longer periods. Cache size would be increased to make more stuff available for faster rez.

Inventory cache would be improved to remove the need to reload inventory or clear the inventory cache to fix inventory problems.

With the current Development Viewer (pre 9/16) there is a bug causing a crash when a new user tp’s into the region. That is part of the risk of using the Development Viewer.

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