New Things Coming to Second Life

There are several projects now making their way into the Release Channels and soon to the main grid. None are as fun or exciting as mesh, but they are things that should make SL faster and nicer to play in.

Faster Non-Texture Assets

Monty Linden attended Oskar’s office hours meeting. There is a small project (small code-wise) coming to the grid soon that will speed up non-texture assets moving through the system. Now is that cryptic or what?

Seems Monty means sounds and wearables. The change won’t be as dramatic as ‘Compression’ is for region crossing, but it is expected to be significant and have noticeable effects. The change has to do with making the process smarter, whatever that can mean in this case. Monty describes it as removing artificial slowdowns… which may have mostly to do with making the path things take through the system more efficient.

Whatever the exact nature of the coming change, the Lab needs status on the change to improve it farther. Built into the SLV2.5 Beta and the SLV Development versions is tracking code. Using those viewers will provide the Lab stats. So, consider using either viewer and helping out. All you have to do is use it. Both install in separate folders, so you can have the main viewer, beta, and development viewers all installed at the same time.

Improved Interest List

Simon Linden is working on what they call the Interest List. This is a list of items the server uses to send update information the avatar needs. It is the list of things your avatar is interested in. Things like updating the position of another avatar so your viewer shows them in the right place.

The new code should reach a release channel next week or the week after and it may be on some regions in the ADITI grid now. It could theoretically be on the main grid in three weeks. Once on a sim the regions should load faster. As you move around, again things should rez faster. For now it only works on static stuff, trees, buildings, rugs… the stationary stuff in the region.

Once this first step is in place and working the team will move on to improving the code to handle dynamic things in the region, the moving and scripted things. Then they too will rez faster.

Smarter Render

A possible addition may be getting settings to allow residents to have more control of the render pipeline. For instance Simon said, ‘…we’ve fixed up the code so you might specify more … like “I want objects of size X visible out to D meters”’. Or not to render, which would help out light weight clients, text clients.

Along with those changes would be the ability for the viewer to decide not to render small things in complex areas, which would again be to improve render speed.

Summary

There is a lot happening. We knew that lots of code was completed and delivered for testing just before the holidays. Now some of it is coming out of the pipeline to where we can see it now.

2 thoughts on “New Things Coming to Second Life

  1. Pingback: Tweets that mention New Things Coming to Second Life -- Topsy.com

  2. With cuts to staff, reorganization, and change in leadership, many of us have been concerned about the health and efficiency of Linden Labs over the past six months. I think the speed with which new improvements are moving ahead and new features introduced have shown us that Linden Lab is alive and well. I am impressed and pleased with the improvements I have seen over the past six months to a year, and excited about new developments. Way to go Linden Labs! Keep it up.

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