Some new things are moving forward in the viewer. Here are a few I think interesting.

Windlight Settings for Estates – We sort of have this in OpenSim where it is called Lightshare. The idea is that an estate owner can set the Windlight settings for their estate. When a resident comes to the region, the viewer’s Windlight settings change to the estate’s settings. This means no more note cards about how to change your Windlight settings for best effect.

I noticed the other day a special note card in a purchase I made (demo skin). In Kirstens S21 viewer it had a new icon. The card was a set of Windlight settings. When I clicked on it my Windlight setting were changed. Pretty nifty.

The change coming to the SLV is the addition of controls for the estate manager to use to set the region’s default Windlight settings.

GPU Table Update – This is an odd little thing. The viewer needs to know what the abilities of your computer and its video card are. With the viewer install there is a list of cards and the default settings to use with the card. The list is old. Fortunately the viewer requests the same information from the SL servers and uses new data to set the actual settings. If there is some problem and the connection can’t be made, the local file is used. But, oddly the downloaded information is not saved locally.

Since users can’t see the downloaded list, most of us can’t check it. Whatever, creating some way to sync the install file and the live server based file is in progress.

Inventory Limits – It is standard advice now to tell people to limit inventory items to something less than 256 items per folder. You could have 256 folders at the top level, each with 256 folders with 256 items in them for a total of 16.7 million items in inventory. I suspect you would have problems before you ever got to a million.

Whatever the case the system is being changed to handle 10,000 items per folder. I’m not sure why, but I suspect it has something to do with performance. It is not that hard to get over 256 items in a folder and have problems. So, a higher capacity would probably reduce problems for new residents.

While it is possible to have more than 256 items in a folder now, it is people that have more than 256 items that have inventory problems. With the new asset system there will be a hard 10k limit per folder. 10k folders each with 10k items is 100 million items. …neat, I will have room for all my shoes.

Media Filter – The SLV2 does not have a media filter. The reason is the user interface. The TPV’s have the media filer, but it is so annoyingly disruptive that most people turn it off. The Lab is looking for some way to make a useful interface. We probably won’t be seeing an SLV media filter until a user interface is figured out.

…that is all for now.