Write a viewer update and the next day something new comes out… This is about the new SL Development Viewer, the nightly build viewer. No claims of stability are made for this viewer. You may find it buggy. It is the generalized bleeding edge viewer from Linden Lab. So, use it with trepidation.
The 2.6.0 Beta viewer I was looking at yesterday does not have ‘modes’. Only the 2.6.1 Development version has modes. For now there is a BASIC and ADVANCED mode.
SLV 2.6.1 Login Modes
We have our new roll outs for the week. The Release Candidate areas have seen several roll backs as some tenacious problems persisted. One weeks old problem with the Sever-Maintenance upgrades by Andrew has been found and fixed. So, the feature is rolled out again in this round of Release Candidate area updates.
There are two similarly named but different projects named server-maint and maint-server. I’m unclear on the difference between them. The projects are about a group of fixes and enhancements for the simulator servers. Some of the more specific and interesting items follow.
Asset Delivery Path and Caching
This is Week 11, but the information is from Week 10… I’m lagging a bit.
Runitai Linden had this t say about mesh cost:
Upload costs aren’t finalized yet — you can be pretty sure costs are going to go up in general, the hold up right now is a reworking of the sim rez pipeline that will make the costs the simulator reports more reliable. Once the reports are reliable, we can get accurate measurements on whole scene polycount vs whole scene prim cost and tune accordingly. As it is, we’re more or less tuning blind, and the client doesn’t have enough information on its own to determine the cost of the whole scene without a major reworking of the mesh streaming pipeline (the client only downloads the parts of the mesh it needs, but the whole mesh asset is needed to determine streaming cost).
…upload fees are a completely different issue…
This gets confusing. The L$ upload cost has not been decided. The prim-equivalency is not even set. Runitai is talking about prim-equivalency. The values one sees for upload cost and prim equivalence in the Mesh Viewer are there for debugging and testing. The actual cost and equivalency have not been decided.
I included this video here just because it is so awesome.
In OpenSim grids it is common to need to move things we have built from grid to grid. LIBOMV ( libopenmetaverse ) is a new tool for doing just that. It is a DOS Command Line (text commands and no in-world view) type program. So, you may want to look at Astra Viewer for a viewer tool for importing and exporting between grids (OpenSim Astra Viewer Review).
While Astra uses a HPA (Hierarchical Prim Archive) file type for exporting and importing, LIBOMV uses XML.
Chapter and Metaverse has a short tutorial on installing and using the tool. See: Moving Objects between Opensims. It is not as simple to use as Astra’s export/import tool.
I have yet to try the tool LIBOMV. Let me if it works for you.
The current stable release of Blender remains 2.49b. In Second Life two of the main sculpty tools use Blender: Primstar and JASS2. Both of those still use Blender 2.49b. However, the beta versions of Blender 2.5 are becoming popular with those working with mesh in Second Life. The reason for that is the Collada Export/Import features in Blender 2.56a have more fixes. The Collada features have just been updated again and this week more work will be done on Collada.
If you are finding problems with your Second Life Mesh Imports because of Collada bugs, get over to Letwory Interactive and the Blender 2.5 Tracker and let them know.
Dolphin Viewer is out in a new version. This one adopts the new code from Linden Lab, version 2.5.1. Some changes have been made and they are listed on the Dolphin web site: Dolphin Viewer 2.5.3.14965 – good bye web profiles! I’ll mention the ones I find interesting… or troubling, here.
The avatar profiles have been changed back to SLV1 and early SLV2 style profile. For now the non-web-profiles still work. We can expect them to continue working until the Lab decided to turn off the series 1 viewer and move on. Still it is only a matter of time until they disappear and it becomes web-profiles or nothing.
EyeFliez - Kirsten Viewer Hangout