KirstenLee S21(8) RC3 Released

RC2 was out 6/9. RC3 fixes some of the problems with RC2. One change is this version of S21 is very stable. No crashes after hours of use. There is no typical announcement on KirstenLee’s blog. But, the new download link for the RC is on the home page.

Camera

There are some ‘camera’ issues that show up when one is trying to select objects for editing or for camera zooms. I’ve seen problems for some time in most series 2 viewers. But, this is far worse. A click to select something often selects the object behind it. Other times selecting an object launches the camera to some odd new position. Research is on going to see whasup with that.

Speed

I’m seeing some odd results on FPS (Frames per Second) rates. In my cottage or places with few avatars I get good FPS. In places with lots of avatars I drag down to 9 to 12 FPS. Even in a shopping mall with lots of textures but few avatars, I see good FPS, typically 15 to 25 FPS.

Some are seeing good FPS even when there are large numbers of avatars around. I may need to mess with my settings.

ATI & nVidia Drivers

Several people have been seeing problems with both video cards. One has to be careful which driver they use. Older drivers seem to do better than the newest drivers.

New shaders have been added and several changed. The changed and new shaders may be contributing to the problems. My 8800 GTS on driver 270.61 is working fine. Some have had to roll back to 266 versions.

Rez Speed

Rez speed has been good. However, some textures are slow downloading remaining gray for several minutes. Some time ago this was a SLV2 issue. It fixed and now seems to have partially returned.

Summary

The problems above are all minor. In general RC3 is nice. It will be interesting to see how the better stability affects placement in the Third Party Viewer List. Of the viewers I’m using right now S21(8) RC3 seems to be the most stable.

Oh… and it has great shadows. 🙂

One thought on “KirstenLee S21(8) RC3 Released

  1. Kirsten or one of the team seems to have patched the Camera flip on zoom that has plagued most V2 versions for quite a while.
    Either that or installing the latest (beta) Nvidia driver did it (unlikely).

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