There is a little bit of breaking news today and a couple of good tips. I’ve rolled the server and viewer news together. the viewer news is mostly in regard to coming features and fixes.

Viewers

The Runway Project Viewer is version 3-3-0-252906. This is the viewer being used to find the cause of Cloudy, Blurry, and Grey Avatars.

I asked Vir Linden about blurry avatars today. They have found a number of problems that cause it; caching, texture baking, texture pipeline, etc. They understand a number of the causes. They also have some causes they don’t have figured out and some cases are still unexplained. So, the problem is not yet completely diagnosed.

For those parts they understand, they are writing fixes. But, it looks like the problem will continue. Oz Linden expects it to take significant time to fix. That’s the impression I get listening to various Lindens in that circle.

The ‘invisible-avatar-on-two-monitors’ problem has been fixed. I’m not sure which viewer version the fix is in.

Future Viewers

There are a number of fixes going into the next development viewer. The local texture thingy that will be the Linden answer to temporary uploads may make it in the next release. There is a bug… I’ll call it a bug… holding it back. Specifying an invalid image file causes and awkward fail. Plus the update is waiting on another a couple of other unrelated fixes.

Progress Bars

We may see progress bars coming to the SL Viewers someday. Some of the things we have to acknowledge to get them off the screen may get a time-out-progress bar. It will let people clearly understand the thing will go away without a click.

GPU Texture Compression

There are some problems bouncing around with AMD-ATI and nVidia in regard to texture compression. This is in-memory-compression. It reduces the amount of VRAM needed. However, it degrades the texture quality.

ATI cards running AI in Catalyst are having problems with it and the quality is pretty bad. Having compression automatically turn of on nVidia cards with >512 VRAM and for <512 may become standard. I think the feature is off by default now with more than 512mb.

Word is that turning on Advanced in Catalyst creates some really bad rendering in SL.

Memory

The Lindens are working on better memory pool management in the Shinning Branch of the viewer. I think most of those improvements are in the current Beta viewer now.

Volumic-Windlight

This is the feature that would make it possible to have boats and ships that didn’t have water inside them. Volumic-Windlight would allow one to set the Windlight effects within a volume, like the inside of a ship.

This is something that is so far down the road it doesn’t even show on the radar.

System AO’s

Kelly Linden has been working on a way to add the ability to replace the default avatar animations. This would remove the need for Animation Overrides (AO). He said, “…it would let you set the animation for the animation state directly. So you could replace the default animation for the Walk state for example.” And this is a near term project. So I am hoping to see something in 2 to 4 months.

Server News

We get news on the servers several times per week. Monday is the day final decisions are being made as to which server update running on the release channels will roll on to the main channel. It looks like that is going to be the Blue Steel/Le Tigre package.

SCR-6

SCR-6 – llGetSubString can produce results that crash Mono scripts. The fix for this problem is in this release. I can’t swear it is will be in what rolls to the main channel, but, I think it will.

Next Release

The change to llGetAgentList() will roll into a release channel this week. It is already in ADITI on Sandbox Island and Sandbox Island Extension. That will probably change Thursday when new packages somewhat regularly roll to ADITI.

HTTP_BODY_MAXLENGTH, which is part of the HTTP Request features, will be in the new RC package. This changes the size of the HTTP querry/get header the simulator will handle for your script.

PRIM_SLICE is a new part of ll(get-set)PrimParameters(). This gives us the ability to change a prim slice via script control.

These three are popular additions to the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) that a number of people have been wanting.

VWR-17719

VWR-17719 – llSetPrimMediaParams PRIM_MEDIA_FIRST_CLICK_INTERACT doesn’t work. Some people have been working to build HTML based HUD’s. This problem is preventing that. It seems all the information is in place to explain what this does and how it works. The problem is, it doesn’t work.