Second Life News 2013-34

By now you probably know that SSA is rolling out to the main channel of the grid tomorrow. The Lindens have made the formal announcement. See: Project Sunshine Goes Grid-Wide!

Wendigo Lake RP Area - Enlarge

Wendigo Lake RP Area – Enlarge

Release Channels

Blue Steel is getting an updated version of the package running there last week. The only change is the SSA code is being added. Otherwise it stays the same. This is the Grey Box fix release.

Le Tigre is going to run the same package as Blue Steel.

Magnum is going to run the package that ran on Le Tigre last week (33). This is the package with ‘internal bug fixes’ that should have no visible changes to users. Of course it is getting the SSA code too.

So, by about noon Wednesday the entire grid will be running SSA, unless something goes wrong.

Nyx Linden says the Lab is confident they have enough servers to carry the baking load. Tomorrow will be the proof. 

Watch Closely

SSA has been in development for months. Since February the Lab and third party Viewer (TPV) developers have been telling people about SSA. Inara Pey and I have been blogging about SSA for so long I’ll be glad to move on to something else.

Wendigo Lake Dark RP - Enlarge

Wendigo Lake Dark RP – Enlarge

But, tomorrow how many people will be asking, “Why am I grey?” If there rez-day was this month, I can understand. But, Firestorm and other third party viewer users… those people have no excuse.

How many will be crying and rage quitting because they can’t run SL anymore?

Jessica even posted a special article explaining SSA, again, on the Firestorm Viewer blog. See: Server Side Appearance (SSA) goes grid wide!

The splash page of the SL Viewer and Firestorm are announcing the need to update your viewer.

The End of Phoenix Viewer

The all Phoenix Viewers and the SL Viewer 1.23 and all pre 3.4 versions are at the end of their lives. Those viewers are not going to be updated. The Firestorm team has been talking about this since sometime in November 2012. Anyone want to be on how many people will be screaming because they were never told?

We’ll know tomorrow.

Wendigo Lake RP Area w/ALM & Shadows - Enlarge

Wendigo Lake RP Area w/ALM & Shadows – Enlarge

WenDigo Lake

I saw Juicy Bomb writing about a new RP region: Wendigo Lake. It is a nice build. Not yet open for RP, but you can visit.

There is some very well built stuff there. But, if you use the default LoD setting, things rez and unrez. It is well textured. The textures may be too heavy. I had lag problems and the place is empty. But, it is nice looking.

Turn on ALM and use the local environment.

Wendigo Lake RP with nice lighting and sculptures - Enlarge

Wendigo Lake RP with nice lighting and sculptures – Enlarge

Wendigo Lake's Interesting Things - Enlarge

Wendigo Lake’s Interesting Things – Enlarge

7 thoughts on “Second Life News 2013-34

  1. LL has also rolled out 3.6.3 (279564) to the main download page. This is a maintenance update with some useful things in it (muting particles) and bugfixes.

  2. I used to follow the Linden blog for news. Until they found it necessary to produce a picture of the day to give the blog an impression of liveliness.
    If LL’s own would be half as exciting as your blog we might still attract more new users every day. 😉
    When server side baking is finally in place, I hope to see pathfinding more useful.
    So far the FS based CtrlAltStudio viewer without pathfinding feels a lot lighter/faster.( For some time I have wanted to be able to (temporarily) opt out of pathfinding.)

    Thanks for always keeping us up to date!

    • Thanks for the kind words.

      Pathfinding is all server-side, except for the Navmesh render. Unless you edit the Navmesh, whether a viewer has that ability or not should make no difference to performance.

      There is no way to opt out of Pathfinding, even on the region controls. Pathfinding is like region building controls. You can disable people’s ability to rez prims. But, all the viewer & server code that enables a person to rez a cube is still there and still running. The same is true of Pathfinding.

      Pathfinding was built to run in the servers spare time. When a server is busy enough to run out of spare time, Pathfinding gives up time. We see Pathfinding character performance degrade before we see server performance degrade.

      • Thank you for the explanation Nalates. I find it irritating that the viewer signals “the region has to be rebaked” *blink blink*.
        So it’s not the pathfinding that makes the difference but one that doesn’t have it (like Ctrl-alt-studio viewer) feels faster.

        • Yeah, the Lindens were taking heat for that notice being in everyone’s face. Now it is an icon up in the address bar.

  3. Phoenix is not at the end of its lifie just because it doesnt do SSA. Some people will still be using it. I hear a lot will use it for building because the V2/3 interfaace is too cumbersome for them or any other technical reasons. People are willing to accept grey avatars for that.

    Well, unless the Firestorm team decided to actually block Phoenix.

    • I intend to keep my Phoenix 1185 for OBJ export of shapes. Unless they actually block the old viewers.

      Within a day or two of the Q&A Jessica gave she was already walking the ‘block old viewers’ statement back. But, there are several on the Firestorm team that want to force users to update. I think support people fall into that group too. So, we’ll have to see what they do.

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