Second Life News 2013-34 #2

Nothing much new from the Beta Server user group. SSA did roll out. It is working for all but a few people. There are some bake fails here and there. Most are inventory fails that seem to affect the viewer and SSA servers too.

Server Beta 2013-24

Server Beta 2013-24

There are likely other causes for bake fail. We will find them as time passes. But, in general most are finding the new SSA system to be way better. 

RC Channels

These are essentially the same as last week. Last week’s packages were upgraded with the SSA package that rolled to the main channel. Otherwise there are few or no changes to last weeks release candidates.

The result is basically all regions are running the SSA code now.

Materials Problem

I am fuzzy on this materials problem.

MATBUG-206Fixed maximum Glossiness and Environment shininess with legacy bumpmapping.

I think most people can view this JIRA entry.

It seems that adding in a normal or specular map then using the viewer’s built-in bump maps breaks the material. Or may be it is just using a specular map with a viewer bump map breaks the material. Apparently the existing bump maps used by the viewer need to be revised to work with the new materials system.

Group Bans

Baker Linden tells us, “Group ban stuff is coming along well — I’m finishing up the last major part: getting the viewer connecting to the server. After that it’s a lot of security checks, and some minor additions. So group ban stuff should be out in a (relatively) short time now.

I suspect relatively short time means weeks.

 Mac Users and Texture Thrashing

If you are a Mac user and you are seeing Texture Thrashing, textures continually going blurry-sharp-blury-etc., check you Debug Setting value for: rendertexturememorymultiple. Make sure the value is 1.0, the max value allowed by the viewer. By default this seems to be set to 0.5. That reduces the max video memory setting in Preferences. Changing it to 1.0 allows you to achieve the maximum setting possible.

This is a Mac specific problem. By default viewers running on Windows use the value 1.0.

Make sure you are using the maximum possible value for video ram.

If increasing the video ram setting does not help, consider turning on texture compression.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *