Second Life News 2014-28

Viewers

Currently there is only 1 RC Viewer in the cue. Other viewers are in QA, but have not yet reached RC stage. The Snowstorm RC Viewer is said to be doing well. I’m not sure I agree, but it will likely be the RC Viewer that gets promoted.

Open Source 2014-28

Open Source 2014-28

Group Ban and Oculus are Project Viewers. I expect Group Ban to move to RC status soon. The Oculus Project Viewer is not going to change status any time soon. It has been waiting on the Oculus DK2, which has just started shipping. Once the Lab has DK2 in hand I expect to see some changes in the Oculus Viewer.

There is an Experience Tools Project Viewer. But, it has yet to appear on the RC & Project Viewers page. Experience Tools is still in closed beta. Oz says that he has seen lots of requests to participate in the Beta come in. The Lab is going through them. I know some people that are playing with the Experience Tools (ET) project viewer. It is out there. Oz is going to see if they will put a link on the Project Viewers page. 

Servers

There should be a roll to the main channel this week. Later today we may see the Deploys thread post. Then we will know. The RC channels should also be getting updates this week.

Experience Tools

Those playing with ET have found a race condition in the SL system causes ET attachments to fail to detach when leaving an ET area. The race condition has to do with the server getting information to the viewer while dealing with a region crossing. It is an old bug that revealed more often by ET.

Oz describes it as, “Sometimes it will happen that the messages arrive in the right order and the objects detach correctly, and sometimes not.”

FBX

This is a conversion format for 3D models. AutoDesh, the makers of AutoCAD , 3D Max, and Maya, developed the format. It is the favored format by Blender developers. It is also the format that Ebbe Linden has said they are looking at for SL2.

There is a possibility that we may get the format for use with SL1. In fact there is already work being done on it and on improving Collada for SL1. The last updates I saw were in April of this year. A third party developer may take on completing the work on FBX.

There is also apparently an internal Linden item titled ‘Importer Improvements.’ But, I have no more info on the item.

Avatar Height

Nyx Linden gave us a helpful way (Hover in appearance) to adjust avatar height. The adjustment is still not as easy to use as the previous adjustment tool used by third party viewers, which was dependent on a quirk in the avatar baking system, which was replaced by Server Side Baking. See: Second Life Avatar Offset.

There is now a proposal in for how to improve avatar height adjustment. The JIRA item (SUN-38) is now being discussed in the mailing list. It was talked about in the Third Party Dev’s meeting (June 20 – Link to video). You can hear and see Jessica Lyon, of the firestorm team, describe and demonstrate the problem. (about 7 minutes)

The Lab has the written version of the proposal and is reviewing it. So, we may see this get fixed. If you are interested in getting a fix, open the JIRA and select WATCH. Please do not fill the JIRA with ‘me-too’ posts.

2 thoughts on “Second Life News 2014-28

  1. Although the Hover slider in the shape editor can’t replace the old system entirely, I found a funny use of it: if you have a mermaid avatar, or a magical creature, you can use it to create a dedicated custom shape, so that the avatar can float nicely. No more long mermaid tails going undergrounds.

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