Second Life News 2014-34-35

Servers

The main channel got a new update Tuesday. The package has an esoteric JSON fix and a crash fix that we may learn more about tomorrow, Thursday.

Krisie Snowdrop Concert - 2014

Krisie Snowdrop Concert – 2014

RC Channels

A new package rolled to the RC channels today, Wednesday. The package contains bug and crash fixes.

SVC-2262  – Incorrect height value in postcard which sent from above 256m.

BUG-6466 – Numbers expressed in scientific notation and include a plus sign in the exponent are not parsed as json numbers by LSL.

Nothing too exciting. All three RC channels got the same package. 

Viewers

The main viewer is: 3.7.14-292638. No change over the last 10 days or so.

RC & Project Viewers

A new RC Viewer is up: Snowstorm Viewer version 3.7.15.293295 – This is mostly a fixes update. But, it does have a new feature that was contributed by NiranV, the Unified Snapshot panel, which is pretty cool.

  • OPEN-213 Broken header guard in llaudiodecodemgr.h
  • OPEN-217 Change to media_plugin_quicktime.cpp causes Windows compile to fail
  • STORM-2030 Rapidly clicking the refresh button in selected floaters may result in duplicate entries
  • STORM-2031 Display issues with Top colliders/Top scripts floater
  • STORM-2034 Support ‘older than’ when inventory filtering
  • STORM-2037 LSL syntax fetching for new keywords appears to be broken
  • STORM-2038 On the Edit tab of the build menu, clicking the area in between the fullbright checkbox and the materials drop down box opens the color picker.
  • STORM-2040 Unified Snapshot floater
  • STORM-2076 Width spinner is broken in the Snapshot->Save to disk floater

The same two Project Viewers are up.

  • Experience Tools Viewer version 3.7.12.291846
  • Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.12.292141

There is a hidden Project Viewer for the new CDN (Content Delivery Network) that is coming. Oz Linden has offered the link to it for those that want to test it. I covered the ‘how-to-test’ in: Second Life News 2014-34 #2.

At the Server/Scripting UG meeting Oz Linden pointed out that the current test system won’t handle much of a load. Put a lot of demand on the test system and it will fall over. The test system does NOT scale well. This system is for collecting performance data.

So far the data is showing a significant performance improvement. Oz was looking at his latency in Boston. Getting assets from the Phoenix servers was taking 100ms and from the CDN servers 10ms. That is a significant improvement.

Whirly Fizzle was doing testing and published a nice set of data. You can check it out here: CDN Benchmarking.

The Lab has plans to build a scalable system. But, at this point it is a plan. However, the actual work is supposedly not that hard. They just have to do the work. So, I’m thinking we are weeks away from seeing this in RC. There will be viewer changes and server changes.

Oz says the viewer changes will be really easy. This means it will likely spread through the third party viewer community quickly. This is a long time desire of Oz’s. It will be interesting to see how it improves performance.

CDN is a caching system run by third parties. It is common for web sites to use CDN. Rather than download a page full of images from a single server or site of servers, the images are downloaded via CDN. It makes for way faster page loads. Plus, CDN providers locate their caches near users and they have lots of them.

Like any cache if an asset is not already cached, it can take more time to download. In the case of Second Life, if someone in your part of the world has visited the region you are visiting you’ll see a much faster download. The first person sees little if any improvement and then everyone else sees significant improvement. I expect that with as many people exploring SL as there are, the caches should build up pretty quick. I think you can see this in Whirly’s data.

Next Snowstorm RC Viewer will likely have a fix for a Japanese character input problem. Pell Smit contributed a fix that you can try here: Beta Pell Fix Viewer. If you are not entering Kanji characters this isn’t for you. Plus, it is a beta, which means it is likely buggy.

Build Tools

Development seems to slow right now. Some in the forum think it is because of reduced staff. No doubt that can contribute to a slow down. The main apparent slow down is because the Lindens are rebuilding the ‘build tools’. Once those are redone they will start rebuilding everything SL… code-wise-compile.

This will move Second Life to being built on VS2013. Plus Oz is having additional tools added in too. Once that work on the tools is finished OZ expects it to take 2 to 4 weeks to get everything SL re-compiled. When that work is completed people will shift back to working on SL.

This will let them build Mac to 10.9.4 + Xcode 5.

Crossfire & SLI

I remember some time back that ATI and NVIDIA duel video cards were something people had working in SL. SLI is what NVIDIA calls their duel, triple, and quad card setup protocol. ATI calls theirs Crossfire.

Whether or not SLI/Crossfire works came up at the UG meeting. A review of the SL Forum indicates it no longer works. Even when it did, it was not fully working. One card took over texture decompression and the other did scene rendering. People were seeing an improvement, but not like games designed to use multiple video cards.

Now it seems it is not working. I can’t decide if it is and people just aren’t puzzling out the configuration needed or there is actually a problem.

A review of other gamers and their use of SLI/CF shows what appears to be a majority just using a single high-end card. Apparently the cost benefit ratio does not hold up for multiple cards.

If you are using multiple video cards with SL, please let me know.

3 thoughts on “Second Life News 2014-34-35

  1. I have a quad NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295. SLI never worked for me in SL. Last I tried, I had to disable it because the viewer seemed to perform less than optimal.

  2. Pingback: Second Life News 2014-35 #2 | Nalates' Things & Stuff

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