Second Life News 2014-45

Servers

There is a roll going to the main channel this morning. The Deploy thread in the forum describes it as ‘minor improvements’. Not much to go on.

RC Channels

There is no package ready for the RC Channels. Caleb Linden says there will be no roll of the RC Channels.

Deyanira Yalin - Builder's Brewery Class Instructor

Deyanira Yalin – Builder’s Brewery Class Instructor

Problems

I am seeing more people complaining about texture loading and render stalling and things remaining gray or blurry. It is still a small number of people, which means the Lindens are not going to turn their attention to the problem. They are watching for problems from Pipeline and CDN changes. So, that may reveal the problem.

If you are consistently running into the problem, file a JIRA. To helpful the Lindens needs lots of detail and a way to reproduce the problem. If this is a timing issue, the Lindens may not be able to reproduce it from within the Lab, they are sitting on the servers and miss out on some of the problems we see.

Viewers

The main viewer is version 3.7.19-295700. This is the version with the new HTTP Pipeline code and improvements to the Inventory Fetch process.

The release notes are here.

RC & Project Viewers

Benchmark Viewer version 3.7.20.296094 – This is the viewer that does away with the GPU Table. It will make life easier for new people joining Second Life with new video cards. The Lab can stop having to update the GPU Table with each new card that comes out.

Project Experience Tools Viewer version 3.7.16.293901 – This version seems to be a bit behind. This viewer has the features for working with the Experiences System the Lab is developing.

Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296 – This is the development project for providing support for the Oculus Rift. From the JIRA I gather this doesn’t work well with the SpaceNavigator. There seems to be some rotation kink that skews the view 90 degrees.

Note: Dave Rowe, the CtrlAltStudio developer, has updated his version of Firestorm (4.6.5 – my 64-bit is version 4.6.7) to work with the latest Oculus Rift SDK 0.4.3. It is now Alpha version 1.2.2. Windows only, no Mac version.

Project Snowstorm Viewer version 3.7.20.296071 – This is a maintenance release that has some open source contributions added:

  • Japanese input
  • Improved rendering of projectors
  • Object editing bug when rotating
  • Crash on exit on OSX Yosemite in full screen mode

A number of other issues are resolved in this release:

  • OPEN-215kCGLRPTextureMemory is a deprecated function as of Mac OS X 10.7, replace with kCGLRPTextureMemoryMegabytes
  • OPEN-268FFLOAD_XML missing on linux and darwin, FFSAVE_XML missing on darwin
  • STORM-2053applicationShouldTerminate function returns NSApplicationDeligateReply when it should return NSApplicationTerminateReply
  • STORM-2056Projector reflections do not respect the environment intensity parameter
  • STORM-2067Glossy Projectors
  • STORM-2069Delete key doesn’t delete first character of marked text on OSX
  • STORM-2070Sticky modifier keys after OS window comes up on OSX
  • STORM-2071Unwanted InputWindow comes up when typing Japanese on OSX
  • STORM-2072Bad behavior of Input Window
  • STORM-2078Editing an objects rotation with the rotation rings often causes the object to jump to position <0,0,0> on the region and rotation changes to <0,0,0>
  • STORM-2080Dresses purporting to be Fitted Mesh stretch to 0,0,0
  • STORM-2081Second Life 3.7.18 (295539) Oct 16 2014 08:19:54 (Second Life Release) crashes every time upon viewer Quit under OS X Yosemite 10.10

From what I’ve heard this is probably the next viewer to make it to RC status. The Oculus version will remain a project viewer until after the Oculus HMD retail version is released. Not much has been said about the XP Tools viewer or project in recent weeks. So, I don’t know where the Lab is with that Project, other than ‘we’re working on it’. The Benchmark (no GPU Table) version will probably be the next viewer to make main release.

Known Issues

A number of issues affects all current viewers:

  • MAINT-809Setting 16x antialiasing crashes Viewer in Ubuntu 11.10 with GeForce 6600
  • MAINT-3200WL Haze effects are inconsistent between solid and transparent objects under water.
  • MAINT-3197Rigged alpha attachments don’t render for impostors.
  • MAINT-3198Legacy bumpiness renders funny on HUD faces with custom alpha mode
  • MAINT-3213Brightness and Darkness legacy bump maps render incorrectly on Intel GPUs.
  • MAINT-4158Avatar distorted when changing outfits
  • WEB-4659Direct Delivery Outbox fails in Linux build

Auto-Build

You probably remember the Lab is changing the tools they use to build the viewer and server software that runs Second Life. They are still working on that project. This week they are resolving issues with the Mac software build process.

This project has people tied up that normally work on other projects. While this is an important project, it isn’t one with new shinnies for the residents. The hope is once complete development can move faster. But, for now I think we are seeing a slow down.

Other Worlds

Inara Pey has an article up on Blue Mars: Return to Blue Mars. Seems it is not completely dead. But, it certainly is not competition for SL1 or 2. However, it does seem to have some use.

3001 The Final Odyssey

In other news I see Arthur Clark’s final story in the 2001 series is going to be made into a TV mini-series by the SyFy channel. (Reference)

Voting

In the USA we are having mid-term elections. Liberal news media is providing horrendous coverage. Dirty politics is at its height in TV and radio commercials. But, most polls are predicting a shift to conservatives.

Few people understand how to read the governments published unemployment numbers to find the real unemployment rates. The numbers are spun by hiding changes in the size of the work force. Looking at raw data for the demographic for 18 to 55 year old people we can get a rough estimate of the real numbers. This is the group of people normally employed. Currently 25% of this group is unemployed, quite different from the reported rates of 5+%. Expect that to show in the voting results.

3 thoughts on “Second Life News 2014-45

  1. “Liberal media”? “Horrendous coverage”? Damn. girl. I thought you were intelligent.

    • I find it amazing when people go right to insults. I assume they have no other argument for their position with any merit.

      • Another definition of “liberal media” is media that reports what’s really happening as opposed to whatever rumor Fox News chose to spread that day. There’s no hope for the angry old white men that believe that crap, but young intelligent people, especially women, should be smarter than that. Sorry if my original comment came off too harsh but seeing that really shocked me.

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