Second Life News 2015-06

Servers

There was no Beta Server UG meeting this week. The Lindens were meeting to decide on which projects would be planned for implementation in 2015. With any luck we’ll hear what they decided, at least to some degree.

Slow render Feb 2015

Slow render Feb 2015

I am hoping they decide to work on the viewer’s caching system. I’m tired of coming home to a grey house, something I can do several times per day when I am in Second Life.

I am also hoping they get the Avatar Render Cost feature working. My hope is they will flash a value on screen when you add any new attachment to the avatar. I think it would be great to have that happen when trying on mesh demos. I think it would put pressure on designers to make more render efficient items.

Viewers

The main viewer is now version 3.7.24-297623. (Release Notes) This is the viewer with reduced pipelined texture and mesh fetching timeout. So stalled connections fail quickly, allowing earlier retry. The timeout value changed from 150 seconds to 60 seconds for textures, and from 600 to 240 seconds for meshes. 

The main viewer got 7 fixes:

  • BUG-7686Avatars are not coming on viewer
  • BUG-7687nothing is rezing in SL, av’s are all gray and textures will not rez
  • BUG-7688Since the last restarts I can’t seem to see things I rez from my inventory or wear mesh in my inventory. I have done numerous clean installs of the latest LL viewer. I have also made sure I am not running the beta version of the AMD CCC.
  • BUG-7690Textures and Meshes abruptly stopped rendering
  • BUG-7691won’t rezz properly
  • BUG-7694Textures and meshes loading slow or refusing to load
  • BUG-7698Textures much slower to load on a CDN region then on a clone of the same region not running CDN

I’ve been using 3.7.24 (297623). I’m not sure these bugs have been fixed. I was getting much faster renders weeks ago. Things seem to have gone the wrong way for me. I now have horribly slow renders and single digit FPS in any area with more than a dozen avatars. The viewer does mini freeze after mini freeze.

RC & Project Viewers

Download Alternate Second Life Viewers

Second Life Experience Viewer version 3.8.0.298001 Release Notes

Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.25.298030Release Notes

On Tuesday the 3rd a new Project Viewer popped up: Project Importer Viewer version 3.7.25.298441. I haven’t used this one, yet. What I get from the release notes follows. If you are importing mesh items, this is an important set of viewer changes.

Release Notes:

This viewer has changes to the viewer’s IMPORT feature. It has an optional feature to allow more debugging output. The Lindens describe this saying, “An ImporterDebug option has been added to the settings.xml file which, if enabled, causes more information to be output during import than you can shake a stick at. The extra output can be very helpful for diagnosing authoring errors (e.g. violating the material subset constraints mentioned above) and pinpoint what needs to be fixed in the source model for successful import.”

Better handling of objects with lots of materials. They say we can now import objects with more than 8 material faces. Your simplified LOD’s must still have all the same materials. It would have been nice if that could have been changed.

This RC adds name based LOD association. They say, “LODs and Physics reps can now be explicitly associated with a given mesh in the full LOD model using name-based matching. By properly naming the meshes in your lower LOD meshes and physics reps, you can avoid issues with ordering of the meshes within your DCC tool and other material mismatching errors.” I’m not sure what this means. I expect we’ll see people discussing this in the forum.

This viewer has a number of fixes to the mesh importer.

  1. MAINT-4400 new Mesh importer reports many ‘MAV_FOUND_DEGENERATE_TRIANGLES’ warnings
  2. MAINT-4405 ImporterDebug debug setting is missing from loader mods viewer
  3. MAINT-4470 viewer crash in LLModel::isMaterialListSubset
  4. MAINT-4487 [loader mods] triangle limits from .slm are ignored when uploading the model the second time.
  5. MAINT-4495 crash when uploading mesh lod files with non-matching object names.
  6. MAINT-4504 [loader mods] creating a mesh from disparate models no longer works
  7. MAINT-4515 [loader mods] viewer crashed when uploading a large mesh
  8. MAINT-4533 [loader mods] viewer crash when uploading shiprigging88b.dae
  9. MAINT-4538 [loader mods] name based matching doesn’t stop misnamed models from uploading.
  10. MAINT-4542 [loader mods] viewer does not display error when Material is not a subset of reference model.
  11. MAINT-4631 [loader mods] door model is missing triangles when uploaded.
  12. MAINT-4632 [loader mods] teamcity linux build fails
  13. MAINT-4794 Present informative dialog if mesh upload fails due to specific reason

So, for those importing mesh, this is a viewer to get now and start testing. While the Lindens are working on this part of the viewer it is the TIME to get them to make other fixes and quickly fix bugs you find.

Project ToolsUpdate Viewer version 3.7.25.298587 – Release Notes – Wednesday January 28th this project viewer appeared. This is the viewer built with the new Auto-Build compiler tools.

Project Hover Height Viewer version 3.7.25.298129 – Release Notes

Project Managed Marketplace Viewer version 3.7.21.296858 –  Release Notes

Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296 –  Release Notes

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