Last Friday was the Third Party Developers meeting. It lasted about 20 minutes. So, not much news and almost no new news. Sigh. I’ll put it all in one post.
Bambi Foxdale #paparazzoted
Viewers
The main viewer is 3.8.4-305119. Expect that to change this week (42).
RC Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 3.8.5.305531 – This is the most likely viewer to get promoted. It is doing well, I suppose not crashing nor getting BUG reports. So, it is Oz Linden’s best guess at the viewer that will get promoted. But, that isn’t a guarantee. Release Notes: Big batch of Maintenance work to improve performance, fix bugs, address feature requests and give Second Life love. It has almost 100 fixes.
RC Second Life Notifications Viewer version 3.8.5.305555 – Release Notes:
New Notifications floater separates incoming notifications into Categories. It provides a better way to view, interact with, prioritize and manage incoming notices for busy residents.
- System – Displays general notifications, such as inventory transfers and friendship status changes.
- Transactions – Displays notifications that result from Linden dollar (L$) transactions.
- Invitations – Displays group invitations.
- Group – Displays notices from groups you are in.
Each notification in the list can be expanded or collapsed by clicking the arrow at the bottom right of the listing. You may also use the Collapse all button to collapse any expanded notifications. You may delete notifications from the list by clicking the x button at the upper right of each listing. Alternatively, you may click the “Delete all” button to delete all notifications in the current tab.
A special thank you to Aki Shichiroji for initial feature design.
RC Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.5.305528 – Release Notes:
Graphics Presets You can now create different saved “presets” for your graphics preferences, and quickly switch between them using a new top bar pulldown. Create one with a short draw distance and support for lots of detail to use when going to a dance club, another with long views for exploring, and any others that you find yourself using frequently.
Avatar Rendering Complexity Controls For many users, the most expensive part of rendering a Second Life scene is rendering the avatars around you. For some time, the viewer has had a measurement of how much each avatar around you is affecting your performance; this viewer introduces some control and feedback based on that measure. A new *Avatar Maximum Complexity* control lets you prevent expensive avatars from lagging you; any avatar over the limit is displayed as a solid color rather than rendering full detail. A default limit is set based on the rendering performance of your system. You’ll also get a notice when your own rendering complexity changes, and an indication when you’re over the limit of too many of the avatars around you.
RC Second Life HTTP update Viewer version 3.8.5.305771 – Release Notes:
This viewer release is a complete replacement of the under the hood HTTP infrastructure. It provides improved performance and stability by replacing the self deleting responders with coroutine implementations. These coroutines also provide a finer grained concurrency allowing the Viewer greater control over the numbers and types of HTTP requests that can be simultaneously outstanding. This release also removes a considerable amount of deprecated and unused code from the viewer. These changes impact all areas of the viewer that use Sim Capabilities. A non-exhaustive list includes:
- Asset upload (Images, Meshes, Animations)
- AISv3 inventory manipulation
- Viewer Managed Marketplace
- Simhost event polling
- LSL script compilation
- Experience management (blocking, allowing, creating)
Project Valhalla Viewer version 4.0.0.305703 – Release Notes:
This long-awaited project replaces the aging LLQTWebKit system used in the Web media plugin with a shiny new one based on the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) that supports modern web technologies. In fact, we think this is such a big deal that we’re cranking the Viewer version number to 4.0.0.
This is the first iteration of a Project Viewer – which means that while a lot of the problems facing the old MOAP implementation should now become a distant artifact of the past, we are still cranking through the many new issues with our CEF-based solution. See a bug? If you don’t see it filed already – file a Jira! We look forward to your feedback. Thanks!
Only those who care about you can hear you when you’re quiet.
The word from the meeting is that CEF viewers may or may not work with Flash and QT. The problem is that for Flash & QT to work in a viewer the user must have the third party Flash & QT properly installed on their computer. The Lab has no control over what you have done with your computer. So, they will NOT be attempting to get Flash and QT to work with the new CEF viewers. They aren’t disabling the features. They will work correctly for those that have Flash & QT installed correctly. We don’t know how many people that will be.
This means that content providers that want their SL products to deliver media reliably need to change their media to HTML5 format. Otherwise only some smaller percentage of users will be able to reliably see the content.
While the CEF viewer is in project status the Lindens will be sympathetic to problems content providers report. Once the viewer makes it to RC the Lab will be much less sympathetic. So, get your bug reports in now, while the viewer is in project status.
Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296 Still no Rift update. Oz is hoping to get to it soon.
Firestorm
After the next Linden viewer release the Firestorm Viewer will go into feature freeze in anticipation of a mid Nov viewer release.
No Change Windows
During the winter holidays The Lab designates periods when they make no changes to the SL system or viewer. The Firestorm viewer team also follows those no change windows and makes no changes in those times. That makes it important for the Firestorm team to get a release out before Thanksgiving.
The Lab will have No Change Windows for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. They haven’t set start dates yet. But, most of us can look at a calendar and anticipate the likely dates.
Bugs
The quesion asked in the meeting: Is anyone working on attachments dropping on region cross? Oz says all the primary fixes relating to the problem are out… But, users are still reporting the problem.
SVC-7578 – Stacked attachments are not loading after teleport. This bug has been around since the change permitting stacking multiple attachments on a single attachment point.
It is thought that bad network connections get the viewer and server out of sync when crossing into a new region. The result is most often an attachment disappears.
At this time the Lab has no reliable method for recovery.
The more technical explanation is that when going to a new server all attached objects get new UUID’s… and the viewer trying to keep things as they were in last region, gets confused when new UUID information coming from the new region gets lost. The viewer is no longer sure what is or isn’t attached.
Stacked unscripted attachments are almost never a problem. Scripts require much more time to transfer to a new region server. I suspect that increases the time over which a problem can happen to the update information… and it happens more often.
Oz is not clear on whether the update process is using UDP or HTTP.
To fix a problem a reliable way to reproduce the problem is needed. This problem is difficult to fix because there is no consistent way to reproduce the problem. Since it is hard to reproduce, making it intermittent, means it is hard to fix.
BUG-7084 – Prim properties visually revert to an earlier state since Interesting.
Since the viewer-interesting changes were added to the viewer, objects that change state via script often appear visually in the wrong state. One can most often see this problem when rezzing a large structure from its box, derez it and you still see much of object until click on it.