Third Party Dev Meeting 2016 w50

64-Bit Linden Viewer

Oz Linden tells us they are making progress on the 64-bit version of the Linden made Second Life™ viewer. Also, they are cleaning up a lot of stuff in the process.

Candy Cane dismount

Candy Cane dismount

There is a small possibility of having a project version of the 64-bit version out before the full no change window break.

Voice Viewer

The new voice update is likely after the first of the new year. It fixes some things and improves voice diagnostics.

More HTTP

In the new year, the Lab will be moving animations and sounds over to the HTTP protocol. That will then put them into the CDN pipeline. That will make for faster download of those.

In 2017 they will add new limit on fetching viewer types… I am guessing he meant limiting UDP data flow. That will push everyone to change animations and sounds over to HTTP.

I didn’t realize Gestures are a special case. I am guessing they are more server side than viewer side and thus the additional complications. For now, they are excluded from the move to HTTP protocol. The Lab in testing has shown gestures are amazingly slow loading (10kbps per Vir Linden).

360 Pictures

The 360-pic viewer is still on hold while the team works on the 64-bit viewer.

Alpha Bug

STORM-2144Fix crash when LLPanelOutfitEdit::onOutfitChanging(bool) is called before panel is built. I’m not sure what this bug looks like when it flies in. But, a fix by Cinder and possibly a fix in the RC Maintenance viewer solve the problem.

Redegast Viewer Adopted

Cinder Roxley is going to take over Redegast development. Cinder is setting up a web site. The Lab will change the Third-Party-Viewer Directory when she is ready. For many this will be great news. Wait for the ‘formal’ announcement.

Christmas Party

The Linden in-world Christmas Party is announced here: Jolly Holiday Crawl & Snowball Showdown at 10 am (SLT) Monday the 19th!

Alpha Render Problems

  • BUG-3645Automatic alpha masks behaving unexpectedly for 2 textures sharing a common piece of alpha channel. This report has the steps for reproducing the problem.
  • MATBUG-285Alpha blend behaves like alpha masking
  • BUG-4601Alpha problem with texture on prim. 90% black area goes 100% black with 100% transparency present

These seem to center around the control: Develop->Rendering->Automatic alpha masks

A work-around for the problem is to set 1% transparency… I haven’t see the problem, or maybe I just didn’t recognize it. Whatever, I’m not sure how the work-around applies in various situations.

The possibly related Debug Settings are:

  • RenderAutoMaskAlphaNonDeferred
  • RenderAutoMaskAlphaDeferred

The problem apparently comes from the viewer trying to decide if a ‘blend’ alpha texture looks like it should be masked, if so it uses it as a mask. The problem is the viewer is often wrong. (per Whirly F.)

Lab Changing Viewer Dev

Oz is putting in place a new strategy for fixing render things… bugs, features. The Lab is creating a new stream for rendering-fixes. Mixing the other fixes and rendering fixes has been a problem slowing viewer development. So, they are separating those fixes so render pipeline changes won’t hold up other fixes.

Did you know…

Linden Lab provided the mirrors for the recent Firestorm updates. Yay! Thank you Linden Lab. I probably got my copy of Firestorm 5.0.1 a day or two earlier than I would have if they hadn’t.

Jessica says next time they will start with mirrors when they release new versions.

It takes the FS JIRA 10 minutes to reboot…

Next Meeting

Next TPVD is Jan 13, 2017 – Not that much will happen between now and then. So, Oz decided not to have a meeting  on the 6th.

The Alchemy dev peeps are working on an update to include Bento. Kokua, Lumiya, and Singularity are expecting to update soon too.

Those with Bento capability are Firestorm, Catznip, Linden, Black Dragon, RLV, Cool VL Experiemental, and … I’m not sure what others.

Animation Freezes

The Lab has a couple of examples of animations freezing that they can reproduce. It seems to be a problem of animations tripping over each other when one is not using an AO. Weird.

Second Life and VR for 2017 … or not

Linden Lab has no plans for Oculus support for 2017. Simply put Oz Linden and crew are NOT convinced they can get a comfortable frame rate from SL. ‘Comfortable’ in this case means you are not puking from simulator sickness.

There are more health issues coming to light in regard to VR use. I’ve written about some. But, prolonged use, meaning an hour or more, seems to be inducing some serious visual perception issues post VR use.

If your system does NOT run at a minimum of 120 FPS now, you can’t comfortably run a VR stereo experience without simulator sickness.

The user base that has systems capable of making a minimum of 120 FPS is VERY VERY small. My new i5-6600k @ 4.1GHz w/32GB Ram, RAM Drive, SSD, and GTX1060 runs about 40 to 8o FPS with bursts to 160 FPS. The i5 is currently considered the best chip for the dollar for gaming. While such a system is more than adequate for SL and other games the heavy user made content of SL pulls frame rates too low for VR.

New Things for 2017

About new things… Lindens aren’t saying. But, several Lindens have things in the area of Windlight they want to do. So, I expect some new Windlight stuff this year…

When asked by dev’s about some things TPV Dev’s would like, Oz said there were other things, than were asked about, they considered a higher priority and are working on. They just won’t say what they are. Normal…

2 thoughts on “Third Party Dev Meeting 2016 w50

  1. “Those with Bento capability are …/… Cool VL Experiemental”

    The former “experimental” branch (with Bento support) of the Cool VL Viewer became the new stable branch (and replaced/deprecated the old stable branch) last week already.

    I know it’s hard to follow the quick pace of my releases (weekly ones !) and backports; Bento got backported to the Cool VL Viewer only one week after it made its appearance in LL’s github, almost one year ago (http://sldev.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1581)…

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