Third-Party Dev Meeting (Leaks) 2017 w44

There is some news this week. Most are from a couple of leaks. They give us a clue as to why the release of the Firestorm viewer is delayed. So…

The Linden Voice RC Viewer has 1 bug still left. The Lindens are hunting for the cause of an intermittent channel misconnection. If I understand the voice system mistakes which region you are in and connects your voice to the wrong region. Of course, voice doesn’t work when that happens.

in simple words

in simple words

Vivox, the providers of SL voice, is working on the problem and thinks it is in the SDK….

The Alex Ivy RC Viewer got an update Thursday. The viewer is doing well and Oz Linden is happy with it. However, there was a bug in the updater part of the code. It caused those updating some problems. I ran into it. A manual install corrects the problem.

The Lindens can’t get a good grip on how well the 64-bit viewer is doing as the 32 & 64-bit versions report as the same viewer. From other indicators, the Lindens know 32-bit version has people crashing way more often than previous versions. The 64-bit version is crashing way less than previous versions. Apparently, there is a WAY SIZABLE difference between 32 and 64-bit versions.

Crashes are typically early in the login… Oz suspects it is crashing during the benchmarking tests.

The 360-image RC Viewer is making lots of progress… Expect an update real soon. We’ve been hearing that for a time now, since week #27. It is this project that gets put on hold when programmers are needed for something more important.

However, work goes on and image quality and speed are being improved and they are building in the stuff to simply add 360-Images to SL Place Pages and other services. I suppose Flickr and Facebook. Whatever, lots coming for 360.

A project is rolling along to deprecate the UDP interface for inventory. If your viewer uses UDP for inventory manipulation then you’ll have a problem early in 2018. Maybe as late as after Valentine’s Day. But, sometime early in 2018 the API’s for UDP inventory services will be shut off.

The holidays are coming and that means No Change Windows. For Thanksgiving, it looks to be from November 22-26. That’s a Wednesday to Sunday. The next No Change Window is for Christmas and New Years. Oz didn’t have the dates. I suspect it to be from December 22 through January 2nd.

Next Third-Party Dev meeting will be the 17th. December 1 and 15 are the likely meetings dates. The next meeting might be January 5. Consider it iffy.

From Firestorm

Word is Firestorm will release a new version before the end of the year.

There is a proposal to provide users more information about what they are wearing and the things they rez around them. It comes in the form of a Firestorm JIRA feature request.

FIRE-21793Add resource usage tools.

Heya! Long time!

I have a little patch for FireStorm that consists of a couple of features I think SL should have had eons ago.

  • It allows people to get an easy overview of an avatar’s VRAM usage – it gets displayed in the tag, just like Render Weight does. Also, like Render Weight, you are able to limit the visibility of avatars that are over a certain amount of VRAM. Many many people have absolutely no idea how much RAM their avatar and attachments are using- they are oblivious to the massive bloat many creations actually put on them. This will help, a lot.
  • The second component is the ability to see the VRAM, triangles and vertices (properly calculated) of any selected object in an inspect window, including totals and broken down by link in the linkset, including multiple selected objects. This allows for quick identification of the efficiency of an item, without having to take measures that would otherwise not be ToS compliant. This properly iterates over the individual links and shows proper totals, unlike the obscure and almost not-known render debug display or even somewhat stowed away simple FS VRAM info.

I need to stress that this info is kind of important – especially the Avatar and Object VRAM totals and by-link-breakups. It has become pretty much one of the top performance killers in SL over the last years – not only clogging up people’s network lines on TP to new places, downloading potentially hundreds of megabytes of data per avatar (Which is just horrible for metered lines as well..), but also clogging the cache and sending SL’s less-than-stellar texture cache handling into an endless churn. And easily seeing how much texture memory an Avatar or Object uses, has been a really…really big eye opener when it comes to a lot of content where it has been rather obscure and somewhat hidden away before.
Consider the fact that lots and lots of avatars out there easily use over a hundred, sometimes several hundreds of MB of textures. Way, way too much content – be it attachments, buildings or what have you – simply are a torrent of 1024’s. And the consumers don’t even know or are aware of the insane memory bloat. Now consider what happens at places where lots of avatars meet.

Please take this patch into consideration and inclusion without changing the pre-defined defaults for jellybabying – they are quite sane at over a hundred MBs per avatar, but can of course be adjusted to need. This overall set of features is supposed to help improve performance, but even more importantly to make people aware – consumers as well as creators – of the efficiency of items.

Obviously basic information like that should have been in SL from the start. The grid might have become a much more content-efficient place akin to other game-ish environments out there.

Credits for this go to me, as well as Arcane Portal who’s been a driving force and co-coder behind this.

Chalice Yao

This will give users more tools for evaluating the goods they buy and wear. These are the type of additions the Lindens, and particularly Oz, like. So, I expect to see them adopted.

Like ACI these new tools will have an impact on designers and overall SL performance.

Another leak has let us know about features in the current Alpha/Beta release of Firestorm. I gather this leak was an accident.

You can find out more about what is coming in Firestorm here: Coming to Firestorm soon… A couple of new features for builders and non-builders alike. Check this out as there are more features talked about.

The devs will be discussing these features and what the Lab thinks of them next meeting. They will be working out how to proceed. But, my understanding is the Beq features are in the Firestorm RC now. The Yao features are in the planning stage but have already been coded into a Firestorm branch. So, unless the Lindens have a strong objection, we’ll see these features in the not too distant future.

One thought on “Third-Party Dev Meeting (Leaks) 2017 w44

  1. Proper VRAM usage per avatar? THIS is a thing that SL really needs. Congratulations Beq for adding the first feature to Firestorm that i deem an actual improvement to SL.

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