Second Life Third-Party Dev Meeting 2017 w46

The next Third-Party Dev meeting is 12/15.

Alex Ivy

Alex Ivy RC Viewer is holding up well in testing. Actually, better than ever.

There is the one startup crash, they haven’t been able to reproduce. The one they think likely from benchmarking crashing systems. They think they have a fix. The supposed fix will be in next update of Alex Ivy, likely arriving from QA just after Thanksgiving.  If that fixes the crashes, then they will be ready to release Alex Ivy in Early December as the main viewer.

Zenos Profile Photop

Zenos Profile Photo

This is sort of a big deal. I’ve been using 64-bit viewers almost exclusively. They are WAY more stable than 32-bit viewers. If you are not running a 64-bit OS, update ASAP.

When Alex Ivy is released the Lab will have a 32 & 64-bit Windows viewer. They have a 64-bit Mac viewer and no 32-bit Mac.

Linux

If things go as planned, they will build a Debian 64-bit Linux viewer. They will not be able to put much time in on QA. But, they plan to get a Linux build out.

The Lab is counting on the community to provide QA and fixes. Otherwise, this won’t be a working Linux version. Think of the Lab as providing the foundation. The rest is up to the community.

Oz Linden tells us there is a 64-bit Linux version in the Rendering branch. More about the rendering branch below.

Voice

Vivox, the SL voice system people, are working on fixing a race condition. The Lab may be able to add that fix to the next Alex Ivy if Vivox finishes soon enough. This would solve some of the voice problems people are having.

Viewers

Maintenance RC version Martini got a new release.

An update for the 360-image viewer is in the works. We may see it update in week 47. The big improvement is in image quality.

Animesh Project Viewer work on going. See the Content Creator’s meeting for more info.

Second Life Project Render Viewer version 5.1.0.510604 is out as project viewer. Has rendering fixes.

This viewer release includes several fixes to the Rendering pipeline (always a little scary). Please report all issues to us in Jira, we’ll be watching for them.

  • This viewer is now built from the Alex Ivy (64bit) branch
  • There is no Linux viewer available for this build
  • All known issues for the Alex Ivy Viewer apply to this build
  • Improvement to mesh LOD calculation (account for CTRL+0)
  • Improvement: Agents that render as jelly dolls should have their attachments render at 0 LoD to prevent loading higher LoD complexity in memory thus deterring crashes -> debug setting RenderAutoMuteByteLimit has to be > default of 0 for this feature.
  • Bug: Mesh avatar deforms constantly – was due to bounding box / LOD swaps
  • Bug: Some mesh turned invisible when the camera is moved – was caused by the fix for MAINT-6125.
  • Bug: Setting one avatar to “Do not render” causes all avatars to become impostors

Crash Rates

Looking at crash rates between the 32 and 64-bit viewers, the Linens find they vary much more widely than previous viewers, but the sample too small for Oz to be willing to give out numbers. Relatively Windows-10 64-bit w/4GB of RAM is substantially less crash prone than the current 32-bit default viewer. Different by an order or more of magnitude.

The difference between Windows-7 32 and 64 and Win-10 is dramatic too. In the future, the Lab is going to focus mostly on Win-10 64, which is the majority of SL users by a large margin.

So, update your Windows to 10 64-bit.

With the Alex Ivy Viewer, there is better reporting. With it as the main viewer and a high number of users they will know how many are running a 32 or 64-bit OS something they do not have data on now.

Inventory

The Lab will be deprecating all non-HTTP inventory API’s. That will be happening soon, <9 months. This should do a lot to fix inventory reliability. The Lab has changed their viewers to the new API, I think. So, only some third-party viewers have yet to change over.

No Change Windows

For the rest of this year, 2017, there will be only small changes in the SL system. Especially in week 47, because of the US holiday Thanksgiving.

Latest date for a Dec release? Lab shuts down 12/22 to 1/2 for Christmas and New Years. So, if Firestorm is to make another release this year, it has to be well before 12/22.

Resource Usage Tools

Resource Usage Tools… Lindens would love it. But, not in name tags, but great for inspecting things.

So, what is a Resource Usage Tool? The feature is in a request in the Firestorm Viewer JIRA. See FIRE-21793Add resource usage tools. You can see the discussion there. No discussion in the SL Forum yet. Maybe I’ll start one.

You may know that most viewer crashes are from running out of memory; system and video. You may also know there are a couple of things that cause high memory use. Large textures and lots of polygons in mesh stuff.

The only tools for knowing anything about these problems are Land Impact and Avatar Complexity Index. Getting these tools has changed how designers design and buyers buy. My old hair-dos have an ACI of 160k and up along with hundreds of scripts for size and color change. Now I can get hair-dos in the 2 to 6k range with less than a dozen scripts. The Consumer Report thing works in RL and SL. Give people solid information and they tend to do what is best for the majority. If we could just convince politicians…

So, the resource being looked at now is viewer memory; system and video. What is being proposed is giving people a tool so they can see how much memory their avatar, building, whatever is using. Like LI and ACI users and developers will be impacted.

How the information will be displayed is being debated. Some want to put it in the name tags. We already have a load of people whining about the ACI notices that pop up. Oz Linden would prefer it being a panel one could open. We may see it done differently in different viewers.

Apparently, the User Interface is the larger problem in adding the tool. The data capture is seemingly simple. So, I suspect this is an easy add and something that fits with both Firestorm and the Lab’s idea of empowering the user.

More on next page….

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