Not many attending last Friday… Some news mostly updates.

The Bugsplat RC Viewer should be identical to default viewer. The only difference is it uploads crash reports to the Bugsplat system. The Lindens are wrapping up their evaluation. There is no information pre-evaluation on where this is going. Oz Linden through it was going well. But, until the numbers and Linden-users’ evals are in no can know.

illusion

There is a Voice RC Viewer out and another in QA that uses a newer Vivox SDK. In the newer one voice crashes recover automatically.

Oz tells us there are 3 other viewer candidates likely to appear this week (#33).

The Animesh RC will get an update. Another Rendering changes version is coming. A new Maintenance version is in the wings waiting for a simulator change – the offline communication thing. The point here is to be more reliable in delivering messages at login, which were sent to you while you are offline.

Also, there are 3 Project viewers; the Estate Management Tools’ new features for the ban list, for which they are looking for feedback. There is the Snapshot Viewer which has no change, but they hope to get back to soon. For now, they are likely working on the Facebook problem with snapshots not uploading. The whole world seems to be on FB’s case.

The Bakes-On-Mesh viewer is waiting for some inventory system changes, I think, now available in AGNI server RC channels. Test this feature on Aditi as all the changes are in place there.

Land Impact Costs (LI) are being studied with the hope of changing LI to deal with some poor design incentives. The current formula was chosen when there were different resource constraints. Things have changed. The LI calc needs to make corresponding changes to influence design to better consider current resource constraints. Plus, the current LoD incentives encourage some poor design and that needs to be corrected.

We have seen some correction with the special calc for Animesh LI in the Level of Detail (LoD) models used.

Oz thinks they may have the sim calc both LI costs, the current and the proposed new. Then see what would be affected by comparing the results. Once they know what the change would do current builds they would figure out if or how to warn landowners of what the changes will do. Same for ACI, but ACI has less impact.

Oz assures us this will be a slow and careful process nor is it imminent. They will make every effort to avoid mass returns is the LI numbers have to go up.

Seems there is a problem KDU, Kakadu. KDU is the commercial library used to handle JPG2000 images. It is costly. The Lab uses it convert uploaded images to a uniform format for storage. Also, it is used in the Linden and Firestorm viewers.

A number of third-party viewers use OpenJPEG, which is designed to be an open source KDU. However, it is not a perfect replacement for KDU.

In the days before Firestorm started using KDU we had numerous image problems. Textures often didn’t work in some viewers. Seems we have a problem again as some KDU-OpenJPEG change created a problem and some OpenJPEG uploaded images are correctly handled by KDU.

I’m not sure how this problem is displaying. Just that things are not working well. But, as most people building use either the Linden or Firestorm viewers for image/texture upload it is a small problem.

TCO – Texture caching changes are working their way through the pipeline. The idea is to make a bigger cache but one mostly one that works way better. That will be nice.

EEP, the Enhanced Environment Project, is waiting for Inventory system patches on ADITI, then they can roll out a project viewer.

The Lindens were shutting down SL for maintenance this Monday way early. They were making some changes that required everything be off. I think I was still asleep. I also think few noticed.

The JIRA is to get an update this coming Thursday (8/16). The JIRA will then update your email address from main SL account information.

So, that is it for the meeting. Lasted 26 minutes with about 15 minutes of talking…

SL has news cycles… One part of the cycle is the discussion of coming features. Everyone is excited or panicked and there is a lot being said, debated, and people ranting. Then there is development with weeks of ‘we’re working on it’. Not much for news. Then the prototype stage starts where we get a Project Viewer and provide feedback. We see more discussion and the Chicken Little disaster and sour grapes people come out. One would think they would learn…

Following are the RC and final release stages. Tutorials are made questions are answered in the forum and then that feature’s discussion stops being news and we move on to the next items.

We are in the final stages of the development part of the cycle for a number of projects. So, it is relatively quiet.

Also, the way the Lab relates to the user base has changed. It is a far more cooperative relationship than the adversarial one of the past, which is less newsworthy. However, there are those ranting in the forum that haven’t kept up and remain oblivious to the changes. The result is SL is just as prone to fake news, misinformation, and lies as is RL.