Servers

There is no deploy post this week. So, we may not hear anything until Thursday’s Beta Server UG meeting.

There were login issues over the weekend. The Lindens think they have that fixed.

Inara didn’t make it to the Server-Scripting meeting. I was out and didn’t make it. So, everyone that didn’t make it to the meeting is just out of luck as to what’s going on. Sorry.

Viewers

The main viewer is version 5.1.9.519298, released in week #40.

Second Life Animesh Viewer version 6.0.0.520636 – Released week #43.

Second Life Bugsplat Viewer version 5.1.9.519462 – Last updated in week #37.

Second Life EAM Viewer version 5.2.0.520057 – Moved from Project Viewer to RC in week #40.

Second Life Love Me Render Viewer version 5.1.8.518751 – Released in week #34.

Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 5.1.10.520444 – Released in week #42.

Second Life Project 360 Snapshot Viewer version 5.1.6.515934 – Last updated in week #10.

Second Life Project Bakes On Mesh Viewer version 5.1.10.520711 – NEW – The previous version came out in week #39.

Second Life Project EEP Viewer version 5.1.10.520819 – Released in week #43. The next version should have the LSL functions supporting EEP.

As things were first talked about EEP was to make it to the main grid without LSL support, which would be an iteration 2 thing. There have been a couple of minor gotchas in the server and viewer sides of things delaying release. It appears the time is being used to add the LSL support.

Some users thought it was important EEP not be released until LSL support was provided. Why and whether that was really a real-world issue based in fact is debatable. But, it does seem to be working out that EEP will released with LSL support.

The LSL support is no doubt an important part of EEP. The LSL support will allow your viewer to be controlled to provide environment changes, e.g., walking into a cave and it getting dark for you and not those outside the cave.

The ability to make those changes will depend on Experiences. If you accept an Experience, you’ll see the changes otherwise, not.

Other Viewers

Black Dragon – It updated to version 3.3.3 and has improvements to its POSER feature, which is more of an animation tool then just a pose builder. You can pose/animate your avatar and an Animesh character at the same time.

NiranV is also planning to compile a version of the viewer that uses Intel’s built-in AVX. And what is AVX?

In 1999 Intel added SSE, Streaming SIMD Extensions. This was a collection of 70± functions built into the CPU to speed 3D graphics and similar processing. The collection evolved to SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, and SSE4. Outside the scientific community adoption of the last 3 iterations of SSE has been slow.

The AVX/AVX2 is the follow on to SSE. These are both sets of functions to speed vector graphics processing and similar math tasks.

CPU’s with AVX started shipping in Q1-2011. So, most computers in use now have an AVX/AVX2 capable CPU.

Some think SSE is faster than AVX. But, the point of AVX was to do things better and presumably faster. So, we’ll see what happens with NiranV’s viewer.

Other News

The Lindens have announced the Second Life Halloween Creepy Crawl 2018 – Join us! This event starts at 10 AM SLT Wednesday October 31. You can find the detailed schedule of places and times in the Destination Guide and in the forum post.

Police Restraints – Marine Kelly makes various types of restraints. She has announced the price will be going up with the latest iteration of her police handcuffs and related parts of the set. This is important in a savings-way because if you own the full set or buy it at the current lower price, you’ll get the update for free.