Niran has release a new version of his viewer. This release has Screen Space Reflections. The images on the blog show it working. It is an interesting feature. Check it out.
Nalates Urriah
New Version CtrlAltStudio Viewer
Alpha 3 or version 1.1.0.34268 has been released. Cinder Roxely has made a Mac version.
There are changes for the Oculus Rift:
- Added looking around with the Rift in 3rd person view.
- Fixed projected light not being rendered correctly.
- Fixed bad display with only Basic Shaders turned on.
- Fixed Rift full screen resolution being used for normal and stereoscopic 3D full screen.
Get more info here: CtrlAltStudio Viewer.
Singularity 1.8.3 Released
A new version of the Singularity Viewer is out: 1.8.3. This release is a collection of fixes and new features. See the blog for more information: Singularity 1.8.3 – Release.
One of the new features is a Collada Export feature.
Second Life Content & Mesh 2013-38
I haven’t been hearing much exciting or interesting news in the C&M user group. So, I haven’t been writing about it. But, there are couple of interesting things that came up this week. I consider Avatar 2.0 and the Mesh Deformer joined at the hip and there was some discussion about Avatar2.0.
Pants Flare
The Pants Flare thing came up in the Content and Mesh meeting with Nyx Linden. This is the best meeting for getting content creation and mesh questions answered. Nyx is not a modeler, so asking “how to” questions is pointless. But, ‘why doesn’t this work’ questions Nyx can usually answer or dig into to figure out if the SL system is broken.
Seems some people have issues with how pants flare works. Who would have guessed?
Whirly Fizzle offered it up for discussion saying, “If we have no topics, we can discuss how broken pants flare is.”
Second Life News 2013-38
The information on server updates is out. The main channel will be getting an update. The package from the Magnum RC channel is being promoted. This is the package that has improved asset fetching and preparatory work for future improvements. You can read the release notes here: Second Life Server 13.09.05.280647.
I doubt we will see much improvement in asset fetching performance. It may look like it, but what we will be seeing is more an improvement from increased reliability and less wasted server effort. It is sort like the speed limit on the highway hasn’t increased, but there are fewer wrecks. So, things get there sooner.
This package also has the ‘GetMesh2’ api/function. You may remember reading that users were setting their viewers to use ridiculously high values for MeshMaxConcurrentRequests. This is a step in changing how the system handles Mesh Downloading.
Debugging a Second Life Region’s Lag
I suspect many of us have visited a region and had our FPS (Frames per Second) rate drop to low single digits. Innula Zenovka is managing a region that has the problem and started looking for help figuring out what was wrong with it. I suppose managers like Innula get handed some real messes to deal with.
Innula says her viewer usually runs at about 30 FPS. But, in the problem region it drops to 2 to 3 FPS. I hate it when that happens.
See the thread: Advice, please, on reading consoles and debugging a laggy sim.
There is some good information and tips in the thread.
One tip is to select an item you think may be using a number of large textures. A simple right click on it will do. Then press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T. This will send a series of notifications. You will get a list of the textures used in the item as a list ordered by each object in a link set. The notifications tell you the size of the texture and which face it is applied to.
You can see the result in the image: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T Read Out.