As previously pointed out, this Friday (9/11 – week 37) was the Third Party Developer’s meeting. There is enough news from that one meeting to fill several posts. So, I broke them up. This is the second one coming from that meeting.
Embracing Autumn
Inventory Changes
Aura Linden has been making Second Life™ inventory much more robust. Over the past year as parts of the SL system have been upgraded other parts have revealed their weaknesses. Months ago the inventory system was updated, AISv3. The upgrade added new code to the servers and viewers.
Second Life™ is getting a new tool to hopefully induce people to reduce avatar generated lag; the Avatar Complexity Rating. I’ve written about it before and I am trying to play with the Project Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.4.304761, which adds avatar complexity settings and notices.
Complexity KB Value
The notice that appears in the upper right of the screen just after login tells you your avatar complexity number. I suggested that it be colored, green good and red bad, just as the Show Avatar Render Complexity Information (ARC) display does.
They note the other factors that can cause avatars to be rendered a Jelly Babies;
total attachment surface area
total attachment byte size
You can change the values of these settings in Debug Settings. See:
RenderAvatarMaxNonImposters – The maximum number of avatars closest to your camera who may be fully rendered. Avatars beyond those will be rendered as ‘imposters’, which means that the rendering will be a little simpler and they will be updated less frequently. Increasing this value can cost you in performance if you’re in a crowd. This does not cause them to render as Jelly Babies.
RenderAvatarMaxComplexity – Any avatars over this complexity will be drawn as solid color outlines. Changing this value directly may cause problems; use the slider in the advanced graphics preferences floater.
RenderAutoMuteSurfaceAreaLimit –The limit for the total surface area of attachments before switching to solid color rendering. The default (10 million square meters) is intended to protect against deliberate abuse and should rarely be encountered.
RenderAutoMuteByteLimit – The limit for the total number of bytes of attachments before switching to solid color rendering. The default (10 million bytes) is intended to protect against deliberate abuse and should rarely be encountered.
As you may have guessed, the last two are mostly to stop some griefing issues. But, those settings can be used to improve viewer performance.
Changing RenderAvatarMaxComplexity in the Debug Settings doesn’t seem to be a problem. Whether I change it in the Preferences panel as the Lindens recommend or in Debug Settings the change is reflected in the other. But, getting to the Preferences setting is much easier. Whether changing the setting there affects other settings not affected by using the Debug Setting, I have no information. It is a possibility, but I have not seen anything that leads me to think that happens. But, this is a Project Viewer and it will change.
At the Second Life™ Developers’ meeting a question came up about whether it would be possible to sell experiences, the kind made with the new Advanced Experience Tools. There was discussion about the idea at the TPD meeting.
The Well
The answer is: it has been discussed within the Lab, they would like for that to be possible, it is a complex add, and currently no one is working on it. So, a ‘NO’, but with hope. I would say, very very little hope. It is high hanging fruit.
What about grid wide experiences? The Lab is waiting to see how the land-based experiences go. There are several hundred experiences in the system. Not all of them are in use or that have scripts associated with them. So, it is a bit early to decide how well Experiences is going to be adopted by users.
As the Lab learns more about the feature’s popularity and how people use it, at some point they’ll decide if adding grid-wide experiences is worth the effort.
We don’t hear much about this Second Life™ change. But, Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) is coming and will affect our use of Second Life in many ways.
TV
The viewer currently uses Webkit, an old unsupported tech, to display a number of viewer panels (like Search). It is also the tech used in Media On A Prim (MOAP). It is a part of SL Televisions.
You may remember that weeks ago a point came up about how the little profile icons used in chat are never flushed from viewer memory. The more people that enter chat the more memory is used and never released until the user logs off or memory is consumed and you crash.
Um certo cais – A certain pier
As tiny as they are they have a larger impact than one would suspect. The profile image has to be download and is the source from which the tiny icon is made. It is, as I recall, it is the memory for both images that is not released.
Last Friday word in the Third Party Developers meeting is Cinder Roxley started writing a fix. I would guess that we’ll see one this year, but I have no idea what Cinder’s schedule is like – which you should read as I have no real basis I can point to for that guess. I expect the fix would be tested in the Alchemy viewer before appearing in any other viewer.
For most, all this means is another memory leak is getting fixed and we will crash less often.
This is a PROJECT viewer, meaning it is more crash and bug prone than the Release Candidate viewers. I crashed and hit 100% disk use with this version of the viewer almost always in the first 15 minutes. But, I wanted to see the new features. So, I keep re-starting it. Sometimes it runs longer than other times. I have yet to pin down what I am doing different between a quick crash and longer run times.
New Complexity Information
It is important to note that during this Project Viewer time that you can provide feedback to the Lab and they are much more likely to listen and make changes. After the features are in an RC viewer they are MUCH less likely to make changes. So, if you think you may have a grip or suggestion, get it to the Lindens (JIRA Feature or Bug Report).
