For SL users there is the Apple question, will Second Life™ run on Apple? Or… continueto run on Apple?
In June of this year Apple announced its discontinuing support of OpenGL after macOS 10.14 Mojave (scheduled for release Sept 2018), the core aspect of SL’s render engine. It will take a couple of years for Apple to phase it out. But, updates and support officially stop now. For some time support has been really bad.
● 1325 Colorful Disaster
They explained their reasoning when some game developers declared they would stop making games for Apple.
The reasons;
OpenGL was designed 25 years ago.
Core architecture is from the beginning days of 3D graphics.
Designed is based on outdated thinking.
OpenGL is a legacy tool with updates ‘tacked’ on.
Hardware GPU work flow has changed.
Never designed for multi-threading.
Today’s rendering is asynchronous.
On the PC side of things OpenGL is still supported. We can’t know for how long. Khronos, OpenGL’s developer, has introduced Vulkan. (See: State of Graphics: DirectX 12 & Vulkan – 4/2016) Development is exciting and popular. The group is on the forefront of some interesting tech. But, I don’t know that it will be helpful for SL.
I happen to like Slink, so I build what I can wear. For me that means using the Slink Developer Kit. Finishing some stuff up I decided it is time to update my AvaStar, Blender, and Slink Kit before moving on to new things. Also, I wanted to try out the AvaStar feature that adds Dev Kits.
The highest Blender I have is version 2.79c. This can get a bit confusing. The official release is 2.79b according to the Blender.org site. The main download provides an MSI file for use with Windows. This is a basic Windows install file. Not what I suspect most developers want. We want the ‘Archive’ file, the one that allows us to have multiple versions installed. You get that from the same download page just look in ‘other versions’ and grab the ZIP file.
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.
There are neat places in SL. A few are cute or have cuddly animals. But, I stumbled on D-Lab searching for helicopters and they are over the top cute. They have an adorable little 2-seater helicopter that I saw near an airport. I tracked down the creator and found D-Lab’s Skyshop.
D-Lab’s Skyshop
Most of the stuff in the image they have for sale. Much of the really cute stuff is only visible inside the chop. They sorta have two showrooms. The fun stuff is in the shop shown above, the Skyshop.
Grid Survey Milestone – You may know that Tyche Shepherd maintains a survey of regions in Second Life. You can find the latest information at GridSurvey.com.
If you have ever wondered which regions are in a particular RC channel, Tyche provides the best information available. It isn’t a perfect list of RC channels as things change quickly. But, it is the best available.
