Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Surely by now you know SSA is Server Side Appearance, which is about baking your avatar appearance. The Lindens have posted a second notice that SSA will be here next week. See: It’s Time to Update Your Viewer!
And they reuse their previous video:
[youtube jwglL3VXI80]
Please make sure all your friends know about the coming update and the need for them to be using a recent version of whatever viewer they use.
As you know the Materials System has been released by the Lab. The third party viewers are picking up the project and adding it to their viewers. Cool VL Viewer and Niran’s Black Dragon have Materials. Firestorm 4.4.1 does not have Materials yet but, 4.4.2 is nearing release and will have materials.
There are fixes for problems in Materials System that are in the pipeline. One of those has to do with Ambient Occlusion on large objects. That is unlikely to be in Firestorm’s 4.4.2 release.
Server Side Appearance (SSA baking) is planned for the release the week of July 7-13. The Lab is expecting it may be on the 8th or 9th.
Firestorm and Phoenix users will see a huge notice on the viewer’s splash screen that they need to update. If you have not yet updated to 4.4.1, avoid the rush and do it now.
The FS Team is working on Materials, Sunshine, and adopting the CHUI to Firestorm. I am sure they would love to see all of those in 4.4.2. But, they aren’t saying what they will be able to do because they haven’t even been able to get all the Lab’s code for these features. The Lab is just not done with it. Things are changing as it is developed. You don’t try to hang pictures in a house before the walls are built.
The FS Team asked the Lindens if their release of a new viewer requiring a cache clear is loading up the asset server. Monty Linden says the asset system has lots of head room and is not the likely bottle neck. But, the inventory system that tracks what you have in your inventory is near capacity. Consider the inventory an index that deals with permissions and lots of interactions between you and backend systems of SL.
Jessica has explained that people are convinced clearing cache solves every problem and speeds up their viewer. The opposite is true. But, sometimes without a stop watch people cannot get past their subjective impression.
Whatever the case, it looks like the Lab is going to start making plans to look at cache operation. Monty Linden is going to take a look to see how a Firestorm-clear-your-cache release may be affecting the SL servers.
Most of the current inventory problems are with inventory cache, which is not the same as the basic cache. It is possible to clear inventory cache and not clear the basic cache of textures, mesh, and objects. But, it is a clear that has to be done manually.
There is a blog announcement on the SL Blog about the Sunshine Project being rolled out. There is also a new Torley video out to show the change.
[youtube jwglL3VXI80]
As you can see the Lab is requiring a viewer update. As Torley explains the viewer, then the servers and then another viewer update will rollout.
RL is keeping me busy this week. I am mostly skimming head lines to see what is going on in Second Life™. That results in short notes on things.
The Lab is doing a thing with Dell Computers. You have a chance to win a free laptop. If you don’t know Alienware is a company owned by Dell that makes gaming machines. I think they are expensive for what you get, but they are good machines. So… check out the announcement and see if you can win a free one.
I am distracted by RL work events and running a bit behind. I’ve barely been in-world since last Thursday. We did get a rollout Tuesday to the main channel. The main channel got the Interest List update. This should be noticed as a little bit faster rezzing of regions you are visiting for the first time.
Rollouts started for today, Wednesday, on the release channels. All three are getting the same package. It includes the new LSL functions I’ve been writing about. If you have missed those articles take a look at the release notes. These include additions to Pathfinding and object returns.