Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
For some time there has been a link on the Marketplace’s home page that allows you to switch over to the new search feature. That link is gone.
The Lindens explain why here: New Second Life Marketplace Search is Live. As of 8/15 the new search is ‘SEARCH’. The old searching infrastructure is retired.
The main viewer has updated to version 4.0.7.318301. This was formerly the Maintenance RC Viewer. There are a lot of fixes in this update. Oz Linden points out that work is being done to prevent viewer crashes. This release dropped the crash rate by 4%, which is huge.
One fix in that line is in the image processing. When video memory filled up and there was no way for the viewer to handle the texture… it crashed. Now it will simply skip rendering the texture and color the object gray.
In the last 10 minutes or so of the Third Party Developers’ Meeting the problem with AMD video cards problems came up.
It seems especially the R series of video cards (RX480 etc.) have a problem with OpenGL. See: BUG-20057 – Visual Artifacts with ALM enabled on some AMD graphics cards.
This bug is dependent on screen size. So, you may be able to escape it by changing your viewer window size or screen resolution.
There is a thread in the AMD forum about the problem. It is way techy. See: OpenGL display artifact on W7100.
This is an interesting update on the current bugs and progress on the head bones. Matrice Laville, the programmer for AvaStar speaks about several issues.
One of the people working with Bento is totally frustrated. She provides us a textbook case of victimization and projection. Wow. She is having problems with the Bento Collada file in the SL Wiki dated Aug 6th. Even after several people downloaded and checked the file during the meeting then told her the file was complete but had bone position issues, which were talked about earlier, she couldn’t hear them.
The main channel got a new package this Tuesday. This is the package that has minor internal changes. These are usually security and logging things. This particular version of the package was delayed a week to fix for BUG-37573 “Rez silently fails on RC Magnum, RC LeTigre and RC BlueSteel regions.”
The RC channels remain running the same package. No new package.
The main viewer is still version 4.0.6.315555.
Earlier today I was thinking Firestorm would release soon and it was later in the day, Monday. The announcement is here: Firestorm Release 4.7.9-50527. Inara has her coverage here: Firestorm 4.7.9.50527: “I see jelly people!”
Mac and Linux users lose the Havok add-on features for Pathfinding and mesh uploading. Inara has more details on that subject.
This brings Firestorm on par with the Lab’s version 4.0.6, the current main viewer. But, we may see a new Linden version promoted this or next week. Firestorm is scheduled for its next release in 3 months.