You’ll find the viewer works in Direct and Extended Rift modes. There are lots more little details discussed in the announcement.
I find this interesting, quoting David Rowe:
I can achieve a pretty smooth 75 FPS experience on the Rift if the scene’s not too complex, though only if I have my main monitor set to 120Hz. If I set it to 60Hz I only get a somewhat juddery 65 FPS on the Rift. I haven’t looked into this yet and am keen to hear how other people get on. Note: You can use Ctrl+Shift+1 to display a statistics window in Riftlook.
At 75 FPS it would be close enough to 90 FPS to be usable for extended periods.
So, how do we know which of our materials in Blender or another modeling program will be assigned to which SL Object FACE? We have an answer and tutorial… sort of.
Mamba
First, remember that objects in Second Life™ have a FACE. Face in SL use has a different meaning than it does in Blender or other modeling programs. In SL an object has 1 to 9 ‘faces’ regardless of how many polygons there are. SL Faces are groups of polygons. We can assign a texture/material to each of those SL faces.
Last Friday was the Third Party Developers meeting. It lasted about 20 minutes. So, not much news and almost no new news. Sigh. I’ll put it all in one post.
Bambi Foxdale #paparazzoted
Viewers
The main viewer is 3.8.4-305119. Expect that to change this week (42).
RC Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 3.8.5.305531 – This is the most likely viewer to get promoted. It is doing well, I suppose not crashing nor getting BUG reports. So, it is Oz Linden’s best guess at the viewer that will get promoted. But, that isn’t a guarantee. Release Notes: Big batch of Maintenance work to improve performance, fix bugs, address feature requests and give Second Life love. It has almost 100 fixes.
RC Second Life Notifications Viewer version 3.8.5.305555 – Release Notes:
New Notifications floater separates incoming notifications into Categories. It provides a better way to view, interact with, prioritize and manage incoming notices for busy residents.
System – Displays general notifications, such as inventory transfers and friendship status changes.
Transactions – Displays notifications that result from Linden dollar (L$) transactions.
Invitations – Displays group invitations.
Group – Displays notices from groups you are in.
Each notification in the list can be expanded or collapsed by clicking the arrow at the bottom right of the listing. You may also use the Collapse all button to collapse any expanded notifications. You may delete notifications from the list by clicking the x button at the upper right of each listing. Alternatively, you may click the “Delete all” button to delete all notifications in the current tab.
A special thank you to Aki Shichiroji for initial feature design.
RC Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.5.305528 – Release Notes:
Graphics Presets You can now create different saved “presets” for your graphics preferences, and quickly switch between them using a new top bar pulldown. Create one with a short draw distance and support for lots of detail to use when going to a dance club, another with long views for exploring, and any others that you find yourself using frequently.
Avatar Rendering Complexity Controls For many users, the most expensive part of rendering a Second Life scene is rendering the avatars around you. For some time, the viewer has had a measurement of how much each avatar around you is affecting your performance; this viewer introduces some control and feedback based on that measure. A new *Avatar Maximum Complexity* control lets you prevent expensive avatars from lagging you; any avatar over the limit is displayed as a solid color rather than rendering full detail. A default limit is set based on the rendering performance of your system. You’ll also get a notice when your own rendering complexity changes, and an indication when you’re over the limit of too many of the avatars around you.
RC Second Life HTTP update Viewer version 3.8.5.305771 – Release Notes:
This viewer release is a complete replacement of the under the hood HTTP infrastructure. It provides improved performance and stability by replacing the self deleting responders with coroutine implementations. These coroutines also provide a finer grained concurrency allowing the Viewer greater control over the numbers and types of HTTP requests that can be simultaneously outstanding. This release also removes a considerable amount of deprecated and unused code from the viewer. These changes impact all areas of the viewer that use Sim Capabilities. A non-exhaustive list includes:
