Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
There are gotcha’s in this latest main SL Viewer 3.8.4, in the mesh upload. You can use more than 8 materials now. Gaia Clary has changed AvaStar to export more than 8 materials. But, the announcement of that change comes with a warning: don’t.
Also Drongle McMahon commented on the problem and what happens when we exceed the allowable polygon limit per material for mesh items. See: Second Life’s Limits.
RLV
Marine Kelly has updated the RLV Viewer which is now version 2.9.14. There are some fixes for RLV bugs. None of it seems earth shattering to me.
See: RLV 2.9.14
These changes will be making their way into other viewers, but it takes some time.
Updates have been a little slow coming because Marine was working on RLV related products. Check her blog for information on those (use link above).
Yesterday (9/30) and last Friday we got some updated viewers.
![Wooden [Quench me]](https://i0.wp.com/farm1.staticflickr.com/622/21659005550_0cc4ddcb24.jpg?resize=500%2C262&ssl=1)
RC Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 3.8.5.305531 – Release Notes: Big batch of Maintenance work to improve performance, fix bugs, address feature requests and give Second Life love. There are 97 fixes and additions.
Project Azumarill Viewer version 3.8.4.304871 – No change.
Project Notice Viewer version 3.8.4.305083 – No change.
Project Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.4.305380 – No change.
Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296 – No update – yet…
There are some dates for Rift delivery, a SDK 1.0 December 2015. Don’t confuse the DK1 and 2 with the SDK’s that have been coming out. The consumer CV1 Rift will finally be delivered, sometime in Q1 2016.
David Rowe believes the Lab will finalize their Rift Viewer when the consumer Rift has a release date. When that happens he plans to stop development of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer. Until then he says;
In the SL Wiki there is a page titled LIMITS. This page lists most of the limits we encounter in SL. The page updated today to indicate the change from the main viewer with a new mesh uploader.
::Since viewer release 3.8.4, processing of meshes in the Collada file that have faces assigned to more than 8 materials has changed. Instead of simply dropping the extra material faces, the uploader now creates a new object to accommodate them. The result is that the single mesh is divided into multiple objects (prims) in a linkset (or coalesced object). Thus the limitation to 8 materials is removed as far as input is concerned, but still applies to each of the resulting linked objects actually uploaded. As a consequence it is now possible to upload a mesh with more than 174,752 triangles, although it will be divided into multiple objects. (Reference)
This sounds like a good change. But Drongle McMahon made this comment in my blog about the change (I’ve done a little editing on it – reference):
SL Blogger Support is planning to have an in-world meeting. I think Candy Canary Beck is organizing it. It is for this coming Saturday, 10/3 @ 1PM SLT. See the post here: SL Blogger Meetup Announced. Location: Basilique (SLURL) – Harvey’s Bar To the East of the landing point. Arrive early, it takes some time for things to download and render.
This is a general discussion held in text chat. To keep the group’s conversation coherent Candy Canary uses a set of discussion rules. One person has the chat box for 5 minutes or until they say DONE, whichever comes first. Then the group has the next 5 minutes to respond to the person. The right to the chat box moves around the room.