Second Life – Page 218 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Texture Thrashing 2015-04

2015/01/24 by Nalates Urriah

CmdrCupcake (Sovereign Engineer) has been looking at texture thrashing. He found what is eating texture memory and leads to textures cycling through rendering to full load sharp images then going blurry and apparently reloading and getting sharp again only to repeat.

House Triggering Texture Thrashing in some video cards.

While it was not immediately obvious the addition of CHUI and its addition of avatar icons to the chat discussions seems to be the trigger for the current texture thrashing. These images are loaded into the viewer as UI textures. There are a ton of these textures used for chat, group chat, and friends lists. These chat textures consume memory.

RLV & Kokua 3.7.24

2015/01/23 by Nalates Urriah

Kokua has a new version of their viewer out. This version changes from RLVa to RLV. So, what does that mean? Basically, just that you need to do a clean install. The RLVa settings need to be removed and the RLV settings installed. Installing over the previous version won’t clear the RLVa settings, thus the clean install is needed.

RLVa and RLV are similar. Both add to the viewer the ability to have in-world Linden Scripting Language (LSL) scripts control the viewer. To some lesser extent the new Linden Experience Tools serve a similar purpose.

Second Life Bits 2015-04

2015/01/22 by Nalates Urriah

Life is busy for me. New work, new lovers… not much time in the SL world.

Servers

We got a roll to the RC channels this week. None to the main channel.

The RC package is described on the forum in Deploy for Week 1/19. This is a bug fix and new feature package. BUG-8223 is a picture upload issue that most of us have never seen. The new feature is the new HOVER feature that adjust avatar height in relation to the ground and objects sat on.

SL Viewer Updates

2015/01/15 by Nalates Urriah

Today I logged in to check out a Fab Free sale. There are some great nails on sale at Nail Me (SLURL).

I had the typical message that an update had been downloaded and the viewer needed to do an install of version 3.7.24 (297623). I decided now was the time. So, I OK’d the update now option. The viewer didn’t log me out. It closed and started the update. But, when I tried to relog I had to wait while the SL system realized I had left, logged me out, and then let me log back in. I would have been really annoyed if I has been in a hurry to get some place.

Second Life Bits 2015-03

2015/01/14 by Nalates Urriah

This was to be a Happy New Year post, the first of 2015. But, blog/server problems messed up that plan. Since then RL has been delaying my getting it published. I’m just getting back to this now. So, belated Happy New Year!

I just thought this was a cool image... See Fab Free. — I just thought this was a cool image… See Fab Free.

Life is still busy for me as I finish up multiple projects with more lining up. I know I’ll be writing less in January than I have in the past.

Inara, Ciaran, and Mona do a good job of covering the news. So, I may move to only covering those parts of Second Life they skip. So, for now I expect to publish more bits and less news.

The Second Life News-Scape

2015/01/11 by Nalates Urriah

Viewer news has been decreasing, at least in my opinion. Most of 2014 I’ve been writing about Firestorm catching up with the SL Viewer and we still aren’t there. Firestorm is basically on a quarterly release plan. So, there is only infrequent news to report in the Firestorm regard.

Cool VL Viewer and Singularity serve what I perceive to be an increasing smaller audience of the Version 1 interface users. I’m not saying their user count is decreasing. As users on older computers move away from Firestorm and the SL Viewer their user numbers may increase for a time. But, I think that will change as time passes. And SL2 is likely to be a final nail…

The fans of third party viewers generally follow the viewer developers’ blogs. So, I think the need for news on these viewers is decreasing. Mostly I am less interested in the viewer changes happening now and that makes it hard for me work up the energy to cover them.