Second Life

Things about SL

Kokua Viewer 3.6.6 Released

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Kokua/Imprudence Viewers
Kokua/Imprudence Viewers

A new Kokua viewer is out. This version has an OpenSim fix for the 4096 Bug. That is going to make lots of OS users happy.  Latif Khalifa, the Singularity Viewer developer, made a patch that fixed the issue. The patch was distributed to Kokua and Firestorm. So, three of the popular viewers in use on OS grids will have the fix.

The 4096 Bug is a long known bug that prevents the user from teleporting more than 4096 grid locations from their current location. It has been very annoying as large grids had to develop jump points, sort of half-way points one teleports to so they can reach their real destination.

Grid locations are a basic 2D X,Y coordinate system. Just as we have 3D X,Y,Z locations within a region, the region is located on a 2D GRID, which is why we call these grids. The actual locations in the grid-region system is GRID: X,Y plus REGION X,Y,Z. If the distance from GRID:X1,Y1 to GRID:X2,Y2 is more than 4096 units the teleport fails. We don’t normally see the GRID:X,Y values.

Whatever, this is a really nice fix for OS users.

This version of Kokua updates to use the SL Viewer code base 3.6.6 which has materials fixes.

There are about a dozen other fixes/features. See: Kokua-3-6-6 is released

 

New Version CtrlAltStudio Viewer

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Alpha 3 or version 1.1.0.34268 has been released. Cinder Roxely has made a Mac version.

There are changes for the Oculus Rift:

  • Added looking around with the Rift in 3rd person view.
  • Fixed projected light not being rendered correctly.
  • Fixed bad display with only Basic Shaders turned on.
  • Fixed Rift full screen resolution being used for normal and stereoscopic 3D full screen.

Get more info here: CtrlAltStudio Viewer.

Second Life Content & Mesh 2013-38

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I haven’t been hearing much exciting or interesting news in the C&M user group. So, I haven’t been writing about it. But, there are couple of interesting things that came up this week. I consider Avatar 2.0 and the Mesh Deformer joined at the hip and there was some discussion about Avatar2.0.

Pants Flare

The Pants Flare thing came up in the Content and Mesh meeting with Nyx Linden. This is the best meeting for getting content creation and mesh questions answered. Nyx is not a modeler, so asking “how to” questions is pointless. But, ‘why doesn’t this work’ questions Nyx can usually answer or dig into to figure out if the SL system is broken.

Seems some people have issues with how pants flare works. Who would have guessed?

Whirly Fizzle offered it up for discussion saying, “If we have no topics, we can discuss how broken pants flare is.” 

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Second Life News 2013-38

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The information on server updates is out. The main channel will be getting an update. The package from the Magnum RC channel is being promoted. This is the package that has improved asset fetching and preparatory work for future improvements. You can read the release notes here: Second Life Server 13.09.05.280647.

I doubt we will see much improvement in asset fetching performance. It may look like it, but what we will be seeing is more an improvement from increased reliability and less wasted server effort. It is sort like the speed limit on the highway hasn’t increased, but there are fewer wrecks. So, things get there sooner.

This package also has the ‘GetMesh2’ api/function. You may remember reading that users were setting their viewers to use ridiculously high values for MeshMaxConcurrentRequests. This is a step in changing how the system handles Mesh Downloading. 

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