Second Life

Things about SL

Viewer Release Pipeline Update

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We have a new release of the Main SL Viewer: 3.6.2-279258. If you don’t have automatic updates enabled get the newest version here: Second Life Download. You can find the Second Life Viewer’s Release Notes here. Look for the version with the 279258 number.

Download Page Changes
Download Page Changes

This version got the Vivox updates. Vivox™ is the service that provides voice chat for Second Life™. We cannot see the JIRA notes on MAINT-2696, so we cannot know exactly what changed. My understanding this only affects reliability of the service. You should have fewer problems with voice chat failing. 

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Second Life News 2013-32

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Maestro Linden is on vacation this and, I think, next week. Caleb Linden is posting the Deploys for the week of… forum post. There will be no new software rolling out to the main grid. It is unclear whether there will be region restarts are not. We will likely know when regions start going down. … Read more

Pathfinding Rumors Persist

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When Pathfinding was in development I had some concerns about how it would affect Second Life™ performance and especially about how hard it would be for region and land owners to implement. I wasn’t the only one. Rumors got started and region owners freaked out. The result is many turned off Pathfinding for their regions.

Surprisingly today, many region owners apparently still turn off Pathfinding thinking it is going to improve region performance. After all, if it isn’t running it can’t use up CPU cycles. Right? Wrong.

Whether Pathfinding is on or off the core functionality uses the same amount of cycles. Enabling or disabling Pathfinding is like enabling or disabling building in a region. The only affect is has on performance comes from whether people add prims or not. It isn’t the enable-disable that affects performance, it is the number of prims added. Otherwise, nothing in the server’s operation changes. This is just another setting that controls what people can do, not what the simulator does.

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State of Game Engines

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I think any one that has been around Second Life™ for any time and taken a look at the engine driving SL realizes the current batch of game engines in the gaming world far exceed the capabilities of Second Life. To get an idea of where the art of games engine design is take a look at Game Thirst’s Count Down of the top 5 game engines.

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If you are not that into the tech of game engines you may be wondering if Second Life will ever catch up. Well, probably not, which begets the question: why not? 

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Materials

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Juicy Bomb has a nice example of hair made using the new Materials System. It is really nice. I’m looking forward to seeing more of this type of hair. There is also a cute picture of her in a Tulle Skirt. I’ll have to go check out that skirt and see how the demo behaves. … Read more

Second Life News 2013-31 #2

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I’m lagging on the news. But, there isn’t much happening… well that affects us. The Lindens are busy. It is just stuff is in testing and incomplete.

Rollouts

The main channel and Blue Steel and Magnum got the roll outs we were anticipating. But, the Blue Steel roll out did not happen. The package planned for it failed internal QA testing and was held back. So, Blue Steal is running the same version as the main channel.

We found out Thursday that the main channel updates for faster texture retrievals cannot be used by the current viewers. However, the code to take advantage of that change is in the pipeline, somewhere. 

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