State of Game Engines

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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Second Life News 2013-31 #2

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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Mesh Deformer and the State of Mesh

The Deformer project remains pretty much on hold. The JIRA thread STORM-1716 has turned  in to a massive discussion where the uninformed and technically illiterate rant about what should be done. It is now a useless JIRA report too long to read with good technical information buried in thousands of words of useless rhetoric. The purpose that report best serves is to demonstrate why the JIRA was closed.

Mesh Shape Changing
Mesh Shape Changing

So… until Oz Linden can convince Linden management to assign people to the Deformer/Avatar project I see it remaining on hold and the JIRA item having devolved into a waste of time.

With In-Worldz deciding to adopt the Deformer, we are likely to see it added to viewers that support non-Second Life grids. But, for those viewers to be used in SL, they have to be classed as experimental viewers. That likely means little use by residents and lagging support. But, it might increase the Lab’s priority for the Deformer… might…

But, there is a need now and an annoying problem with Mesh Clothes.

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Second Life Animation Sync Problems

This video shows problems with animation sync since some Interest List roll outs. Notice the dates changing as the video plays.

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A JIRA is being filed today. If you want to file a JIRA on the same problem, please do. Since referencing JIRA numbers other than your own is difficult, make a reference to the July 30 Sever-Scripting meeting and ask your report be referred to Andrew Linden.

 

Second Life JIRA SUN-99

Since the JIRA is closed to most users browsing the contents it is hard to know what is happening with Second LifeTM bugs. Nor can we easily keep up on bug changes. The SUN-99 problem is hard to explain. So, I’ve tried some of the JIRA’s options to get a copy of the SUN-99 JIRA report.

I have it in a Word Doc file. You can download it here: SUN-99