Second Life

Things about SL

OpenSim Viewer Drop Out

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With the inclusion of Havok code in the viewer to handle Pathfinding’s Navigation Mesh (Navmesh) things had to change. The Havok license restricts its use to the Second Life™ grid. This means the Lab is removing support for the command line options: –loginpage, –loginuri, and –helperuri. That effectively prevents the Linden Lab™ viewer from being … Read more

#SL News Update Week 33

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This is a catch up article from last week. I had serious RL partying to attend to this weekend. So, hopefully this will get me caught up. I am bummed there is no new Metareality poscast in week 33.

Region Crossing

In Week 22, 2012 Phase I of the Multi-Threaded Crossing Project rolled out. See: #SL News Week 22. Today Oskar tipped us off that Phase II is moving through the QA process and close to reaching Release Channel Candidate status.

I take that to mean that in the next couple of weeks we might see it on a release channel. This is a complex process that is taking a load of work. So many parts of the SL system are touched there are a load of places for things to go wrong. We saw that with Phase I. It took months to make it to roll out. Phase I was in and out of the release channels for months. Hopefully that will not be the case this time.

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#SL Materials Update Week 34

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We got a bit more information on the Materials system this morning in the Open Source meeting.

JIRA

Oz Linden created a JIRA for the development process and bug reporting. See: STORM-1905 – Add support for Normal & Specular Maps.

The STORM Project is closed to creation of new items except by Lindens. Residents can add to existing items. If you are wanting to create a new item, like a feature request, create it in the VWR or VIEWER project.

Feature Requests

Oz says feature requests will probably do better in the Building & Texturing section of the Creation section of the forum. It is unlikely that any features will be considered for Phase I or the first pass at the Materials System. The Third Party Developers (TPD) and Lab have their hands full getting Materials implemented and working out coordination between TPD’s and the Lab.

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Content Creation Improvement Week 33

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The Content Creation Improvement User Group (CCIUG) has been discussing redesign of the Build Panel. Geenz Spad has been bugging me to get people interested in redesign of the panel. I’ve been like, “OMG! This is boring…” Now with the announcement of a materials system project, I understand his motivation. See: Second Life Materials System Announced.

Idea for New Build Panel – Enlarge

To implement the materials system will require design changes to the Build Panel. Whether anyone likes the idea or not the panel is going to change. So, you can either participate in the design process or not. HOWEVER… for all the clueless people that can’t handle change or cope with frustration and fill the forums with rants without participating in the process, remember. We will be pointing to this point in the design process to mock you. :p

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Interesting Debug Settings

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Strawberry Singh has a post on her blog titled Debug Me. Whether you follow her blog or Plurking you know she does some great pictures, which is an understatement. In Debug Me she is explaining some of the Debug Settings she uses to improve her pictures. You’ll have to visit her site for her settings. I’ve written a little about the settings from a performance aspect.

  • RenderGlow – This is mostly a visual change with little impact on render time. The viewer has a number of glow settings that do affect performance. So, you can control glow in most any scene of visual and performance aspects. Use your web browsers page search/find on the Debug Settings page to find them all. Some improve the rendering of glow at the cost of a slower render, but it is not a big performance factor.
  • RenderVolumeLODFactor – This changes how objects in SL are rendered. It has an impact on performance, but the amount of impact depends on the scene and camera location. So, you won’t see a 1-to-1 relationship between the setting value and performance. Berry gets good results with the value high, but that is in photos. If you are exploring SL, a setting of 1 or 2 is going to improve rez time and FPS. But, you will see the distorted sculpties and mesh objects that change shape as you get closer or move away. Higher values stop that changing. For photos a large setting can solve the problem sculpties looking funny.

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Second Life Going to Steam

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Another announcement came out this morning… Second Life is going to be available on Steam. (Reference) As some sharp-eyed developers have speculated, we’re going to make Second Life available on Steam in the next month or so. Many of us have friends who are avid Steam gamers, but if you’re not familiar, Steam is a very popular … Read more