Mesh Update Week 10

This is Week 11, but the information is from Week 10… I’m lagging a bit.

Runitai Linden had this t say about mesh cost:

Upload costs aren’t finalized yet — you can be pretty sure costs are going to go up in general, the hold up right now is a reworking of the sim rez pipeline that will make the costs the simulator reports more reliable. Once the reports are reliable, we can get accurate measurements on whole scene polycount vs whole scene prim cost and tune accordingly. As it is, we’re more or less tuning blind, and the client doesn’t have enough information on its own to determine the cost of the whole scene without a major reworking of the mesh streaming pipeline (the client only downloads the parts of the mesh it needs, but the whole mesh asset is needed to determine streaming cost).

…upload fees are a completely different issue…

This gets confusing. The L$ upload cost has not been decided. The prim-equivalency is not even set. Runitai is talking about prim-equivalency. The values one sees for upload cost and prim equivalence in the Mesh Viewer are there for debugging and testing. The actual cost and equivalency have not been decided.

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Blender Update Week 11

The current stable release of Blender remains 2.49b. In Second Life two of the main sculpty tools use Blender: Primstar and JASS2. Both of those still use Blender 2.49b. However, the beta versions of Blender 2.5 are becoming popular with those working with mesh in Second Life. The reason for that is the Collada Export/Import features in Blender 2.56a have more fixes. The Collada features have just been updated again and this week more work will be done on Collada.

If you are finding problems with your Second Life Mesh Imports because of Collada bugs, get over to Letwory Interactive and the Blender 2.5 Tracker and let them know.

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Dolphin Viewer 2.5.3.14965 Released Review

Dolphin Viewer is out in a new version. This one adopts the new code from Linden Lab, version 2.5.1.  Some changes have been made and they are listed on the Dolphin web site: Dolphin Viewer 2.5.3.14965 – good bye web profiles! I’ll mention the ones I find interesting… or troubling, here.

Profiles

The avatar profiles have been changed back to SLV1 and early SLV2 style profile. For now the non-web-profiles still work. We can expect them to continue working until the Lab decided to turn off the series 1 viewer and move on. Still it is only a matter of time until they disappear and it becomes web-profiles or nothing.

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KirstenLee Viewer Team

Kirsten Viewer
EyeFliez - Kirsten Viewer Hangout

The KirstenLee viewer is probably thought of as a viewer built by KirstenLee Cinquetti. A recent blog post reveals that the KirstenLee Viewer is now a growing team. If you’re interested in the people behind the viewer, check out the blog post, Meeting KirstenLee and Dawny.
The post has some interesting information about how the team sees and describes the viewer. No longer do they think of it as just for photographers’ and machinimists’ viewer. They see it as more of a high-end general purpose viewer… Ok, …it’s going to be some time before my thinking changes. But, I do use the viewer more and more for everyday use in SL.

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RedZone Pit Opens

While all the stuff about RedZone has been bad enough, now we find out that the misuse of the database is even worse. A group of crackers penetrated the ISellSL web site and databases. They have revealed what they found in the database and web site.

Not only were user ID’s being associated with IP addresses, the software was working to crack people passwords… not just the bad guy copyboters passwords, but the RedZone customers too.

Read through the details on the Alphaville Harold in the article: zf Redzone Security Breached – SL Passwords Compromised?

If you have not changed your password in some time, it may now be time.

 

Phoenix Viewer 1.5.2.977 Beta

Phoenix Viewer
Phoenix Viewer 977

It seems a number of people have been having trouble running the Phoenix Viewer 908. Some users crash after a few minutes and some after a longer time. The Phoenix team has been looking for the problem. This Beta release is a step in confirming they have found the problem. They need more testers on many different type of hardware to test the viewer. So, it you are one of those that has had problems with Phoenix crashing, get the new 977 and give it try. If you crash, file a report on the Phoenix JIRA.

Download & Install

The release announcement advises us that this install will clear the cache. For most of us that just means you may notice your first login rez taking just a bit longer.

Windows users have a choice between an SSE and an SSE2 viewer. To know which your computer will use the Phoenix Wiki SSE page links you to a handy tool that examines your computer and checks what type of SSE support it has. SSE2 is better than SSE. Newly made computers support SSE4. Two year old computers probably support SSE3. So, don’t sell your computer short, just check it.

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