Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
Lance is running a poll at the Dolphin Viewer site. It seems he is in the process of deciding which development path to follow, series 1 code and user interface (IU) or series 2 code and UI. Voice your opinion and vote.
I think the results will be interesting, if enough people vote, and it may help Lance.
This release is announced as a bug fix release with no new features or visible changes.
The fixes are to the Group Limit code (coming group limit increase) and texture caching.
Texture caching is a big thing. Some weeks ago the Snowstorm Team made some comments about finding some bugs in the caching code. I’ve wondered why, if we have a caching, does my cottage’s door have to download a texture each time I open the door. My door is one of those where the entire wall changes from solid to phantom and the texture changes from a closed door to an open one. The idea for this style door is to reduce the prim count. However, they used two textures that have to download. For better effect they could have placed both open and closed textures in one texture and just shift position to affect the change.
This article covers more than just the S21 viewer review. KirstenLee’s S21 reveals some of the changes coming to SL. I touch on those as part of the viewer review. KirstenLee is working on the release of her cutting edge viewer S21, now out as a release candidate. Today Release Candidate 2 was made available. This version uses the new resident Profile System.
If you have not used KirstenLee’s viewers, the S20 and S21 viewers are series 2 viewers with a modified SLV2 User Interface (UI) and a custom render pipeline. The S21 viewer has additional UI changes. KirstenLee is making UI change to make the S21 more compatible with SLV2 skins. Of course making a better interface is part of the process too. For compatibility KirstenLee has put the sidebar control back on the right side of the screen.
The S21 is based on SLV2 code from Linden Lab’s Mesh Project Viewer. The viewer will render mesh. It does not yet have the ability to upload mesh. Only the Mesh Project Viewer has that ability. S21 also has Qarl’s patches… there’s more than one? The main one is the prim alignment tool. I’ll have to look around and see if I can find out if there are other Qarl additions.
Lil Linden posted an update about changes and upgrades coming to the grid. See: Deploys for the Week of 2011-01-10.
It appears the Compression upgrade is moving to the main grid. All regions will get it. This will greatly reduce region crossing time (see previous post for graphs) and cut the number of failed teleports. Along with it comes the Encroachment feature that allows one to return prim that are only partially on your land.
The Region Crossing news is hot. The new code is in use across the Magnum Release Channel. The stats on the improvement are impressive. The new improvement is referred to as Region Crossing Compression or just Compression.
There are some nifty graphs showing what is happening. Notice a little after ten compression is activated. The graphs take a significant step down.
The chatter is the region crossing changes are being activated today. I have yet to chase down the sources. The release notes for Tuesday’s rollouts show the rollout to Blue Steel. In world chat is that they are active on Magnum. One person quotes Oz Linden saying activation will be immediate.
I have to do some reading and searching to find out the details. Is this activation just for the release channels or the entire grid? I’ve been to Magnum. (Magnum RC Sandbox 1 — boxes 1 to 4 are the region names). I find it works well going from some of those regions and not so well for others.
Update: 2011-01-06 2:00 PM SLT – It seems the activation is for the Magnum release Channel. That is about 10 to 20 % of the main grid.
There is a meeting with the Beta Server team at their regular Office Hours, today at 3 PM in the ADITI Preview Grid, in Morris.
It seems an avatar carries 4 to 10 megabytes of data from region to region. It is unclear just what all that includes. Your baked avatar textures may be part of that. The state of scripts you are wearing is included. So, it is actually quite a lot of data.