A new version of RC Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.27.300323 is out as of 3/31. I am running it. I have had had little time with it. I can’t tell if it is a problem or if the Second Life™ servers were just lagging. Whichever it was, rendering was painfully slow. Every time I moved or turned my head FPS would drop to 5 or 6.
♥ Bubbles Life ♥ by cry wolf, on Flickr
Yesterday 3/30, RC Tools Update Viewer version 3.7.27.300242 appeared. This version is about the build tools related to Visual Studio 2013, Xcode 6.1 compilers used to build the viewer.
I’ve been missing User Group meetings. Yesterday I was finding a work-around for a business class HP Laserjet Multifunction Printer that kept forgetting where to send document scans. I decided HP has totally destroyed their driver & software download site. Frustrating. It used to be simple.
Daisa Daisa – Color Bust by Nylon Pinkney, on Flickr
But, even if I had been at the meeting, there isn’t much news. As there was no package for the RC server channels last week there is no main channel roll out this week.
I am sure it will be pretty awesome to use the Oculus Rift HMD in a world like this.
Improvements
Ciaran Laval has an article up on his site that gives a good summary of recent changes in Second Life and coming changes. See: Linden Lab Ask Us To Check Out Improvements To Second Life. I’ve mentioned some of these weeks ago but he goes into more detail and collects them into one place.
There was no Beta Server UG meeting this week. The Lindens were meeting to decide on which projects would be planned for implementation in 2015. With any luck we’ll hear what they decided, at least to some degree.
Slow render Feb 2015
I am hoping they decide to work on the viewer’s caching system. I’m tired of coming home to a grey house, something I can do several times per day when I am in Second Life.
I am also hoping they get the Avatar Render Cost feature working. My hope is they will flash a value on screen when you add any new attachment to the avatar. I think it would be great to have that happen when trying on mesh demos. I think it would put pressure on designers to make more render efficient items.
Viewers
The main viewer is now version 3.7.24-297623. (Release Notes) This is the viewer with reduced pipelined texture and mesh fetching timeout. So stalled connections fail quickly, allowing earlier retry. The timeout value changed from 150 seconds to 60 seconds for textures, and from 600 to 240 seconds for meshes.
PrimPerfect has an article up on photography. It talks about Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan, and Wildstar Beaumount being interviewed in a ‘first’ show on Second Life Photography. They say a second show will look at post-processing of Second Life images.
Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix is aware some people are having problems getting Sparkles 50% discount. To help them out she has posted: Troubles getting Sparkles Discount.
Servers
This week the main channel gets an update. It is the Experience Tools permission fix update. Release Notes.
