Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Surely by now you know SSA is Server Side Appearance, which is about baking your avatar appearance. The Lindens have posted a second notice that SSA will be here next week. See: It’s Time to Update Your Viewer!
And they reuse their previous video:
[youtube jwglL3VXI80]
Please make sure all your friends know about the coming update and the need for them to be using a recent version of whatever viewer they use.
As you know the Materials System has been released by the Lab. The third party viewers are picking up the project and adding it to their viewers. Cool VL Viewer and Niran’s Black Dragon have Materials. Firestorm 4.4.1 does not have Materials yet but, 4.4.2 is nearing release and will have materials.
There are fixes for problems in Materials System that are in the pipeline. One of those has to do with Ambient Occlusion on large objects. That is unlikely to be in Firestorm’s 4.4.2 release.
Server Side Appearance (SSA baking) is planned for the release the week of July 7-13. The Lab is expecting it may be on the 8th or 9th.
Firestorm and Phoenix users will see a huge notice on the viewer’s splash screen that they need to update. If you have not yet updated to 4.4.1, avoid the rush and do it now.
There is a blog announcement on the SL Blog about the Sunshine Project being rolled out. There is also a new Torley video out to show the change.
[youtube jwglL3VXI80]
As you can see the Lab is requiring a viewer update. As Torley explains the viewer, then the servers and then another viewer update will rollout.
The main channel is getting an update today. It is the server maintenance package that ran on all 3 release candidate channels last week. This is the package with the new object return scripting functions, the Pathfinding change to keep characters within a parcel, fix rendering of neighboring regions, and another fix for the HTTP-in-bound connection problems.
The release candidate channels will all get the same new server maintenance package tomorrow, Wednesday.
This package includes a fix to llApplyImpulse, which is/was only working in the root prim. If used in a child prim, it would work after the script was compiled in-world, meaning while the containing object is rezzed. If the object has the script and is rezzed from inventory, it fails.
I am distracted by RL work events and running a bit behind. I’ve barely been in-world since last Thursday. We did get a rollout Tuesday to the main channel. The main channel got the Interest List update. This should be noticed as a little bit faster rezzing of regions you are visiting for the first time.
Rollouts started for today, Wednesday, on the release channels. All three are getting the same package. It includes the new LSL functions I’ve been writing about. If you have missed those articles take a look at the release notes. These include additions to Pathfinding and object returns.
Viewer changes are picking up speed. As the new multi-channel process moves forward we will see more viewer projects moving forward. Some of these things are things I’ve written about weeks and months ago. Now they are coming to a viewer near you.
Inara has written an update on the SSA (Server Side Appearance): SL projects update 24 (5). See it for details. The summary of that news is simple. We are likely to see SSA enabled over the next 2 to 6 weeks. I expect it to SLOWLY creep across the grid. The server side code has already been rolled out to the main channel. Now it is just a matter of enabling it on the regions. But, there are concerns about problems and whether the new servers can carry the load. So, this will be a very careful roll out.