Maestro Linden is going on vacation. But, he did post the Deploys post Friday. It is planned that the Experience Tools package will be promoted to the main channel Tuesday, thus making it grid wide by late Wednesday.
Music Concert 2014
There are no noticeable feature changes using the current SL Viewer. One needs the Experience Tools Project Viewer to use the changes provided by the server update. There is no official link to that viewer on the Project Viewers page, yet. Once the beta testing proceeds to Experience User testing we’ll see that viewer appear. For now testing is with Experience Creators.
Virtual reality/worlds have extensive possibilities for education and training, we all know that, I think we do… But, I suspect most are like me and think little on the problems educators have using virtual worlds as their classroom.
SLeducate – University of Western Australia (UWA)
If I think about it even a little I realize the first problem is just getting a student into the world and to the right location. The University of Western Australia (UWA) has an article up about those challenges. See: Eliminating a headache faced by all SL virtual educators!
Experience has taught us over the years that existing Learning Islands in Second Life™ don’t really get people new to Second Life to a level of usability needed to take a class. Often people are still figuring out how to use the viewer rather than focusing on the lesson.
The Magnum channel will continue to run the Experience Tools package. It will be updated with the changes going to the main channel. There may be some updates to the Experience Tools too, bu they don’t say what.
Currently there is only 1 RC Viewer in the cue. Other viewers are in QA, but have not yet reached RC stage. The Snowstorm RC Viewer is said to be doing well. I’m not sure I agree, but it will likely be the RC Viewer that gets promoted.
Open Source 2014-28
Group Ban and Oculus are Project Viewers. I expect Group Ban to move to RC status soon. The Oculus Project Viewer is not going to change status any time soon. It has been waiting on the Oculus DK2, which has just started shipping. Once the Lab has DK2 in hand I expect to see some changes in the Oculus Viewer.
There is an Experience Tools Project Viewer. But, it has yet to appear on the RC & Project Viewers page. Experience Tools is still in closed beta. Oz says that he has seen lots of requests to participate in the Beta come in. The Lab is going through them. I know some people that are playing with the Experience Tools (ET) project viewer. It is out there. Oz is going to see if they will put a link on the Project Viewers page.
Wednesday morning at 7AM PDT at the Firestorm Auditorium a Q&A meeting was held. Oz Linden and Peter Gray were answering questions. For most of the meeting Jessica was asking questions I think she took from previously submitted ones and that she or she thought the community was interested in.
And I’ll be proofing this after it is posted… so…
[youtube uO2Ean6Vzxk]
Toward the end they opened it up to audience questions.
The meeting was recorded so you can see it at several places; SLArtists, YouTube, and other places… sound is better on the SLArtists video, but it is hard to jump around in that player.
Today my viewer updated to the Snowstorm RC. I have it set to use RC Viewers. So, I’m using Second Life 3.7.11 (291465) Jun 25. The release notes are here.
Summerfest ’14
I went over to Summer Fest 2014 to try it out. First, the cute little pacific island theme used at Summer Fest makes it a really fun build to explore. The foliage is awesome. The buildings have a weak LOD, but if you have your viewer’s LOD setting turned up, they are OK. I don’t I prefer performance in this case.
The viewer runs faster. I was getting 20 to 40 FPS at the Fest. But, rendering is still a problem. Oz Linden said at the Firestorm Q&A that they are working on changing the viewer to allow it to use more of the video RAM you have on your graphics card. I doubt any of that work is in this viewer. But, possibly. So, that may be why we are seeing this problem.
The main viewer and this Snowstorm RC both have the problem of texture thrashing. The textures render sharp then blur and reload, sharpen and repeat. It makes taking pictures a pain.
I think the problem is worse in this viewer than in the main viewer. Again, I don’t see the problem in the Firestorm viewer.
I don’t expect to see texture thrashing in a GTX560Ti with 1GB of VRAM.
