Viewers

General Viewer Information

Second Life’s SSA 2013-34

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Server Side Appearance baking is considered a success. We still have some bake fail issues and I’ll get to those. The Firestorm team has put out an article about SSA here: Server Side Appearance a Success! This article is worth the time to read. Jessica Lyon points out how the ignorant are complaining about how the Lab should have worked on something that really needed fixing… like bake fail was not a big enough problem.

Third Party Viewer Meeting 2013-34
Third Party Viewer Meeting 2013-34

Nyx Linden spoke at the TPV Dev’s meeting Friday (week 43) about SSA. Friday a new set of SSA changes were going external that means the SSA code the Lab has been working on for the viewer was made public. TPV Dev’s can now look at the code, find bugs, problems, and begin adding it to their development code.

Nyx says the Lab has this new code working in their development viewers. But, they currently consider it mostly untested. I suppose that means it has not passed through formal QA testing on the way to a viewer release candidate and remains mostly in development. 

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GPU Table & Performance

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The Lab rates video cards into 5 classes. They setup your default viewer graphics preferences based on those classes.

There is an update coming to the GPU Table, which is what the viewers use to figure out what class your video card is in and choose your initial settings. We should see it in one of the viewer release candidates this week or next.

The GPU Table has this information:

// Class Numbers:
0 – Defaults to low graphics settings. No shaders on by default Not supported
1 – Defaults to mid graphics settings. Basic shaders on by default Supported
2 – Defaults to high graphics settings. Atmospherics on by default. Supported
3 – Same as 2, but with lighting and shadows enabled. Supported
4 – Same as 3, but with ambient occlusion enabled. Supported
5 – Same as 4, but with shadows set to “Sun/Moon+Projectors.” Supported

You can find a copy of the GPU Table in the viewer’s install folder. Its secret name is: gpu_table.txt. You can look up your model of video card to see how the Lab thinks it should be supported. 

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Second Life Height Offset

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Third party viewer users are accustomed to have the a feature know as avatar z-offset or height offset. This feature allowed us to precisely control our avatars vertical position. Whether walking, sitting, or ground sitting we could adjust the avatar’s vertical position in relation to the ground or a floor.

The roll out of SSA broke this feature. It appears this is the thing most often asked about in various support groups since SSA rolled out. At least it is the question I see most consistently being asked. Well, that and temporary texture upload. But, temporary texture upload has been replaced with Local Textures for some time.

Today I see the Marine Kelly has an article out about a fix for Height Offset. See: RestrainedLove Viewer 2.8.5.3 with Z offset fix. Marine also explains how to use Local textures in her article. 

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Kokua Viewer 3.6.3 Released

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WARNING! If you are a Windows user, avoid grabbing a copy and just installing it. That will create problems. Read the notice on the blog. Some things have changed and this install must be done differently than in the past. See: Kokua 3.6.3. Once you have made an update to 3.6.3 the installs will work correctly… or so we think.

Kokua/Imprudence Viewers
Kokua/Imprudence Viewers

The problem comes from the Kokua Dev Team incorporating Automatic Updates. The addition required a renaming of the install folder from Kokua Viewer to just Kokua. A basic install will result in having two versions of Kokua installed. 

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Exporting Second Life

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Hamlet has an interesting article up today: New Singularity Viewer Lets SL Creators Convert & Export Their Prim-Based Works to Unity 3D & Other Top Platforms. Hamlet explains why this is such an important aspect of Second Life™. Hamlet links to the article explaining how to do the export from SL to Unity 3D. [youtube … Read more