Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
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.
Over the holidays not everything stopped. There has been progress and changes in Second Life. One SCRUM Summary even commented on the massive amount of code coming from Linden teams prior to Christmas. From all that, these are some of the things I found interesting that have been happening.
Work is progressing on STORM-807 – update returnability of objects based on new encroachment rules. This change should appear on the main grid in early 2011. The feature will allow a parcel owner to return an object that over laps their parcel. Objects are located by their root prim’s center. If part of prim or some of the objects linked prims extended into another parcel there was/is little the one encroached on could do. That will change.
This is a two sided feature. It is going to the Le Tigre release channel today. But, viewer code is needed to make the feature available to residents. One can apparently return items now, if they use a newer viewer with the Sim Console. Press Ctrl-Shift-[back tic] to see if the Sim Console will open. You can read more here: Parcel Encroachment
Dolphin Viewer has a new version released today, 1.5.41.3627. The release notes are part of the announcement. See: DolphinViewer 1.5.41.3627.
Nothing really earth shaking is in this new release. This version has support for the new group limits. The proposed 40 group limit anticipated for Second Life and the higher group limits for other grids like OpenSim. The actual limit is set server side. At login the viewer gets the group limit and adapts. So, you are likely to see different limits in different worlds.
KirstenLee has released a new version of her viewer. See: Kirstens S20(45).exe.
KirstenLee didn’t say much about this viewer and I’m not finding the (45) release notes. Her brief description of the changes is the adding of all the Mesh and Viewer fixes available from Linden Lab.
Kirsten also expects this to be the last release before a version change over to S21, which will have her new render engine. It will be interesting to see how it performs.