Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
There was no Server and Scripting UG meeting today.
There is a Deploys post up for this week. No roll to the main channel or any of the RC channels. So, version #18.01.17.511913 is running on all channels.
The main viewer is version 5.1.0.511732. Updated last in week #2.
Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 5.1.1.512226 – Updated! The previous update was version 5.1.1.511871 in week #4.
Saturday was the annual Mole Day. Inara has an article on Mole Day with all the details. SL Moles are the guys that build all the SL Governor’s public works things. We hear little about them, but they are a key part of Second Life™. The Machinimatrix Blog got hacked. It is fixed and all … Read more
The main channel is now running version #18.01.17.511913. The version ran on all three RC channels last week. It is reported in the wiki as having Internal Changes. Mazidox Linden described it at the Server Beta UG as, “This week we promoted a couple of things to RC on Agni including DRTSIM-367 (internal fixes) and a version of the service that handles avatar bakes, built with the new version of our OS.”
The bake service is not actually a simulator change. It is a change in a backend service. The server and service have to work together. So, there is probably some simulator change. But, maybe just in which API it uses to bake the avatar.
The Linux Operating System (OS) the Lab uses in its server gets updated every so often. They have been (are?) in the process of another OS update.
Firestorm released version 5.0.11.53634. The download is here.
There are some controversial changes in this version of the viewer. I think the controversy is from confusion which is from ignorance.
The issue is about the Level of Detail (LoD) setting RenderVolumeLODFactor found in the debug settings (Ctrl-Alt-D=Menu Advanced->Debug Settings). The Firestorm Team has explained why they are making the change. See LOD and The Upcoming Firestorm Release The What and Why. It gets all technical, but it is an accurate description of how SL works.
The TL:DR is that high RenderVolumeLODFactor settings have your computer spending time drawing complex things which are so far away they only take up one or two pixels on your screen. Does it matter if a jacker has a dozen buttons if the whole jacket is so far way it can be drawn in 4 pixels and is just a tiny tiny spot on your screen? If you can’t see the buttons, why draw them? LoD is about making these optimizations and providing better performance.
Doing all the useless drawing of thousands of pixels to average them down to 4 pixels for your screen lags your render process and slows the SL system because all that detail has to be downloaded. Dumb move.
We have a Deploys post this week. 🙂 The main channel is not getting a roll. I’m showing my home region in the main channel as last restarting 1/16, last Tuesday. All three RC channels are to get a rollout tomorrow. Version #18.01.17.511913. It is only described as ‘internal fixes’. There was no additional information … Read more
There is some interesting news. Not much but a bit. The Alexy Ivy Viewer was updated in week #2. This is very likely its last update in the RC stream. The next step for Alex Ivy is a promotion to the main viewer. Oz Linden expects that to happen in week #3. Of course, this depends … Read more