Viewers

Firestorm released version 5.0.11.53634. The download is here.

Controversy and Confusion

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.

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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 on not finding any show stoppers in testing.

When Alex Ivy promotes, Oz plans to publish a blog post to encourage people to update to 64 OS. The difference in crash rates is HUGE.

The Maintenance Viewer is there…

The Voice Viewer has no known problems. So, it will be the next likely to promote after Alex Ivy.

The 360-Image Viewer is out there… Oz says it is verging on becoming an RC version.

The Animesh Viewer is expected to move to RC status in a couple of months. If you are following the Content Creation UG meetings you know not much new information is coming out. The project is into the ‘make things work correctly’ phase. So, no changes or additions.

The Rendering Viewer is fixing render bugs.

Oz tells us will be a new media update branch. Things like CEF will be getting updates.

Also, another round of tool updates is planned. The Visual Studio version the Lab I suing is 1 version behind.

HTTP, when Alex releases the Lab will be depreciating all non-HTTP API’s. Older viewers not using HTTP will lose functionality.

The Lab will start work on ACI in a couple of weeks. Oz says they plan to fix bad incentives. Some things are calc’s to cost too much and some cost too little. So, they’ll be tweaking the ACI.

No word on a Firestorm release date. But, Firestorm is limiting LoD settings to <=4. Higher values will NOT persist. Plus, they are adding warning and advice not to change because of some notecard advice in the Debug Settings.

Oz says they found backend problems in the group notices system. Partially fixed. Memory leak. Restarting the servers solved most issues.

28:30 – Oz talks about Linux 64-bit viewer. TL:DR – There is one, but it doesn’t work.

EEP – Rider Linden is making the EEP assets. Once done, test regions in Aditi will come up. So, the project is progressing.