Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
There are some dates for Rift delivery, a SDK 1.0 December 2015. Don’t confuse the DK1 and 2 with the SDK’s that have been coming out. The consumer CV1 Rift will finally be delivered, sometime in Q1 2016.
David Rowe believes the Lab will finalize their Rift Viewer when the consumer Rift has a release date. When that happens he plans to stop development of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer. Until then he says;
The coming Quick Graphics Viewer now in RC has some odd behaviors. Well, it is an RC version, so no surprise. One of the ideas with this viewer is to reduce render lag by telling the viewer to avoid rendering complex avatars. These are avatars with lots of high polygon count attachments and large textures that require lots of computer power to render.
There is a setting in Preferences* that lets you set a personal limit for what you want your viewer to render. Any avatar over that limit will render as a jelly baby. But, if you change the setting to NO LIMIT you’ll find there are still avatars that render as jelly babies. What’s up with that?
The announcement is on the Kokua blog. They say, “Release 3.8.4.37073 brings Kokua to parity with Second Life version 3.8.4, DAE Mesh Uploader cohort and Marine Kelly’s RLV version 2.9.14.”
Check the release notes for more details.
From last Friday’s Third Party viewer Dev’s meeting we learn the Firestorm Dev’s are looking at what will be in their next release. As it stands now the Mesh Importer changes are likely the latest they will include. Tentatively the Firestorm Viewer will go into feature lock Oct 18. Figure two to four weeks of testing then a viewer release. So, a good guess, operative word ‘guess’, is a new Firestorm Viewer in early to mid November, if things go as planned, which you can’t count on.
The last Firestorm release was mid August. The one before that in May. So, November is the target for the next release based on the team’s plan of making a release every 3 months. Seems they are staying pretty much on schedule.
From the Third Party Developer’s meeting we learn a bunch of inventory changes are ready to roll out to RC testing. But, they are waiting on the HTML HTTP* viewer, Azumarill. Once the viewer is out, soon, the HTML HTTP part of these changes can start rolling to the servers.
This is another significant change in technology. For users it will be mostly transparent. You aren’t going to have new features or buttons, at least as far as I know. You will have fewer problems and inventory operations will be more reliable and I suspect quicker. Less chance of losing inventory.
Expect a Project Viewer version with Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) this year and maybe this month, probably in October. Webkit is being replaced with Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). This is a major change in viewer technology for Second Life™. It will catch the viewer up with the new tech being used in phones and across the web.
CEF is sort of the engine that makes video and animation possible in the web browsers. It used to be that Adobe’s Flash was the only way to add reliable video and animation to a web page. But, Adobe didn’t respond to Steve Job’s requests to support the iPhone, this was pre-iPhone release days. So, Apple moved ahead without Adobe. Now CEF type tech is replacing Flash in an HTML5 world.