Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
This Friday a Third Party Developer’s meeting was held. This meeting has become the primary source of news for Second Life. We got some news this week. I’ll write up the viewer news first and other stuff in later articles. So, here is what is happening.
there were 24 people attending the meeting. I think 6 of those were Lindens, making it 18 residents. As I check out the video of the meeting, I see 22 people have watched the video of the meeting.
This is a version that is ready for TESTING… more than being for daily use. The big change is the RLV fix up.
They are advising you to use this only on the Preview Grid until you are comfortable with it. That makes me a bit nervous.
In testing they want you to be sure about whether a problem is a ‘viewer’ problem or an RLV problem. You do that by seeing if you can replicate the problem in another RLV viewer. Then file the bug report in the appropriate place.
A new release of the Alchemy Viewer is out. The announcement is here: Alchemy Release 3.8.2.
The highlights of this version are:
New features:
There are some other improvements and bug fixes. Release Notes.
We have a new release of the Project Viewer version 3.8.4.304916 that came out last Thursday. I saw it update my install when I went into SL this morning. This version apparently has some fixes that improve performance. Or it may just be that debug code has been removed. Whatever, I get way faster frame rates.
A number of bugs with Avatar Complexity have been fixed according to the release notes.
I am finding that most of my Jelly Babies come from high KB values, bytes of attachments. Setting my Complexity to MAX means something else triggers Jelly Baby render. KB triggers the Jelly Baby render just under 10,000KB. The default setting is 10,000,000b in Debug Settings’ RenderAutoMuteByteLimit. But, a 9.8mb avatar went Jelly Baby. Complexity was 98,000± with 29m2. So, I am wondering if there is some computation involved.
I’ve seen some ridiculous avatars in the new visitor hubs: Complexity 184,000, 33m2, and 341,000kb…
This viewer version is a bit more stable. If you have been wanting to try it, go for it now. It still sucks up memory and I clear it when the viewer starts slowing down. It takes longer to fill up memory now. I have used the viewer to visit new user landing areas with lots of people for about an hour and not crashed. I think I only cleared memory twice (using System Explorer – Free program)
This Friday (9/11) there was a Third Party Developer’s meeting. This is where most of the early news comes from. These days this meeting is pretty much The Source for any word about anything new or in progress.
The main viewer is currently (9/12) Release/3.8.3.304115. This release is based on a maintenance package of fixes. Release Notes
Kohua has a new viewer out (3.8.4-37026). This one has an updated RLV. They can’t really test it because no one at Kokua is a RLV user. So, if your into the RLV feature use, help ‘em out.