Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Linden made series of viewers
Last week a new maintenance viewer became available in Alternate Second Life Viewers – Download: Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.25.298030. According to the Release Notes there are over a dozen fixes: (Note MAINT JIRA items can only be accessed by Lindens. So, I omitted the links.)
In last Friday’s meeting all the Linden news was covered in 8 minutes. The entire meeting was only 30 minutes. Not much in the way of new information or to talk about. There are even fewer things of interest for general users.
Brooke Linden spoke about Viewer Managed Marketplace project and their progress. She says they are still incorporating user feedback. A new viewer is coming with the feedback implemented, probably in week 6… or 7. There will probably be another round of user feedback before the project goes to beta. The timing is definitely that beta will only start sometime after the Valentine’s holiday. How much after is undecided and depends on user feedback.
I’m just getting around to looking at last Friday’s (1/16) Third Party Developer’s meeting. See the video here.
The viewers in the RC pipeline are; VMM, Maintenance, and Experience Tools.
The Experience Tools Viewer is somewhat held up by backend issues, which are being worked on now. So, there are no changes to this RC Viewer.
Viewer Managed Marketplace – nothing new in this RC Viewer.
Hover RC Viewer – (download) Vir Linden was telling the group 1/16 this new Project Viewer was in QA. Vir was thinking it would be ready in week 4 and the RC test version of the server side did make it to a main grid RC channel in week 4. Due to Wiki changes and fixes the RC downloads page does not yet have this viewer available for download. Inara in her coverage has a link in: SL project updates 2015 week 4/1: Avatar Hover Height along with examples of the features and instructions for using it.
You must be in a region that supports the feature for it to work. For now that is only Blue Steel regions. If the region does not support the feature the controls will be grayed out.
In regard to viewer updates, currently if a user says they no longer want to run the RC version and disables their ‘willing to run’ setting, they get downgraded to the current main release, which is always an older version. So, they effectively get downgraded when they were asking not to be upgraded.
Understandably this upsets some people. In the near future this will change and one will remain on the RC version until it is promoted to the new main/default viewer. Then they will update in sync with the main viewer versions.
This might not work out so well. While I have no doubt that the current downgrade surprised some people, it was by design. It allowed one to easily back out of an RC Viewer that did not work well for the user. Now backing out of a poorly working RC Viewer will be a more complex process requiring one to download and install another viewer version. But, that may be less confusing.
We’ll see what people do with the process.
CmdrCupcake (Sovereign Engineer) has been looking at texture thrashing. He found what is eating texture memory and leads to textures cycling through rendering to full load sharp images then going blurry and apparently reloading and getting sharp again only to repeat.
While it was not immediately obvious the addition of CHUI and its addition of avatar icons to the chat discussions seems to be the trigger for the current texture thrashing. These images are loaded into the viewer as UI textures. There are a ton of these textures used for chat, group chat, and friends lists. These chat textures consume memory.
Today I logged in to check out a Fab Free sale. There are some great nails on sale at Nail Me (SLURL).
I had the typical message that an update had been downloaded and the viewer needed to do an install of version 3.7.24 (297623). I decided now was the time. So, I OK’d the update now option. The viewer didn’t log me out. It closed and started the update. But, when I tried to relog I had to wait while the SL system realized I had left, logged me out, and then let me log back in. I would have been really annoyed if I has been in a hurry to get some place.