Maestro Linden is going on vacation. But, he did post the Deploys post Friday. It is planned that the Experience Tools package will be promoted to the main channel Tuesday, thus making it grid wide by late Wednesday.
Music Concert 2014
There are no noticeable feature changes using the current SL Viewer. One needs the Experience Tools Project Viewer to use the changes provided by the server update. There is no official link to that viewer on the Project Viewers page, yet. Once the beta testing proceeds to Experience User testing we’ll see that viewer appear. For now testing is with Experience Creators.
The Magnum channel will continue to run the Experience Tools package. It will be updated with the changes going to the main channel. There may be some updates to the Experience Tools too, bu they don’t say what.
Currently there is only 1 RC Viewer in the cue. Other viewers are in QA, but have not yet reached RC stage. The Snowstorm RC Viewer is said to be doing well. I’m not sure I agree, but it will likely be the RC Viewer that gets promoted.
Open Source 2014-28
Group Ban and Oculus are Project Viewers. I expect Group Ban to move to RC status soon. The Oculus Project Viewer is not going to change status any time soon. It has been waiting on the Oculus DK2, which has just started shipping. Once the Lab has DK2 in hand I expect to see some changes in the Oculus Viewer.
There is an Experience Tools Project Viewer. But, it has yet to appear on the RC & Project Viewers page. Experience Tools is still in closed beta. Oz says that he has seen lots of requests to participate in the Beta come in. The Lab is going through them. I know some people that are playing with the Experience Tools (ET) project viewer. It is out there. Oz is going to see if they will put a link on the Project Viewers page.
Today my viewer updated to the Snowstorm RC. I have it set to use RC Viewers. So, I’m using Second Life 3.7.11 (291465) Jun 25. The release notes are here.
Summerfest ’14
I went over to Summer Fest 2014 to try it out. First, the cute little pacific island theme used at Summer Fest makes it a really fun build to explore. The foliage is awesome. The buildings have a weak LOD, but if you have your viewer’s LOD setting turned up, they are OK. I don’t I prefer performance in this case.
The viewer runs faster. I was getting 20 to 40 FPS at the Fest. But, rendering is still a problem. Oz Linden said at the Firestorm Q&A that they are working on changing the viewer to allow it to use more of the video RAM you have on your graphics card. I doubt any of that work is in this viewer. But, possibly. So, that may be why we are seeing this problem.
The main viewer and this Snowstorm RC both have the problem of texture thrashing. The textures render sharp then blur and reload, sharpen and repeat. It makes taking pictures a pain.
I think the problem is worse in this viewer than in the main viewer. Again, I don’t see the problem in the Firestorm viewer.
I don’t expect to see texture thrashing in a GTX560Ti with 1GB of VRAM.
Tuesday(?) during the hubbub of SL 2.0 a new viewer rolled out as the main SL Viewer. Version 3.7.10-291134 is the current viewer, which I mentioned on Monday. While I thought there were no release notes posted for this version, it is the sorting order that fooled me. 3.7.10 sorts out way ahead of 3.7.9. So, it did not click with me that this was the SL Share RC Viewer being promoted, which it was.
You access the feature when taking a picture. The FB, Twitter, and Flickr buttons are at the bottom of the Snapshot Panel. (Ctrl-Shift-S)
SL11B
If you were using that RC Viewer, you likely did not see an update of your viewer. That is because it was the rest of us that needed an update, not you.
The Deploys thread tells that the main channel is going to update Tuesday to the Sunshine package that has the AISv3 updates. This ran on Blue Steel last week. The main release viewer had the AISv3 updates. With the AIS running on all the grid, this feature will be everywhere and the viewer can take advantage of it.
The Station 2014
There is also an anti-griefing measure included in this package. Since that is a security issue the Lindens don’t talk about the nature of it.
RC Channels
Blue Steel and Le Tigre will both get the same new maintenance package. The package has the new Linden Scripting Language (LSL) functions for handling materials. To see the effects of the Materials System you must have the Advanced Lighting Model enabled.
