Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Linden made series of viewers
The main channel gets a rollout Tuesday. It will get the maintenance release that has been running on all three RC channels. This release has a fix for some temporary attachment problems and adds the ‘description’ field to L$ transactions.
This week there are no new packages coming out. All regions will be running the same server software this week. In this case the RC channels do not need to roll, so no rolls in RC land this week.
Yesterday about noon the Lindens posted that Experience Keys can be tried out in the Corn Field. You can now try out the new features, at least from the user side. If you are into the creative side and have asked to participate in the Beta then expect to get a Key for use in creating your experience.
The post is here: Check Out Experience Keys in… The Cornfield!
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You can get a viewer that is updated to use the new Experience Tools (XP Tools). The Project Viewer is here: Project Viewer version 3.7.12.291846 aka: Project Experience Tools Channel. It is now on the RC and Project Viewers page too.
Once installed you need to head to the Corn Field (SLURL). This used to be a place where people were forcibly teleported by the Governor’s Enforcement team and locked in for some time. It has history. The Lindens, or more specifically the Moles, have remade it to test the XP Tools.
I’m still trying to get into Hair Fair.
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.
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.
Late yesterday Maestro Linden posted the Deploys post. The main channel is rolling this morning. The new package contains the changes in LSL that allow us to control Materials via script. See llSetLinkPrimitiveParams and llGetLinkPrimitiveParams. Look for the new perimeters in those named; PRIM_NORMAL, PRIM_SPECULAR, and PRIM_ALPHA_MODE.
Blue Steel and Le Tigre will get a new maintenance package tomorrow, Wednesday. This package has fixes for :
New in this release is a feature: L$ transactions from llTransferLindenDollars or llGiveMoney now include a “Description” field with the object’s name in the L$ transaction history section of the website.
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.
The SL Viewers are unchanged from yesterday.
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.
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.
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.