SLV2, 3, 4, 5, 6. & 7 Series – Page 83 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Second Life’s SSA 2013-34

2013/08/26 by Nalates Urriah

Server Side Appearance baking is considered a success. We still have some bake fail issues and I’ll get to those. The Firestorm team has put out an article about SSA here: Server Side Appearance a Success! This article is worth the time to read. Jessica Lyon points out how the ignorant are complaining about how the Lab should have worked on something that really needed fixing… like bake fail was not a big enough problem.

Nyx Linden spoke at the TPV Dev’s meeting Friday (week 43) about SSA. Friday a new set of SSA changes were going external that means the SSA code the Lab has been working on for the viewer was made public. TPV Dev’s can now look at the code, find bugs, problems, and begin adding it to their development code.

Nyx says the Lab has this new code working in their development viewers. But, they currently consider it mostly untested. I suppose that means it has not passed through formal QA testing on the way to a viewer release candidate and remains mostly in development.

Viewer Release Pipeline 2013-34

2013/08/26 by Nalates Urriah

This is week 35, but the news is from last Friday.

With the viewer release pipeline there is a slow down. Viewer code changes are kept small to reduce the complexity of debugging. That seems to create a number of possible release candidates. With lots of release candidates one either has to release a new viewer each week or it takes some time to get candidates moved forward.

To speed things up some candidates are being merged together. Since only one candidate can move forward there are two staying behind that have been tested for a week. They will of course be merged with the candidate’s code that moved forward and their package tested for another week. But, if the candidate was really looking good, it might be possible to save some time by merging in a new code set that would otherwise have to wait and be a candidate of its own.

That has currently happened with the Snowstorm and CHUI candidates.

There are more Project Viewers coming. Project Viewers coming are; more Snowstorm, another Sunhine round, HTTP, Interest List, and a couple of unannounced ones. We should hear about one of the unannounced ones in two weeks. Could that be Advanced Experience Tools? Probably not.

GPU Table & Performance

2013/08/26 by Nalates Urriah

The Lab rates video cards into 5 classes. They setup your default viewer graphics preferences based on those classes.

There is an update coming to the GPU Table, which is what the viewers use to figure out what class your video card is in and choose your initial settings. We should see it in one of the viewer release candidates this week or next.

The GPU Table has this information:

// Class Numbers:
0 – Defaults to low graphics settings.	No shaders on by default	Not supported
1 – Defaults to mid graphics settings.	Basic shaders on by default	Supported
2 – Defaults to high graphics settings.	Atmospherics on by default.	Supported
3 – Same as 2, but with lighting and shadows enabled.		Supported
4 – Same as 3, but with ambient occlusion enabled.		Supported
5 – Same as 4, but with shadows set to “Sun/Moon+Projectors.”		Supported

You can find a copy of the GPU Table in the viewer’s install folder. Its secret name is: gpu_table.txt. You can look up your model of video card to see how the Lab thinks it should be supported.

SL Viewer updates to 3.6.3-279564

2013/08/20 by Nalates Urriah

The release notes for this version of the Second Life^TM Viewer were published August 12^th. There are about 33 fixes and additions. There are eight known issues that remain. Your viewer will automatically update to this version if you are using the default setting to automatically update.

If you have “Willing to update to release candidates” enabled, you may get a release candidate. I’m still flipping coins on whether that is a good idea or not. I’ve mostly decided I need to turn off Automatic updates for everything except the main SL Viewer and I have ‘Willing’ disabled on all my viewers. I do install release candidates, but manually.

This version of the SL Viewer Second Life 3.6.3-279564 was put into RC status Aug 6, 2013. Just yesterday it was promoted to the main release. This is the exact same viewer that was the RC, which is the point.

Second Life News 2013-32 #4

2013/08/11 by Nalates Urriah

The third party viewer (TPV) development meeting was Friday August 9^th. This is information from that meeting. This is usually the stuff that is fun to know.

Viewer Release Pipeline

There are currently 5 release candidates in the people line. Oz Linden says this is going to a larger number of candidates than he expects to be normal. This is a backlog of viewer work winding its way through the testing process.

The Vivox candidate viewer has made it all the way through the new process. It is now the new primary release for the SL Viewer 3.6.2-279258. The updates in that viewer are now being merged into the remaining candidate viewers. We should see those all updated during week 33.

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SL Materials Viewer 2013-32

2013/08/10 by Nalates Urriah

We have a new version of the Materials Project Viewer as of August 8. It is version 3.6.3-279651. You can get the download here: Official Alternate Viewers.

The Release Notes provides an impressive list of fixes, about 5.5 screens of JIRA items. There are 8 known problems listed. This is a significant improvement over the previous release.

This viewer is classed as a Project Viewer. So, if you opt’d in to use Release Candidate viewers you are NOT going to be running this one or any other ‘project’ viewers. At least I am pretty sure you won’t. So, what happens when you install this viewer?