Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
So, how do we know which of our materials in Blender or another modeling program will be assigned to which SL Object FACE? We have an answer and tutorial… sort of.
First, remember that objects in Second Life™ have a FACE. Face in SL use has a different meaning than it does in Blender or other modeling programs. In SL an object has 1 to 9 ‘faces’ regardless of how many polygons there are. SL Faces are groups of polygons. We can assign a texture/material to each of those SL faces.
Last Friday was the Third Party Developers meeting. It lasted about 20 minutes. So, not much news and almost no new news. Sigh. I’ll put it all in one post.
The main viewer is 3.8.4-305119. Expect that to change this week (42).
RC Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 3.8.5.305531 – This is the most likely viewer to get promoted. It is doing well, I suppose not crashing nor getting BUG reports. So, it is Oz Linden’s best guess at the viewer that will get promoted. But, that isn’t a guarantee. Release Notes: Big batch of Maintenance work to improve performance, fix bugs, address feature requests and give Second Life love. It has almost 100 fixes.
RC Second Life Notifications Viewer version 3.8.5.305555 – Release Notes:
New Notifications floater separates incoming notifications into Categories. It provides a better way to view, interact with, prioritize and manage incoming notices for busy residents.
- System – Displays general notifications, such as inventory transfers and friendship status changes.
- Transactions – Displays notifications that result from Linden dollar (L$) transactions.
- Invitations – Displays group invitations.
- Group – Displays notices from groups you are in.
Each notification in the list can be expanded or collapsed by clicking the arrow at the bottom right of the listing. You may also use the Collapse all button to collapse any expanded notifications. You may delete notifications from the list by clicking the x button at the upper right of each listing. Alternatively, you may click the “Delete all” button to delete all notifications in the current tab.
A special thank you to Aki Shichiroji for initial feature design.
RC Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.5.305528 – Release Notes:
Graphics Presets You can now create different saved “presets” for your graphics preferences, and quickly switch between them using a new top bar pulldown. Create one with a short draw distance and support for lots of detail to use when going to a dance club, another with long views for exploring, and any others that you find yourself using frequently.
Avatar Rendering Complexity Controls For many users, the most expensive part of rendering a Second Life scene is rendering the avatars around you. For some time, the viewer has had a measurement of how much each avatar around you is affecting your performance; this viewer introduces some control and feedback based on that measure. A new *Avatar Maximum Complexity* control lets you prevent expensive avatars from lagging you; any avatar over the limit is displayed as a solid color rather than rendering full detail. A default limit is set based on the rendering performance of your system. You’ll also get a notice when your own rendering complexity changes, and an indication when you’re over the limit of too many of the avatars around you.
RC Second Life HTTP update Viewer version 3.8.5.305771 – Release Notes:
This viewer release is a complete replacement of the under the hood HTTP infrastructure. It provides improved performance and stability by replacing the self deleting responders with coroutine implementations. These coroutines also provide a finer grained concurrency allowing the Viewer greater control over the numbers and types of HTTP requests that can be simultaneously outstanding. This release also removes a considerable amount of deprecated and unused code from the viewer. These changes impact all areas of the viewer that use Sim Capabilities. A non-exhaustive list includes:
- Asset upload (Images, Meshes, Animations)
- AISv3 inventory manipulation
- Viewer Managed Marketplace
- Simhost event polling
- LSL script compilation
- Experience management (blocking, allowing, creating)
Now that we have a Second Life™ viewer with CEF, what can we do with it? For now I am not sure what limitations we will have from the viewer. But, we can look at CEF and see what is possible in general. Here I’ll try to give you the basic information about CEF and links to some tutorials.
CEF is an open source project built on the Google Chromium project, which is another open source project to build a better web browser (Chromium) and the project is the parent of the Google Chrome browser. If you research these projects you will see a number of other projects tied together with these.
The RC Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.5.305528 is available here. This viewer has this name because it lets us save our graphics settings. We can have a setting for shopping and another for taking pictures and quickly change between them without opening preferences. Handy.
This viewer also has the new Avatar Render Complexity feature, the one that makes over blinged avatars rez as jelly babies. Now that the viewer is in RC we have a number of users testing the viewer. It is currently my main viewer. I am enjoying it.
We have a new Project Viewer: Valhalla version 4.0.0.305703. This is the viewer with Chromium Embedded Framework, the replacement for Webkit. This viewer debuted 11:52AM, 2 October 2015… last Friday… at least according to the history date on the Wiki.
The main grid got a new package Tuesday 10/6. There is no update ready for the RC channels. So, the entire grid is running the same package.
The package rolled out has fixed server crash and fixed the Region Debug Console help text. It also makes the new LSL functions for getting attachments functional grid wise.
Function: integer llGetAttached( ); – Returns the attach_point (an integer) the object is attached to or zero if it is either not attached or is pending detachment.
Function: list llGetAttachedList( key avatar ); – Returns a list of public attachments worn by an avatar.
Function: list llGetObjectDetails( key id, list params ); – Returns a list of the details for id, specifically those requested in params. – This is an older function but gets a new ability.
Simon Linden hopes to have a maintenance package ready for next week.