Project Bento is moving ahead. The AvaStar people are working on building tools to help people animate the new avatar. You can see a video of where they are now. YOU HAVE TO CLICK…
This isn’t something we will have access to this week or next. We may not see the final release of Project Bento for some weeks and possibly months.
We may have the AvaStar tools soon. Building the animation tool is a simpler task than building a player that works with the new skeleton and the legacy version animations.
With the release if the Maintenance Viewer (4.0.2.312269) in week #11, invisiprims pretty much died their final death. Support ended for these critters in 2011. The code that renders them invisible has been in viewers up to this release. But, with this release something changed.
Dry Dock via Invisiprim – Noted by: Callum Meriman
Inviziprims were prims with a special texture that caused things behind the texture to become transparent. Rendering-wise this was nightmare and problematic. The Lindens took advantage of a happenstance of the render pipeline to get them to work. I understand Crazy Mole once built a dry dock using invisiprims (the picture). Many boat builders used them to make the water inside their boats disappear.
The ‘trick’ is to turn off avatar rendering when you first arrive in a crowded place. (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-4) One press turns off avatar rendering and a second press will turn it back on. B turning it off your viewer can concentrate on rendering the ‘area’. Later when you render avatars they ‘seem’ to render faster because the viewer just has to render them as all else is already rendered.
This doesn’t make it any faster or actually reduce render time. Actual time to a final render is probably longer. But, psychologically we break the wait time into two parts with each being less than the single pass render but added together… more. Basically it is just easier on our patience.
Second Life’s main channel got an update to day (3/22). This is the RC package from last week, which is some Script Fixes and Minor internal improvements.
The RC channels are running the same package, no update this week.
“Quiet the mind and the soul will speak..”
Viewers
The main viewer updated last week to version 4.0.2.312269, the Maintenance RC viewer with lots of fixes.
I was expecting the Firestorm Viewer to update the 16th. That expectation came from a comment at the Third Party Developers’ meeting. Obviously that hasn’t happened.
I am seeing the wiki updating. Lots of new entries for version 4.7.7-48706. This is typical pre-release updating of the wiki. So, release is eminent. I doubt we will see it today or before Monday. The team doesn’t like to release a new viewer before the weekend. If something unforeseen goes wrong and people have to work on the weekend to fix it, that makes for bad juju.
This version of the Firestorm viewer caught up with the Linden Lab viewer 4.0.1. Of course the day Firestorm releases the Lab released and is now pushing 4.0.2 as their main viewer.
If you are thinking FS is behind again… well sort of, but probably not as much as one might think. Some fixes from the Firestorm team go into the Linden viewer, or at least inspire Linden fixes. Of course those FS Team fixes are already in Firestorm. So, it is hard to say who is a head, on par, behind…
