Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This week there is no roll to the main channel.
Blue Steel and Le Tigre will remain on the inventory update package, Sunshine/AISv3.
Magnum will get a new maintenance package that fixes some network issues affecting busy regions.
The main viewer this morning is 3.7.7-289461. No change since last week. This version has lots of code clean up work. It is the Interesting Viewer promoted. It should render a region faster and more intelligently.
A new Firestorm viewer is out. I gather it was released this weekend while I was off doing Mother’s Day stuff. See the announcement: Firestorm Viewer Release 4.6.5-40833. Also, Inara has a nice review of this release up here: Firestorm 4.6.5: steady as she goes.
This release addresses a number of the complaints that users of the prevision have made. Mac users get benefits from this update too. So, if you use Firestorm and have been having problems, you will want to update to this version.
Some Mac users are complaining about typing in chat. That can still be v e r y s l o w. Others are pointing out that an update to a new OS fixes the problem… I’m not sure what the complete story is. As I’m not a Mac user, I can’t research it.
Gaia has posted an announcement about AvaStar 1.1-Alpha. The announcement has caveats and assurances. I’ve downloaded the release but have not had time to try it out.
See the announcement: Avastar-1.1 Alpha Release.
Some big news today… almost… see Group Ban below.
There were no rollouts to the main or RC channels this week. But, a T-Rex was pitching baseball in San Diego.
However, the backend servers for chat got an update. These are the updates Simon Linden has been working on and that several of us have been testing in ADITI over the past few weeks.
People are probably not going to notice much difference. Any difference will be subtle. But, the code adds more analytics to the chat system. The new information should give the Lindens a better idea of what can be fixed to improve performance.
An Alpha version of AvaStar is out. The usual software release order is; Proof of Concept, Alpha, Beta, RC, Final. As an RC version had been released (reference), I took the following Test Versions to be RC releases too. But, apparently not. Bad assumption on my part. Whatever we call this release, it is the next step in the progression.
This Alpha release has all the TEST version changes up to Test Version 1076. The official release name is now: avastar-1-1-alpha_Blender_2-70.
I am running Blender 2.70a. So, I can’t tell if this version works with previous Blender versions. What I do know is that newer video tutorials will most likely be showing the Blender 2.70+ user interface. So, it is probably a good idea to update your Blender to the latest version: Blender 2.70a.
As soon as I post about a viewer, things change. The main release viewer upgraded from 3.7.6 to 3.7.7-289461. The release notes for this version are here: SL Viewer 3.7.7. The is the Interesting Project Viewer updates. I goofed and clicked the wrong link going to the release notes earlier. I’m trying to do too many things at the same time.
This version includes the changes for faster scene rendering. The changes, to a large extent, are about how the viewer handles cache and the order in which things are rendered. For caching, the first time to arrive in a region, everything in the region is sent to the viewer and the viewer caches it. This means fewer server requests for stuff.