The Third Party Viewer meeting was last Friday. I’m just getting around to watching the video of the meeting. There is a lot of interesting news. I’m going to put it up in several parts. I can better index it and my new enhanced search will produce better results for smaller articles.
Third Party Viewer Meeting 2013-34
The interesting stuff:
Interest Lists
Still no project viewer from the Interest List people. Oz Linden doesn’t know what is happening with the project other than it is being worked on. His belief is the Interest List viewer release will provide more optimizations. Otherwise there is nothing that significantly changes.
Third party viewer users are accustomed to have the a feature know as avatar z-offset or height offset. This feature allowed us to precisely control our avatars vertical position. Whether walking, sitting, or ground sitting we could adjust the avatar’s vertical position in relation to the ground or a floor.
The roll out of SSA broke this feature. It appears this is the thing most often asked about in various support groups since SSA rolled out. At least it is the question I see most consistently being asked. Well, that and temporary texture upload. But, temporary texture upload has been replaced with Local Textures for some time.
Today I see the Marine Kelly has an article out about a fix for Height Offset. See: RestrainedLove Viewer 2.8.5.3 with Z offset fix. Marine also explains how to use Local textures in her article.
WARNING! If you are a Windows user, avoid grabbing a copy and just installing it. That will create problems. Read the notice on the blog. Some things have changed and this install must be done differently than in the past. See: Kokua 3.6.3. Once you have made an update to 3.6.3 the installs will work correctly… or so we think.
Kokua/Imprudence Viewers
The problem comes from the Kokua Dev Team incorporating Automatic Updates. The addition required a renaming of the install folder from Kokua Viewer to just Kokua. A basic install will result in having two versions of Kokua installed.
The Sunshine Project has greatly reduced the number of bake fails users experience. The goal of SSA was to improve the reliability of avatar baking. That goal was met. Remember. It was never believed that the SSA project would solve all avatar baking problems. The process is dependent on many aspects of the viewer, your hardware, your connection to SL (which is NOT the same as your general Internet connection), the state of your inventory, the load on SL inventory systems, and much more.
Odd Bake Fail w/SSA
There was never the possibility of getting all these systems to work perfectly 100% of the time. So, from time to time, we will see bake fail. Way fewer people see tenuous bake fail now.
Problems
The problem where some textures just don’t download also seems to affect the SSA bake. The SSA ovens bakes 3 textures; head, upper body, and lower body. I’ve seen a texture for my upper body refuse to download. The head and lower body rendered quickly. Five minutes later I still had a gray torso. Doing a clothing change solved the problem.
There are reports of people remaining grey even when using the newer viewers. Others usually see them normally. I suspect this happens because the user with the problem has a poor connection to Second Life™, which is very different from having a good general connection to the Internet.
Nothing much new from the Beta Server user group. SSA did roll out. It is working for all but a few people. There are some bake fails here and there. Most are inventory fails that seem to affect the viewer and SSA servers too.
Server Beta 2013-24
There are likely other causes for bake fail. We will find them as time passes. But, in general most are finding the new SSA system to be way better.
Gaia provides the same take on Liquid Mesh that I do. Gaia is, however, more strongly saying creative types should be avoiding the use of the technique in products.
Gaia has a stronger belief than I do that collision bones won’t go away. I suspect there will always be some part of the avatar that is used for detecting/calculating collisions. There is no doubt collisions will always be need to be detected. That is part of how virtual work.
Neither of us has any idea how likely a change to collision detection is if the avatar changes. Nor can we anticipate what changes to Second Life performance might be an incentive to change the detection system.
