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.

Second Life News 2013-34 #3

2013/08/26 by Nalates Urriah

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.

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.

Second Life Height Offset

2013/08/24 by Nalates Urriah

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.

Kokua Viewer 3.6.3 Released

2013/08/23 by Nalates Urriah

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.

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.