Firestorm Post: 4.4.1 Coming

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To go along with the Linden blog post about Server Side Appearance (baking) Jessica has published an article on where the FS Team is with the next release of Firestorm. See: Server Side Baking on the Way!

Jessica is trying to get 145,000 Firestorm and Phoenix users to upgrade their viewers. These are just the users that are on older viewers that will not support SSA. She says the majority of FS/PH users have switched to the newer 4.4.0 viewer. Still 145k users is a bunch.

I expect the SL forum to get lots of new users when SSA is enabled on the servers. They’ll all be there asking WTH? Avoid being one of those people, update to a viewer with SSA support.

 

Server Side Appearance Closer

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Today Linden Lab posted an update on the Sunshine Project, which includes Server Side Appearance (SSA) (baking). You can see it here: Faster Avatar Loading on the Horizon.

New Production Viewer
New Production Viewer

This is a warning that failing to update your viewer is going to be a problem. In my mind it seems they are somewhat downplaying the aspect that this update is going to cripple users that fail to update. Those that like the old 1.23 viewer and older versions of Phoenix are going to need to change to a newer viewer. Singularity seems to be the viewer of choice for those users. 

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Blender Accepted to Summer of Code 2013

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Summer of Code 2013
Summer of Code 2013

Google Inc. sponsors Summer of Code (SoC) each year for students over age 18. For those under 18 they sponsor Code-In. This year 15 Blender projects have been included in the mix of SoC projects. They are:

  1. Painting tool improvements
  2. Sketch Mesh Editing
  3. VSE Improvements
  4. Dependency Graph and Evaluation Engine Refactor
  5. BGE Level of Detail and Bug Fixing/Polishing
  6. Deformation Motion Blur
  7. Improved Debugging and Profiling in BGE
  8. Viewport FX II
  9. Expand and improve Blender’s motion tracking module
  10. Texturing for Volume Rendering in Cycles
  11. Rigid Body Simulation Improvements
  12. Threaded dependency graph
  13. Cycles – Add new shader nodes and shading features
  14. Towards a full action replay system
  15. Mesh Custom-Data Transfer

I’m not sure how many of these projects will directly affect the Second Life™ community. You can read more about each project on the SoC pages: Accepted Blender Projects. Click the project description to get more information.

Congratulations Blender guys and thanks Google.

Second Life News 2013-22

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You have probably figured out there is no roll or restart today. Because of the US holiday Memorial Day the rolls have been pushed back a day. The roll the main channel will happen on Wednesday. The RC rolls will happen on Thursday.

Main Channel

The main channel is getting the package running on the Magnum channel. This is the JSON package with a couple of fixes to JSON so that it properly handles quoted information. There are some other fixes; 2 crash modes are fixed and the ground sit fix for the ‘stand button’ is fixed.

Release Channels

This week all three channels will run the same package, at least that is what the Lindens were planning pre-holiday.

The package ran on Le Tigre last week. This is a package with Interest List fixes/improvements. Supposedly things will load a hair faster when you arrive in a region for the first time. It also includes another crash mode fix.

Other Stuff

There are a few complaints that region crossings have degraded. I haven’t seen that, but I seldom use vehicles.

A number of new users are running into extended bake fail for the first time. They post in forum and Answers asking what wrong. Seems like fewer of the Answers Helpers are reading the forum recently. So, I’ve seen some really dumb suggestions from relatively new users on how to fix the problem. Hopefully SSA will roll out in the next couple of weeks.

SSA

The word is that the code has rolled to the main grid and all channels there. This is a feature that can be enabled and disabled region by region. Word is no main grid regions are enabled, yet. Everyone I have asked about AGNI regions being enabled has referred me to Nyx Linden. So, I may learn something today.

 

 

 

GIMP Normals for Second Life

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The title is not very PC. But, I think it will work. GIMP is the free open source image editor many Second Life residents use. With the coming of the Materials System to Second Life™, users of GIMP are going to want to be making normal maps. So, here is a bit more about what normal maps are and how to make them.

GIMP Normal Maps

First, in English the word gimp also means a lame person. GIMP is DEFINITELY NOT a lame image editor. Its name was to denote it being free. While the name is not particularly flattering for the program it derives from: GNU Image Manipulation Program where GNU or GNU GPL stands for: GNU = GNU’s Not Unix and GPL = General Public License. These later acronyms are about how the software is licensed for sale or redistribution.

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