Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
KirstenLee has released a new version of her viewer. See: Kirstens S20(45).exe.
KirstenLee didn’t say much about this viewer and I’m not finding the (45) release notes. Her brief description of the changes is the adding of all the Mesh and Viewer fixes available from Linden Lab.
Kirsten also expects this to be the last release before a version change over to S21, which will have her new render engine. It will be interesting to see how it performs.
A couple of hours after I noticed the release notes being put up the downloads were announced on the Phoenix blog. The release announcement is here: 1.5.2.818 Final Major Release! And here: 1.5.2.818 SSE windows Bug. Ouch.
Update: About 3:03 PM SLT 12/22 the fix 818A was released.
This is a two part bug. If you have a newer computer (no more than 3 years old) then you are likely not affected. This is a problem with computer CPU’s. You have probably been messing with computers long enough to know the CPU is the heart and brain of the computer. As time passes more abilities are built into the CPU, they are taught new tricks. SSE is one of those tricks. Older computers, CPU’s, can’t do the trick and newer ones can.
A new release of Phoenix is near. The release notes are going up as I write.
This version will have full Display Name support. Both 725 and the coming 818 have support for 40 groups. Linden Lab has yet to turn on more groups in the SIM software so don’t get excited… you are still stuck with 25 groups. Only a few SIM’s in Aditi (preview grid) are enabled for more than 25 groups. But, when enabled this viewer has support for more groups.
Over the last 10 days there have been some changes to the SLV2 and a number of bug fixes. Here are the interesting ones. Some of which have been fixed and some are still in progress. What is now in 2.4 production viewer and what is in 2.5 test builds is unclear. If you hit one of thse problems check the JIRA I have included to see where it is as things change quickly.
It has been over a year since I last tweaked my video card for use with Second Life. A recent exchange in comments with Lance Corrimal, Dolphin Viewer, got me wondering about how I have my video card setup. It’s been over a year since I last made changes. When using the default High setting without other tweaks I get from 15 FPS to 80 FPS with my 8800 GTS depending on which viewer and which region I’m in.
Yay! Torley. There is a new wiki page up telling you how to see the DoF effect. You will need a pretty hot graphics card. My nVidia 8800 GTS will do it. Rather than tell you more about DoF, visit the wiki page for videos by residents and the Torley tutorial. Depth of Field Wiki … Read more