Second Life and Virtual Worlds
A new Release Candidate (RC) is out. Release candidates are about stability. If this one proves to be stable it will be come the main Imprudence Viewer. For new features check out the Experimental Viewer. You can down it here: Imprudence 1.3.0 RC3 Released Imprudence Viewer now has selectable fonts. Click Edit->Preferences->[Fonts] Gray map tiles has been fixed. … Read more
Today there is a new release of the Experimental Viewer. See: Release: 2010.09.18 to download Windows, Mac, and Linux. This is NOT the recommended stable version.
This revision had several additions. There is now a search in Friends and Groups dialogs. The search even has an auto complete, which is triggered by pressing Tab after you type in some initial text. There are instructions for use at the link above.
There are a number of bug fixes and changes. The list is at the link above.
KistenLee has released a new test viewer. This one is especially for higher end computers and is classed a Test Build. Download it from the Test Build section of KirstenLee’s site.
S20(37) is the current main release.
One needs a Dual Core2 or better and at least a 8800 GPU or better to run the new test viewer. The code is optimized for SSE3 and GPU compute capabilities for OpenCL/Cuda.
This version contains lots of bux fixes and the addition for more Project Snowstorm code. Support for the nVidia 450 chip was added.
This should be a fun viewer to use. More later. Later…
With the new transparency at Linden Lab we have lots of information about what is being done with the second Life viewer and servers. This article is about the things I’ve come across that are in progress at the development level.
Merov has added code to measure the performance of llkdu.dll and its alternative OpenJPEG. For now it appears KDU is 4 times faster than OpenJPEG at decoding compressed images. The performance measuring code is being improved for use with OpenJPEG and JASPER. This will help TPV and LL developers make viewers faster.
Update 2010-09-15 – after fold – Update 2010-09-15 11:28 PM – Update 2010-09-16 – Details from Nyx Office Hours – 2010-09-17 – Update 2010-09-23 – Link to new Mesh Wiki Page
Wow! Oh wow! I thought this was a feature that was almost dead. I did not expect to hear another word on the subject this year. Here is whasup.
The current news out is the closed beta testers that have been under NDA, are now released from the NDA as part of the Lab’s new open door policy. They have started talking and posting videos. The Lab has a page up on their YouTube.com channel. See Second Life Channel Meshes – This is a play list, so you can see a bunch of videos.
Updated 2010-09-14 – scoll to end of article
Oskar Linden updated part of the Beta Server Wiki to announce the Blue Steel Release Channel changes are coming to 10% of the grid 9/14. If those changes hold up, they will spread to the rest of the grid on 9/21.
What’s changing? This is an example of one of the first rollouts using the new three channel process. So, the number of changes is small compared to previous updates as current changes are split up for testing. If these changes hold for 6 days, they will go to the rest of the main grid and into the other two release channels with the items being tested in them.
These changes are mostly exploits and SIM crasher fixes. Since these are ‘holes’ still active on the rest of the grid, Oskar is not publishing steps to reproduce the problems (a normal part of the testing process) for obvious reasons.