Nalates' Things & Stuff

Second Life Viewer Ideas & Progress

2010/09/16 by Nalates Urriah

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.

Wow! Second Life Mesh Support

2011/03/102010/09/14 by Nalates Urriah

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.

Second Life Grid Updates

2010/09/13 by Nalates Urriah

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.

Phoenix Viewer 1.5.1.225 Released

2010/09/13 by Nalates Urriah

Updated: 8:00 PM

A new release of the Phoenix Viewer is out. This release fixes lots of problems. It takes some time for a new team to get things together and get organized. This release says much about the team coming together and stabilizing the viewer.

Jessica Lyon has published a blog article that contains the release notes and a new features list. See: Some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is a couple of team members are leaving. Seems there is a disagreement about how the team is to be run. That is not an ideal way to start off. But, this may just be a new team shaking out and people learning who they want to work beside. As time passes we’ll learn if this is just a startup issue or a more pathological issue.

Snowstorm UI Thoughts

2010/09/12 by Nalates Urriah

Snowstorm Logo

In Esbee Linden’s Thursday meeting User Interface (UI) changes were being discussed. The item currently being worked on is detachable sidebar panels and how to open multiple copies of them. The latest Second_Life_2-1-2-209322_Development Viewer has a test version of the change.

Imagine being able to arrange the panels for building or scripting and save the panel layout. Or save several different layouts. The idea is that there could be a newbie setup, photographers, scripter’s, explorers, builders, and more. Some of these would be default layouts that come with the viewer. Users would be able to create their own.

Phoenix LSL Preprocessor Info

2010/09/11 by Nalates Urriah

LSL is the Linden Scripting Language. This is the scripting language used to program everything in Second Life. Advanced programmers are used to having libraries of code that can be used in several programs. No provision is made in Linden viewers to provide this feature. Emerald had a Preprocessor that provided programmers the feature. Phoenix has now added the feature.

Toy Wylie has added a section to the Second Life Wiki on what the feature is, how to setup, how it works, an explanation of the “optimized” nature of this preprocessor, and much more.

Find it here: Wiki: Phoenix LSL Preprocessor Info