There is little change in the viewer pipeline. There is a new maintenance version, a new Alex Ivy version, and a new Voice version. All these versions are basically a folding in of recent main viewer update.
Horses
Alex Ivy, the 64-bit viewer, has 1 or 2 more bugs to be fixed before it is a candidate for promotion to the main viewer.
The Voice version has an elevated crash rate, but it is better with this last fold in.
All viewers have been tending to crash more over last few months than previously.
Third-Party Dev’s are not getting Linden reports on their viewer performance. Oz will be getting reports out Monday… events permitting.
Today Sansar will get the update we’ve been looking for. This has the ‘keyframe’ animations. Or for SL peeps animesh. Plus, the terrain editor and other stuff.
Sansar will be down for 90 minutes or so while the update is rolled out.
There is a little more information in the 9:30 Product meeting in the last 10 minutes of the video I am uploading. But, nothing to help with the problem.
Word is that lots of user stuff breaks in this update. I think that is user scripted things…
Sansar is not at the point where there is any backward compatibility. There is no Backward. So, users deal with stuff breaking. Which means we can’t sell stuff as the customer complaints and updates would be overwhelming.
By the time the 4 PM Meeting happens the update should be out. There should be a couple of Product Team members at the afternoon meeting. Only Cara made it to the morning meeting and she couldn’t get her mic working.
If you don’t know, you can do a Sansar viewer reset by clicking into My Look. So, when in an Experience click into My Look. When you come out, you pop back into the same instance of the Experience. It avoids the instance full problem that often blocks returning to a meeting.
This week the Sansar Casual Meet Ups are at The Lost Treasure of Coral Canyon at 2 to 3 PM PT Monday thru Friday. The Experience takes a bit to download. So, give yourself extra time for your first trip there.
Sansar: Lost Treasure of Coral Canyon – Atlas (Large)
It is a bit hard walking in this Experience. At least in desktop mode. You’ll need to use Ctrl-Mouse to target then left-click to go there.
Also, as of today, the promised Sansar update is not yet out.
The Friday Sansar Product Meet Up will be at 9:30 AM and 4 PM PT in the Astro Port. This meeting is likely to reach the Experience’s population limit, 40±. So, be early. And I suggest you visit the location Thursday to have the Experience cached.
New in Blender 2.8 is an over view of Blender 2.8. The current version of Blender is 2.78c. A Blender 2.79 RC2 is available for download now. So, the 2.8 overview is a what’s coming type thing.
I’ve been seeing the Eevee word for some time. I know what PBR is, Physically Based Rendering. Meaning it looks more realistic. Eevee is Blender nickname for the render engine in the coming Blender. If you don’t know Eevee is also a whole Pokemon thing.
So Eevee is way neat. What we are getting that is such a big deal in Blender, in other words, is real time rendering in the viewports. Blender rendering has sort been a same day kind of render. Those grainy windows that progressively got more and more clear.
Now all the light and objects will render in real time.
The grease pencil is getting an update. If you don’t know the grease pencil is used more and more for modeling. But, there are 2D artists, think cartoons, that need better 2D tools. They are getting them. The 3D modelers will see more abilities added from the new grease pencil lines that are objects.
Workspaces are improving. These allow a UI configuration for different tasks. I have a UI arrangement for my animation and another for my modeling and weight painting. We’ve had that UI workspaces to a degree. They are pushing farther.
In Blender, we have had 20 layers to put things on and hide them or show them. The Layer system will no longer be limited to 20. The Layer paradigm is changing and Collections are being added.
As most of these are not things done to mesh or animation, what we do in that regard isn’t changing much. How we do it is significantly changing. The Eevee PBR engine is going to save us tons of time. This will be an update most of the SL users will want.
Monday was a holiday in the USA. So, things are running a bit behind this week. We may see some more viewer updates later in the week.
Legs
Servers
The deploys thread in the SL Forum hasn’t updated yet. As of 8:50 AM PT this morning my in-world tracking has not shown a restart. Those happen for my region before 10 AM and usually before 6 AM PT. So, if there are rolls I expect a one-day shift.
I may update this article after the Server & Scripting UG meeting today (noon PT).
PS: There will be a roll to the RC channels Wednesday. Blue Steel and Le Tigre will get #17.09.01.508236 and Magnum gets #17.09.01.328871. Cake is updating too, but I don’t have any info on that update.
Viewers
I’ve added links to the various viewer downloads in the blog-roll, left column.
