Latif Kalifa added a comment to my ‘news’ post this morning that Materials released just after my posting. The version for the main viewer is now: 3.6.0-277516. See the official announcement here: Get the New Materials Viewer Today! Check out Torley’s new video about Materials.

Torley’s bear is the wrong color… for Torley.

There is a brief tutorial on using normal and specular maps in the video. More tutorials are here:

• Specular Maps Tutorial
• Second Life Normal Textures Tutorial
•  GIMP Normal Maps

Viewer changes are picking up speed. As the new multi-channel process moves forward we will see more viewer projects moving forward. Some of these things are things I’ve written about weeks and months ago.  Now they are coming to a viewer near you.

TPV Dev’s Meeting 2013-24

Inara has written an update on the SSA (Server Side Appearance): SL projects update 24 (5). See it for details. The summary of that news is simple. We are likely to see SSA enabled over the next 2 to 6 weeks. I expect it to SLOWLY creep across the grid. The server side code has already been rolled out to the main channel. Now it is just a matter of enabling it on the regions. But, there are concerns about problems and whether the new servers can carry the load. So, this will be a very careful roll out.

The week of May 26 to June 1 Oz Linden checked and reported that 1,665 different viewer versions that logged into Second Life™. That is an approximation of the number of different viewers in use. The SL system records viewer version strings. Each version of a viewer is to have a unique ID string. But, this is open source and people do whatever they do. So, there is a probability some ID strings don’t get changed. Thus I say approximate.

Viewer Production

Some of these versions are one user only viewers, meaning: someone compiles a viewer for their own amusement and use. They never distribute the version. They may or may not change the version string.

Then there are the griefer viewers. They try to imitate other viewers and may duplicate another viewer’s version string to hide.

The result is going to be more viewer versions than the system recognizes. 

The Third Party Viewers List is ordered by crash rates with the highest crash rate last. It is interesting to look at this list and see which viewers are better or worse from previous weeks.

Yesterday the list was updated. Surprisingly Firestorm lost its first place position. That needs some explaining, because I think Firestorm is the most stable viewer going.

First off Radegast holds first place in the list. BUT it is a non-graphical viewer. It is a text only viewer. So, it lacks most of the code that has problems, the 3D rendering pipeline. So, I don’t count it.

Yesterday the SL Beta Viewer 3.6.0 moved ahead of Firestorm 4.4.0. Well yay! Linden Lab. Congratulations.

Last week I wrote that the Beta Viewer and Development Viewer channels that carry release candidates are changing. Both have already pretty much stopped getting updates. The viewer development is going to parallel release channels like the server’s parallel release candidate channels.

Pipeline by andrewcparnell @ Flickr

Viewer development types watch the code repositories as they are often the first place we are likely to get a look at Linden Lab changes to the code. So, these people are interested in how things will change and where they can fine the code. For most of the rest of us, this is a non-issue. All we are interested in is where can we find a new version. For now there is nothing to point at. 

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

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. 

Viewers

You may or may not have realized that most viewers now have the Server Side Appearance (baking) code. Also, the servers have the server side of the code now. This will allow the Lindens to start enabling the code in test regions in the main grid.

There is a Snack RC channel that supposedly has it enabled. But, that is unclear. We’ll likely hear more about this at the server meetings this week.

Dev Viewer

The Development Viewer is done. That channel is no longer updating. We will only see Beta and Project Viewer as the Viewer RC Pipeline rolls out, which will happen over the next 2 to 4 weeks, probably. 

Each week the blog Lette’s Trivia And Trivial Stuff publishes the week’s top support issues with the Firestorm viewer. Another issue is out. But, some issues are not limited to the Firestorm Viewer. One of those is mesh objects failing to render.

Lette has written up an excellent section on the problem. She focuses on: MeshMaxConcurrentRequests. This is a Debug Setting in both the Firestorm and SL Viewers.

Word on the virtual street is that setting this higher is better and a must. Well… as often is the case the general advice is wrong. It depends on your computer and connection. But, in general it is a bad thing to change. To solve specific problems it is an acceptable temporary fix. But, used as a permanent change, it is a lag producer for you and everyone in the region.

Find out how to use this setting and understand the tradeoffs: Frequently Asked Support Questions of May 17.