As regular readers here will know from my weekly SL project reports, Linden Lab is (among other things) working on the final clean-up of the Server-side Appearance (SSA) code. A large part of this work is directly linked to inventory handling, and is being referred to as the Advanced Inventory Service version 3 updates (AIS v3).

The primary aims aim of these updates is to address a series of inventory issues outstanding from the implementation of SSA, and to aggregate some operations that are currently multiple things into a smaller set of more powerful APIs. As noted in my last update covering AIS, the viewer-side code has reached a point where the Lab is both keen to progress with further testing. This being the case, the Lab has asked TPVs if they could incorporate the updates into experimental versions of their viewers so that they might assist with the testing.

Integrating the AIS v3 code isn’t as straightforward for those viewers which support both OpenSim and SL as it is for those that are focused solely on SL, as the AIS updates have been combined with a removal of the old client-side baking code from the viewer, as this is no longer required by the Lab. So in order to ensure avatar baking continues to work when users log-in to an OpenSim environment, those TPVs supporting both environments with a single viewer are having to ensure the client-side code is not lost when incorporating the new SSA / AIS updates.

On November 6th, Nicky Perian reported that Kokua has now done this, and has a test viewer for Windows available in the former version 3.6.9.30799, which is available in both 32-bit and 64.bit flavours.This viewer both includes the AIS updates and retains the client-side avatar baking code.

As the AIS code is still under development, it is not recommended that either version of this test viewer is used as the primary viewer for logging into Second Life. The primary reasons for making the viewer available are to:

Allow SL users to test inventory transactions, including changing avatar body parts and body part parameters (for example, eye colors) using the dedicated test regions which have been established on the SL Beta test grid Aditi (sunshinesls, sunshinesls1, sunshinetest, sunshinetest1)

Allow OpenSim users to also test inventory transactions and avatar baking on an OpenSim, and check for any unexpected changes to expected behaviour when compared to the latest release viewer.

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