France Portnawak, Dreamland Volcano (Flickr) – blog post



Server Deployments, Week 45

On Tuesday, November 4th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the server maintenance package deployed to all three RC channel in week 44. comprising some minor improvements described by Maestro Linden at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday, October 30th, as, “just some code cleanup and some extra optional debug logging.”

There are no planned RC channel deployments for week 45.

SL Viewer

On Friday, October 31st, the Lab issued a new Snowstorm contributions project viewer. Version 3.7.20.296071 includes a number of contribution, including Geenz Spad’s work on projectors , , a number of Mac OS X issues, a fix for editing an objects rotation with the rotation rings causing the object to jump to position <0,0,0> on the region and rotation changes to <0,0,0> ( ), and more. See the release notes in the link above or the full list of updates and known issues.

Texture Rendering Issues

There have been mixed reports of texture rendering issues since the arrival of the HTTP Pipelining viewer and the CDN. The reports can be variable in nature, but are apparently quite noticeable. The common symptom is for certain textures to remain fuzzy, as if stuck at a low resolution value (e.g. 64×64), with the higher resolution values failing to load until the mouse is placed over the object displayed the blurred texture or the object is physically clicked upon.

The issue appears to be particularly noticeable when using the HTTP pipelining viewer (I’ve encountered this myself running both the current SL release viewer version 3.7.19.295700, and the latest Alchemy viewer version 3.7.19.34077. It is also not the same issue as texture thrashing (which sees texture change from blurred to clear to blurred, etc., as a result of low video memory) nor is it the same as the interest list issue where panning the camera so that an object is off-screen and then back to it again causes the textures for the object to be re-loaded / rendered.

Gibson Firehawk has raised an JIRA on this issue, BUG-7700, which the Lab sees as a duplicate of BUG-7698, raised by Whirly Fizzle, which is being investigated. If this is a problem you are encountering on a persistent basis within one or more locations in SL, please consider raising a bug report and providing as much information as possible, including steps to reproduce. The more information the Lab has, the better position they’ll be in to poke at things.