Sarawak (Flickr) – blog post



Server Deployments

With the no change window in effect throughout the week, and running through until the 2nd week of January 2015, there were no server deployments to ether the main channel or the three RC channels during the last full week of 2014.

SL Viewer

The Experience Tools RC viewer was updated on Monday, December 22nd to version 3.7.24.297643 (although the Alternate Viewers wiki page has yet to be updated). This saw the viewer brought up to parity with the current release viewer.

2015 Updates

Early January 2015 should see the Windows and Mac viewer start to use the new viewer tools chain the Lab has been working on, and the updated autobuild process.One of the hopes with the Windows switch-over to Visual Studio 2013, and the availability of Visual Studio Community 2013, is hoped that over time, many (or all) of the differences between the open source build configurations and the Linden versions can be eliminated, other than when using proprietary packages.

Oz Linden has been working on the Linux side of things in order to get the Linux builds working with the new tools and gcc 4.6; he’s also actively soliciting for assistance from TPV developers for help in this.

Once the tools work is completed, it would appear that “avatar awareness” (aka “radar”) for the official viewer may well be heading towards the top of the list for new viewer capabilities, with Oz indicating he’d like to get to work on a specification for the capability. If not this, then quite possibly a further round of environment updates within the viewer, as noted in my week 51 report.

Other Items

SL Wiki Update

It is still not clear when the SL wiki will be re-opened for editing by SL users. According to Oz Linden, speaking at the Open-source Developer’s meeting on Monday, December 22nd, “every time they get close to finishing the QA, another batch of security problems comes out that we need to integrate fixes for.”

Alpha Map Support for Mesh

JIRA BUG-8100 has been raised as a feature request to provide an additional material map option alongside the existing diffuse, specular, and normal maps that allows a user to apply either a black and white map, or an alpha bit texture to mask out areas of a mesh and render them fully transparent (with a 1-bit edging). The JIRA has gained support and feedback from content creators (including the need for LSL from the outset, if implemented. Those interested / in agreement, should ensure they read the JIRA and WATCH it (remember, VOTE is not as strongly responded to by the Lab).

Next Meetings

Open-source Developers: Monday, January 5th.

Simulator User Group: Tuesday, January 6th.

Server Beta User Group: Thursday, January 8th.

TPV Developer: Friday, January 16th.

With thanks to Mona Eberhardt for the Open-source dev meeting notes and the BUG-8100 pointer.