Linden Lab Ask Us To Check Out Improvements To Second Life

Linden Lab continue to demonstrate their vastly improved communication policies this week by making good use of their blog. A couple of days ago they posted : Check Out the Latest Improvements to Second Life. This post discusses improvements in areas such as :

  • Hover Height
  • Notifications
  • Mesh Import
  • Viewer Managed Marketplace
  • Graphics Settings
  • Second Life Developer Tools

Some of these developments are more technical than others. Hover Height deals with the thorny issue of where your feet may land in Second Life. The issue has always been that your feet may not land where you expect them to, leading to unexpected and inconsistent results. Linden Lab have been working on this and even have a Project HoverHeight Viewer involved in this work. The blog post explains what they are hoping to achieve :

This viewer, and some accompanying server changes, improve things in two ways: the order in which we make adjustments to your vertical position has been made more stable — combining the same set of attachments and animations should now always produce the same vertical offset: even if it’s not perfect, it will at least be predictable. Because it can’t always be perfect, we’ve also introduced a new final adjustment that is directly under your control: a new avatar right-click selection allows you to tweak your vertical position. This final adjustment is shared with everyone around you so that they too will see you correctly, and is saved locally by your viewer so that it persists between sessions. This new feature was inspired by a proposal from the Firestorm viewer team, and they’ve been helping with testing it.

In terms of notifications, let’s face it, they can be a pain, especially when you first login. The more notifications you get, the more of a pain it can become. Part of the reason for this is that all notifications look the same in terms of pop ups. A future viewer release is in the works that will provide different pop ups for different notifications. For example a money transaction notification will have a separate display when compared to a group notification, meaning you should be able to prioritise your notifications.

The Mesh Import improvements include one really interesting improvement, the ability to import models with more than eight unique faces. I’m sure this will please many Mesh creators. Better error reporting and improved association of physics representations and LODs by name are also promised. If this interests you then you’ll be pleased to know that work is already under way with this and you can check it out with the Project Importer Viewer.

The Viewer Managed Marketplace improvements revolve around what could potentially be a big improvement to the workflow of merchants, the ability to manage your Marketplace inventory from within the viewer. This is an improvement that will be arriving in the next couple of months according to the blog post. I’m still a bit wary of the whole viewer managed Marketplace concept but I haven’t read of any horror stories yet and as I said, this change could well improve workflow for merchants.

The Graphics Settings changes are something that many people will welcome. The fact is that sometimes we change our graphics settings within Second Life to suit what we’re doing and our surroundings. At a busy club with lots going on? You may want to turn down your draw distance or settings. Out and about and want a pretty picture? You may want to ramp them up. The idea is that you will be able to save some of your more commonly used graphics settings and then load them via a menu. The blog post states :

Your preferred way to see the world can change depending on what you’re doing, and your graphics preferences strongly affect the performance of your viewer. We’re introducing an open source contribution that allows you to save named sets of graphics settings, with a drop-down for quickly changing between them. When you sit down to listen to a performance in your favorite music club, you can pick settings optimized for rich display of your companions and settings, and when you go exploring you can pick a set that trades off longer draw distances and better lighting effects for simpler rendering of details – whatever you think is important. This Viewer will also expose some controls we’ve been experimenting with for some time to give you better protection against nearby objects or avatars that are too difficult to render fully on your system.

That could really be something that people take to heart once they get their heads around it.

Last but not least, Linden Lab talk about Second Life Developer Tools. The work Linden Lab are doing in this area is with regard to improvements to the tools used to build both viewers and simulators. The former may be useful for TPV developers as well as Linden Lab, the latter is definitely for Linden Lab, but together the idea is that they will improve performance and allow developers to improve their productivity.

The list of changes are all in progress and coming to a viewer and simulator near you over the next couple of months. The changes sound encouraging. Second Life, it’s still very much around.


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