Some dots have started to be joined that are giving some folk the heebie jeebies about their future fun in Second Life. Nalates Urriah has been covering the Phoenix Viewer issues, with Phoenix announcing at an office hour that support for the old Phoenix client will be ended. The viewer will still connect but going forward there will be no further support, meaning eventually it will become obsolete as Linden Lab introduce new features.
One of those new features has been covered by Inara Pey: Avatar Baking: “and the clock has started!”. This is important people! This is a new project, codenamed Project Sunshine-Server Side Appearance, if you want to read a bit about this, there’s a page on the official Second Life Wiki, which you can read here.
Basically this means that more of the work on baking textures when you change outfits will be performed server side, rather than viewer side, which should help improve performance. Here’s an example, I’m changing outfit on a normal region and everything goes a bit blurry:
Eventually the outfit is changed:
