Day: July 19, 2012

LEA launches 3rd round of land grants

Posted on by Inara Pey

LEA_square_logo_60The Linden Endowment for the Arts has announced applications for the third round of land grants is now open. For artists not familiar with the LEA or the land grant process, the following is taken from the formal announcement:

The LEA Land Grant program seeks to promote and nurture the arts in Second Life, through a six-month land grant to recipients. Recipients can be individuals or groups interested in creating or curating art, or proposing cultural projects which would require/utilise a full-sim build and can be completed within the allotted time frame. The LEA is able to offer land grants through the generosity of Linden Lab.

Twenty regions, donated by Linden Lab and managed by the LEA, are generally offered under the land grant programme, and successful applicants will be granted the use of one full region for a period of six months. The region may then be used on an individual or group basis for such diverse activities as:

  • Full sim exhibitions and / or immersive installations
  • Curated projects, especially those which have a connection to physical exhibitions and events (augmented reality)
Land grant regions: LEA10 through LEA29

Applications are not limited to visual art but are welcomed from all areas of artistic expression, including performance, music, and film.

Preference is for submitted works to be original in nature, although curated projects may present extant works. Successful applicants will have up to four months in which to execute their build, and must have it open for public viewing for at least the last two months of the grant period. Artists may alternatively use the land for multiple exhibits, but it is imperative that projects will be ready within four months from acceptance, and this time-frame should be considered (and reflected) in applications.

Application Timeline

(Dates subject to change by LEA in the event of unforeseen circumstances)

  • July 18th: applications open
  • August 15th: deadline for submissions
  • August 26th: final decision by the LEA Committee for primary applications
  • August 27-31st: Notification period for successful applicants / selection of alternates (if required)
  • September 1st: region hand-overs and public announcement of successful applications.

You can find the application form at the end of the LEA blog entry, together with all other necessary information.

Lab offers snapshot “tiling” fix

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update: The tiling fixing reached the SL viewer in December 2012, and has subsequently been incorporated into the majority of TPVs. Please refer to your preferred TPv developer for information on the fix (MAINT-628), if unsure.

The ongoing issue with taking high-resolution snapshots resulting in “seams” appearing in captured images may have a final fix on the way.

The issue was initially reported in JIRA MAINT-628 at the end of 2010, and has impacted viewer releases since then, becoming the subject to intense investigation by users and LL alike. The problem has tended to make itself known when taking images at a higher resolution than that of your monitor, resulting in lines breaking-up the captured image, as shown below.

The problem (image courtesy of Dil Spitz)

In reporting the fix, which has a couple of limitations, Runitai gave the following update on the JIRA:

Runitai Linden added a comment – 18/Jul/12 1:57 PM

Fixed in viewer-cat

Fix was to use a large render target for snapshots that are larger than the window, but only when lighting and shadows is enabled. Screen space effects will still show seams when lighting and shadows is disabled.

If the graphics card is unable to allocate a single render target large enough for the high res snapshot, the old method of tiling is still used. On my GTX 580, I could take artifact-free snapshots up to 3500 pixels wide, but could not allocate a full set of render targets at 4000 pixels wide, so the old method is used.

Changes involve an invasive set of changes to LLRenderTarget, so QA should be careful to check various shadow modes, ambient occlusion, depth of field, and anti-aliasing with lighting and shadows enabled. Running with Debug GL enabled will likely cause a crash now when taking high-res snapshots (expected and acceptable behaviour), since the driver reports “out of memory” when trying to allocate a large render target. When Debug GL is not enabled, the viewer handles this error condition gracefully and continues to function.

The code is in a changeset, and will be going through LL’s QA testing. If all goes well, it will hopefully progress through viewer release cycle soon.