SL Beta Viewer and CHUI
As noted in part 2 of this report, a new beta release of the SL viewer was made on February 6th. The crash rates for this version, some 48 hours on from the release, are reported by Oz Linden as being “remarkably low”, with some 1400 users / half-a-million minutes logged against it to date. If this continues through the weekend, the chances are the code will go to a release version of the viewer early in week 7 (week commencing Monday 11th February).
If things go according to plan, there is likely to be one more 3.4.5 beta release prior to a merge taking place with the Communications Hubs User Interface (CHUI) code.
Currently, the CHUI code is now fully merged with the viewer-dev code, although it is slightly out-of-step with the beta code. Once the merge to beta has been made, and with everything else going on with the viewer, it is anticipated that CHUI will have “a nice long run,” as a beta release.
Server-side Baking and Pile-on Test Pre-announcement
Nyx Linden and his team continue to work on server-side baking (SBB), both on the server and the viewer side of things. An update to the project viewer and viewer code was made back on January 30th, and Nyx has indicated that another push is due early in week 7.
The major news on this project is that a pile-on test is in the planning stage. While dates and times have yet to be confirmed, this is being targeted for later in February on Aditi, and the Lab is looking to have people running a Server-side baking viewer (e.g. the project viewer or any TPV which has implemented the necessary viewer-side code) attend and help provide a thorough load test for the new code.
The test will require viewers to be enabled for certain types of data logging in order to ensure LL gather the relevant information. Details on what will be required will be passed on to those TPVs which indicate they can participate in the test. For those individuals wishing to help out, but whose preferred viewer has not enabled the SSB code by the time of the test, the LL project viewer will have the necessary logging options already enabled. Further details on the proposed test will be published here as they become available.
In terms of TPV integration, it has been confirmed that the SSB code changes for the viewer impact RLVa. Details of the overall impact is unclear, other than RLVa is affected in several areas and Kitty Barnett is working to fix issues. However, this does mean that integration of the SSB code has slowed for some TPVs.
Materials Processing and Project Viewer
As previously reported, the server-side code is on the BlueSteel RC channel, and there are no apparent issues with the code which might prevent its wider distribution. There are still some issues to resolve with materials processing, which means that a project viewer may be delayed another week or so.
Some of the problems appear to have been network related. When testing recent versions of the pre-release materials viewer on a materials-enabled region of the Main grid, it was noted that they (quote) “significantly added” to the network load for the test region, impacting performance. These problems required additional investigation in order to resolve, and it is hoped that they have now been “wrestled to the ground”. There were also some reports of a couple of things still to be fixed in the UI, although it appears that, again, these have now been dealt with.
Given this, and while a publicly available project viewer appearing in week 7 is “not out of the question”, the Lab appear to be looking at week 8 (commencing Monday 18th February) as the week in which a materials project viewer will surface. In the meantime, the recommendation remains that TPVs do not pull code from the current materials code repository for integration into their own viewers.
FMODex
Oz confirmed that the Lab now has FMODex working internally on both Windows and Linux, and passed on thanks to members of the Singularity team for their work in making this possible. The code is to be made available for wider testing by TPVs “Pretty Soon”TM.
As per my last update on the matter, it is unlikely that LL will be able to pre-build the code for TPVs, but the goal is to have something which is not “dramatically different” to how TPVs previously obtained the required code. However, with all that is happening at the moment, it is possible that those TPVs which haven’t already looked to using FMODex may continue “as is” with FMOD until some of the pressure is off in terms of other viewer projects which are rolling forward.
Related Links
- Avatar Baking: “and the clock has started!”
- Materials Processing: the what, why and where
- CHUI: no not a wookie, a viewer from LL
Information source: TPV Dev meeting, Friday 8th February, 2013. There is unlikely to be an official audio recording of this meeting due to it being relocated due to ongoing issues with the Hippotropolis region.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
3.4.5 does not in itself have a remarkably low crash rate – the SL viewer has, in general, had a good resilience in the last few versions. The last CHUI project viewer had a few bugs in it, so hopefully they will all have been fixed by the time they hit the dev version which will be Viewer 3.5.0. The CHUI team has been working well with the users so far, so hopefully this will happen.
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“Remarkably low” was Oz’s description – probably given in terms of the fact that recent 3.4.5 beta releases have shown an upswing in crash rates after things had been smoothed out following clearance of the problems impacting the beta code at the end of last year when crash rates were running at 14%, and so brought releases to a halt for around a 2-month period.
CHUI developments (which is 3.4.6) is now progressing at a faster rate of release than the 3.4.6 viewer-dev, and again, as reported from the TPV dev meeting, is next-in-line for a beta release following the next 3.4.5 beta release due in week 7.
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