SSB/A: rolling to LeTigre, Wednesday July 10th plus Catznip updates

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update Wednesday July 10th: In checking the forum deployment thread for this week’s roll-outs, I see that KarenMichelle Lane has provided a list of regions on LeTigre where SSB/A will be enabled once they have restarted. Again, you’ll need to have an SSB/A-enabled viewer to avoid issues with avatar rendering on these regions. If you find that once the restarts have completed you are encountering issues with avatar rendering (for example, you are using an SSB/A viewer and find you avatar fails to render for yourself or others), or other issues which appear to be linked to SSB/A, please consider raising a bug report detailing the problem, how to reproduce it, and including your environment information (Help > About (Viewer Name) > Copy to Clipboard), which references Project Sunshine.

Update, 22:00 BST: Exodus have released Exodus 13.7.9.1, which includes SSB/A support, CHUI (the Communications Hub User Interface) and the removal of RLVa.

This week marks the start of the enabling of Server-side Baking / Appearance in Second Life.

On Wednesday July 10th, LeTigre will become the first Release Candidate channel on which SSB/A will be enabled. While it is subject to confirmation, it would appear as though all regions on LeTigre will have SSB/A enable once the Wednesday restarts have been completed – I’ll be updating on this following the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday 9th July.

In short this means:

  • Regions on the LeTigre RC channel will see UpdateAgentAppearance, enabled. This is used to request a server-side appearance bake
  • The ability of connected viewers to upload baked textures via the UploadBakedTexture capability and via AssetUploadRequest will be depreciated and removed from simulators on the LeTigre channel
  • As a result, viewers that do not support server-side baking will fail to display avatars correctly.
If you want to avoid seeing increasing numbers of grey avatars (l) and / or avoid people telling you, "you're a cloud" when you appear perfectly fine to yourself (c), update to a version of a viewer supporting SSB/A and see and be seen (r)
If you want to avoid seeing increasing numbers of grey avatars (l) and / or avoid people telling you, “you’re a cloud” when you appear perfectly fine to yourself (c), update to a version of a viewer supporting SSB/A to see others, and have them see you, properly rendered  (r)

Note also that as a result of the SSB/A changes, “temporary texture” uploads will no longer function on regions on the LeTigre RC channel. The Local Textures function found within the majority of viewer will continue to work, however, and provide an alternative means to preview textures at zero cost for most situation where this is required (other than collaborative building projects on Agni).

So, if you have resisted updating your viewer to an SSB/A capable version. or moving from a viewer which is no longer maintained & won’t be supporting SSB/A (e.g SL viewer 1.23.5 or Phoenix) now really is the time to do so. At the time of writing, of the maintained “full” viewers listed in the TPV directory, all but Dolphin, and Imprudence currently support SSB/A, while the current releases of Lumiya, Metabolt and Radegast clients also have confirmed support for SSB/A.

To make sure you get the best from SSB/A, make sure you are running the latest version of your preferred SSB/A-enabled viewer.

Catznip 8.1 Update

While Catznip R8 is SSB/A-enabled, the Catznip team have released R8.1 on Tuesday July 9th. This contains important code updates from Linden Lab. As such, it is considered a mandatory update.

If you are a Catznip user, and even if you have R8 installed, please make sure you do download and update to R8.1 when prompted.

Although Catznip 8 supports SSB/A, R8.1 includes important LL-driven updates to the viewer-side code, please make sure you update when prompted / download R8.1 from the Catnip site
Although Catznip 8 supports SSB/A, R8.1 includes important LL-driven updates to the viewer-side code. If you’re a Catznip user, please make sure you update when prompted

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Published by Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.

9 thoughts on “SSB/A: rolling to LeTigre, Wednesday July 10th plus Catznip updates”

      1. “I felt a great disturbance in the Force… as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.”

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  2. It’s going to be more than a tad interesting to see how SSB/A will work on old, slow machines (Celerons and the like) that support SSE2 and SIMD, but lack a dedicated GPU.

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    1. It could be faster.

      It’s the network that might trip up Linden Labs: does the network have the capacity in the right places to handle the baking servers? Your local cache will no longer be any help, but the texture baking process won’t depend on a good connection. I could see you gaining clock cycles because your PC isn’t doing the texture-baking work, but maybe network-related delays. (Scenario: Wear outfit A, baking process loads components into your cache, then wear outfit B, then replace Jacket B with Jacket A. You lose the cache advantage for that last step.)

      The first week or two could be a bit gnarly, until they get the network optimised. This is exactly the sort of situation where they need the the RC phase for something more than bug testing.

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  4. Instaled it, a clean on enad was taking me forever to rezz even after all inventory being fetched!
    Cant undestand why, all my other viewers are fetching and rezzing fast and so was v8!

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  5. Pingback: SSB/A: rolling to LeTigre, Wednesday July 10th plus Catznip updates | Personal stuff

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