By Bixyl Shuftan
In its latest blog post, Linden Lab announces another update for it's viewer ready to be downloaded by the residents. It says it's been updating "Project Shinning - an initiative that will make avatars load and rez more quickly and reliably."
We’ve tested changing of outfits, avatar swapping, and initial avatar loading into worlds, and our tests showed performance gains across the board. Bottom line, Second Life users will experience less time in “clouded” or untextured avatar states and/or completely failed bakes that require relogs.
They included a video, narrated by Torley Linden, with details. The blog post promises "important updates you'll need to enjoy the benefits of Project Sunshine, so update if you haven't yet."
My own personal experience with the new viewer, based on a day's experience, was mixed. Avatars can still take a while a load. But eventually they did, although it could still take a few minutes, even in a place with just several other avatars. For someone used to chat interfaces based on Viewer 1, the communications HUD left something to be desired, especially when getting a number of Instant Messages. When I had to talk to several people at once, I had to log off and go back to Singularity. And once when trying to log on, the viewer just refused to coooperate (picture above). On the other hand, the glitch from the last official viewer of freezes and crashes when making IMs seemed to be gone, when it was working anyway.
Linden Lab promises two more updates, the first being "A server-side update, rolling out soon. It's at this point that you'll began to notice significant improvements in avatar and object load times and reliability." But for those who don't upgrade, the Grid will be a gray world. And later on, "A second Viewer update, released after the server-side improvements are rolled out." It's with this third step that the Lab says users will get "the full benefits of Project Sunshine."
With many residents still using the older Phoenix Viewers rather than the official viewers, it remains to be seen if everyone will benefit from Project Sunshine.
For the blog post: Click Here.
Bixyl Shuftan
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