EOTB: Server Side Apperance Appears This Week, Maybe Today

In the Linden Blog this week, it was announced Project Shunshine, also known as Server-Side Baking, would be rolled out onto the Grid.

This week, the server component of Project Sunshine will go live across the entire grid! This means that all the improvements we discussed in our previous post will be available to everyone in Second Life.

It’s important to remember that you need to be using an up-to-date Viewer to enjoy these improvements. If you’re still using an outdated Viewer, the server-side changes rolling out now will cause you to see some avatars as broken or incomplete. As of this week, all avatars will be using the new system and will appear broken to you if you don't update. 

Besides the official viewers, there are several third-party viewers that have been updated to handle server-side baking, such as Firestorm, Singularity, and Cool VL. For those who use a viewer not updated to handle the new way textures are loaded, in the words of Firestorm's Tonya Souther it's the "Last Call." As she sees it, if one's computer can't handle the newer viewers, it's time to get a new machine or bid Second Life goodbye for a while.

According to someone in a group chat I was in last night, Server-Side could come early as today:

A Reminder for Everyone...    SSA -Day Tomorrow.. ServerSide Appearence  Arrives Tomorrow! 
Tomorrow LL rolls out Server Side Appearance.  Anyone using an outdated viewer will have problems seeing other avatars at Arinultra  and anywhere else in Second Life.  All those WITH current SSA enabled viewers should notice a huge improvement.  This will pretty much put an end to all those endless gray, blurry, or cloudy "wardrobe malfunctions."   Up-to-date Viewers are Required such as Firestorm, Singularity or others, including the basic LL platform.

So the day some of us have been anticipating, or dreading, has finally arrived.

Sources: Linden Blog, The Tigress' Den

Bixyl Shuftan

"Server Side" Blues

Well, yours truly is down to one working viewer. With Linden Lab's "Project Sunshine" and it's "server side" baking, the result was my Singularity viewer, which hadn't offered an upgrade since May, starting to get buggy. It was freezing up frequently, rezzing slower, and crashing more often. And finally, it's starting to become unusable, freezing up when starting then crashing. So that leaves a year old version of Cool VL. More recent upgrades of this viewer for some reason won't work. And neither will Firestorm or the official viewers.

The result is well, some avatars looking like the one above. Exploring my options on what to do.

Figuring Out Viewer 3

As demonstrated in the recent "Relay Rap" article, it seems my Cool VL Viewer is having a harder time in Second Life these days, objects and people taking longer to rezz. Firestorm won't work on my Mac, for whatever reason. So I'm taking a look at the official viewer from Linden Lab, Viewer 3 (or rather, Viewer 3.4.5 as the latest version is called).

So far, it does rezz objects and people faster, sometimes. Other times, it can lag almost as badly. Although items rezz eventually, it seems more likely to freeze up and crash. The interface is quite different from Viewer One and similar Third-Party viewers. I had to look around for the minimap and movement controls for a minute. Looking for the map took time. I still haven't figured out yet how to shout a text beyond 20 meters. And multiple IMs can be a problem.

And oh yeah, if you log off V3 in one avatar, use another in Cool VL (and presumably Phoenix, Singularity, and others) and log out without changing, logging back into Viewer 3, you'll be wearing both avatars. Quirks like these can result in a few surprises.

Hopefully I'll be figuring this out soon.

Bixyl Shuftan

The Cool VL Viewer

"Use what you have for as long as you can." That's a piece of advice I was given by family when it came to expensive items, such as computers, especially in tough economic times such as now. But with the popularity of mesh, more and more objects and people have appeared as crude shapes. And it seemed like I'd have to get a new computer sooner than I was ready to. Lomgren Smalls did tell me about an alternative to going into debt for a new machine: the Cool VL Viewer.

Read more in Design.