After Firestorm released their PBR viewer
in June, while there was praise for it as it allowed people to see what could be done with this new feature in Second Life, there were also numerous complaints about lag and crashes.
In August, Firestorm announced they were making a change to their three-viewer policy and keep the last viewer before PBR, 6.1.17, around permanently, recommending those who were having serious issues temporarily downgrade, or adjust their viewer Preferences, while they were working on an update. A few days ago
on Tuesday September 17, they announced that their new viewer update, one that would deal with some of the issues caused by the PBR technology, was ready.
...a significant minority of our users have been struggling with the higher performance demands of the last release (7.1.9). We have been in discussion with Linden Lab since that release, and, as you can read in the Second Life Blog post linked at the top of this section, there is a significant focus on making the viewer more capable and performant on lower spec and older machines. These updates are being delivered in phases, and this release delivers the first batch (aligning us to the Second Life release known as Atlasaurus). It does not mark the end of those improvements, Linden Lab has laid a roadmap of at least two further releases (DeltaFPS and ExtraFPS) that specifically focus on performance.
This release fixes a swathe of issues, those of you plagued by crashes after TP were almost certainly victims of the “mirror at home” bug. This bug was fixed soon after the release and has been tested throughout our beta phase for this update. the crash rate for this viewer is far far lower than for the 7.1.9 update. Performance too, the performance updates, should see most of you enjoying better, more consistent frame rates and where you had high rates already, simple seeing more consistency as you move around the world.
This viewer release ushers in a new-era of voice services in Second Life. Linden Lab has been working on a replacement for the ageing Vivox “SLVoice” solution for some time now. The new voice system is based upon open standards, notably WebRTC. The new voice services significantly improve voice quality over the legacy voice system, offering up to 48Khz CD-quality audio. They are directly embedded inside the viewer, removing the dependency on an external support process (slvoice.exe) and hopefully increasing voice stability. Linden Lab has also used the migration to WebRTC to enhance security and reduce “data leakage.” WebRTC point-to-point calls will all route through a Second-Life-managed proxy service, ensuring that your IP address and identity are always protected.
For those used to using the SL-provided voice morphing, this will no longer be available. The team at Linden Lab has put together a FAQ page to help you resolve any questions. Importantly, WebRTC is not compatible with SLVoice. Moreover, the back-end services that support voice cannot co-exist so once Linden Lab roll out the new WebRTC services across the grid, the older voice services will cease to work.
To make it very clear, when Linden Lab rolls out the WebRTC backend across the grid, SLVoice will cease to work FOR ALL VIEWERS. This is not something Firestorm or any TPV can alter/fix/workaround.
