Linden Lab publishes upcoming improvements to Second Life

Linden Lab have published a new blog post today on the official Second Life blog about some new upcoming improvements to Second Life. There are six improvements worth mentioning including Hover Height, Notifications – different notice types, new Mesh Importer Viewer, Viewer Managed Marketplace, graphics settings – new save named sets and changes to the viewer autobuild process.

All of these new improvements,  fixes and changes below should be rolled out to the default Second Life Viewer during the next few weeks or so according to Linden Lab. This is good news that Linden Lab are improving Second Life still and yay for 2015 improvements to Second Life. 🙂

These changes include improving the way your avatar interacts with surfaces inworld, giving you more tools for managing your preferences for notifications and graphics settings, as well as improvements to make life easier for mesh creators and merchants. Read below for the details and links to download Project Viewers that will let you get an early look at some of these improvements.

Hover Height

We’ve been doing some work on all this and testing the results in the Project HoverHeight Viewer. This viewer, and some accompanying server changes, improve things in two ways: the order in which we make adjustments to your vertical position has been made more stable — combining the same set of attachments and animations should now always produce the same vertical offset: even if it’s not perfect, it will at least be predictable. Because it can’t always be perfect, we’ve also introduced a new final adjustment that is directly under your control: a new avatar right-click selection allows you to tweak your vertical position. This final adjustment is shared with everyone around you so that they too will see you correctly, and is saved locally by your viewer so that it persists between sessions. This new feature was inspired by a proposal from the Firestorm viewer team, and they’ve been helping with testing it.

Notifications

Busy Second Life Residents have told us via JIRA, the Suggestion form, and other channels that they need better ways to control and organize the many notices they receive: inventory offers, group notices, event invites, and money transactions all result in the same kind of pop-ups and notice chiclets and are all listed together. It can be difficult to keep track of what has been happening, and all too easy to miss something important. An upcoming Viewer release will add a new floater that provides separate displays for different notice types, and the ability to sort them. You can prioritize and organize what’s important to you.

Mesh Import

Mesh creators have sometimes found that large or complex models can’t be imported to Second Life, and the reason why is not always clear. We’re upgrading support for mesh import: an upcoming Viewer update will allow uploading models that have more than eight unique faces, and improved association of physics representations and LODs by name. It also improves error reporting, including a detailed mode that dumps everything you might want to know about how your model is being processed. You can try out this work in-progress now in the Project Importer Viewer.

Viewer Managed Marketplace

Merchants get improvements too! In the next couple of months, you’ll be able to manage the  inventory in your Second Life Marketplace store directly from the Viewer (there is a Project Viewer available for exploring this on Aditi). Items no longer need to be loaded into the Merchant Outbox or a Magic Box; instead you’ll designate items to be sold directly from your personal inventory.

Graphics Settings

Your preferred way to see the world can change depending on what you’re doing, and your graphics preferences strongly affect the performance of your viewer. We’re introducing an open source contribution that allows you to save named sets of graphics settings, with a drop-down for quickly changing between them. When you sit down to listen to a performance in your favorite music club, you can pick settings optimized for rich display of your companions and settings, and when you go exploring you can pick a set that trades off longer draw distances and better lighting effects for simpler rendering of details – whatever you think is important. This Viewer will also expose some controls we’ve been experimenting with for some time to give you better protection against nearby objects or avatars that are too difficult to render fully on your system.

Second Life Developer Tools

Finally, we’ve been updating several of the tools we use to build both viewers and simulators; while this doesn’t directly provide new features, we believe it will improve stability, performance, and the productivity of developers so that we can more quickly bring you an even better Second Life.

What do you think about these new upcoming improvements to Second Life during 2015 ? Share your views in comments. 🙂