Linden Lab announces upcoming improvements for Second Life

Daniel Voyager

On Tuesday 20th October Linden Lab published a blog post about Second Life Improvements – What’s New & What’s Coming Soon!. Here are the improvements announced in the blog post with updates on other projects going on…

Project Valhalla

The Project Valhalla viewer now comes with the new Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) that supports modern web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and WebGL. This new framework replaces the outdated QTWebkit framework and makes sure for a better experience.

The lab points out that standard HTML5 is now the way forward and I think this is a good step forward. Flash content and Quicktime may still work however the lab have said they can’t promise support.

Rendering Complexity

The lab have announced a new Avatar Maximum Complexity control which lets you prevent expensive to render avatars from lagging you. There is a default limit which is based on the rending performance of the user’s system. There will be a notice when rending complexity changes apparently that will give you an indication when you are over the limit of too many avatars around you.

Another update is that you can now create different saved presets for your graphics settings and quickly switch them using a new top bar pull down menu. This sounds like fun and I’m sure it will be very useful indeed.

Notifications

Incoming notifications are now sorted into categories providing a better way to view, prioritize and manage notices. Each notification in the list can be now be expanded or collapsed too.

Second Life Website

The lab have said in the blog post that Flash has now been removed from the Second Life website due to recent security problems.

Mesh Importer

The lab have said that they have recently shipped the Mesh Importer Viewer which performs name based LOD association and handles models with a variety of materials.

Inventory Loss

The lab are still working on the complicated problem and improvements are in the pipeline. The lab mentioned this too..”A recent simulator change now prevents loss of no-copy items due to a failed rez”.

HTTP Project

In the new RC Viewer the lab have upgraded all the rest of the HTTP uses in the viewer. Features will now perform better and more reliably in the new RC viewer.

Summary

Back in February 2015 the lab did publish some huge improvements for Second Life including Hover Height, Notifications, Mesh Import, Viewer Managed Marketplace and updates to the graphics settings.

It’s really good to know that Second Life is still being worked on and that exciting improvements are coming soon. Yay! 🙂

10 thoughts on “Linden Lab announces upcoming improvements for Second Life”

  2. I sure hope these improvements will reduce the terrible lag that has been getting worse over the past year. When at big event Sims… Mesh bake fails have become common place and frame rates have been dropping. I suspect a root cause is the increased use of some horribly inefficient mesh clothing and more avatars going with higher definition mesh body parts.

    I go to sl stage dance shows and take photos of the dancers live…. But often those dancers with mesh body parts never rez and there is no mesh re rez button (unlike texture refresh). Re rezzing is often the only way for the mesh part to show up to the viewer. As such many top dancers use non mesh bodies and clothing when dancing at 75-100 avatar events. So the audience will see them.

    So crossing fingers that these changes will start helping. The too complex an avatar notice might be great as buyers of terribly inefficient created mesh clothing will stop wearing these clothes and these clothing creators will be forced to learn how to decimate their mesh models.

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    1. Thanks Toysoldier.

      I find at big events lag is very bad at times and it takes ages to for anything to rez fully. It’s been a huge problem in Second Life for so many years and I hope that these improvements will start helping too.

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    2. Sigh Toysoldier, I’ve been riding the SL hardware upgrade treadmill for a decade. If you want decent performance you will need new hardware.That need has been accelerating over the years. I tried Bright Canopy in the pre-launch and it does get you off this iteration of the upgrade treadmill help but I haven’t bothered with it since it went production. I will just wait until all the Sansar mess gets some more clarity.

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      1. Well Willow, if my Window7-64bit, i7, 8GB high speed RAM, SSD drive, and AMD HD7950 system connected to my 25mbps-Down / 2.5mbps Up Internet is not enough of a system to prevent lag on SL… then things are not looking good for the future of SecondLife.

        Trust me… the lag I am experiencing in SL during large popular events on sims has nothing to do with my system. The lag is between the sim code and the viewer. Its the countless examples of horrendously created mesh clothing and avatars that are being bought & worn from creators that have no understanding or care about decimating their creation. Using FS and right clicking avatars at the venues I can see how so much clothing uses massive amounts of unneeded vertices.

        Then there is just the problem in SL of MESH OBJECT BAKE FAILS. Not lagged rezzing… the mesh objects randomly do not rez at all unless the person wearing the mesh un-attaches and re-attaches the mesh object. Mesh seems to be overly buggy on Lag. And there is no button on the viewer to force the mesh object to re-rez.

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      2. ToySoldier, That hardware sounds similar to my graphics computer system which I use up until 9 months ago to run Second Life. Now it’s main use is to run high quality 3D graphs where the render time gets very computer and graphic intensive. The main difference it runs 12GB of high speed RAM instead of 8GB, is liquid cooled, runs dual monitors, is a 64bit cpu with 12 cores, and has two custom 2GB graphic cards. I don’t run SL anymore on that system now it is dedicated to graphics processing 3D graphics.

        The strange thing I found and can’t explain is apparently you can have too much graphic power with SL. The system I run SL on now is 64bit, with 8GB of RAM, has a single monitor, and its graphics are much simpler. It actually runs or ran SL with less lag nine months ago. Although SL lag particularly with mesh avatars in crowded environments has been getting worse and worse.

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