RLV news

Hello there,

Wow it's been two months since my last post... Sorry about that. Let me briefly explain why I've been so silent :

- The V2 SL viewer has been added more nasty bugs than fixes, and that hindered my ability (and motivation) to work on a new RLV, although it has been on "active waiting" mode for more than two months. The bugs are about very frequent crashes due to memory bloat (https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-1650), invisiprims being totally useless when using dynamic shadows, breaking prim shoes (https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2181 , I think, it is marked as fixed but I had to back it out from my code if I wanted to see invisiprims again), and other countless bugs that, frankly, should have been fixed two years ago when V2 was still beta. This is a shame. Even now, you can't write in a notecard and be sure that what you write will be added where your cursor are. You can't use Mouselook either. Ctrl-W works when it wants. The Discard button is so invasive that you often press it by mistake, losing your purchase and wasting your money. What a joke.

- For more than a month now, the latest version was so bloated that the textures would suddenly start to re-rez repeatedly as soon as the memory limit was reached. It was sickening. First time the viewer made me wanna puke for real.

- I've been working at testing mesh on my RLV, so far so good, except... well, meshes are not resizable when rigged (i.e., when used as a piece of clothing). Apparently, it is too hard technically to allow for resizing a rigged mesh, but this limitation is a fatal blow to the mesh clothing and restraint market. This is so disappointing, I was working on some new mesh restraints, well this project has been shelved now. The official ETA for the fix is "Someday/Maybe". Just take a look at the JIRA entry to see for yourself : https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2374

- Third party viewers like the RLV are still unable to upload mesh, because the library is proprietary. I've been trying the open-source version, but had less success than others.

- I am currently working on overhauling the animation system in my products, to give more choices to the user without breaking the existing RR plugins. I'll blog more about this later, when it's ready.

So right now the RLV is on standby, but almost ready for a release should something new happen. It is just that for now, I have nothing new to offer compared to 2.7.3.2, which is more stable and usable than 2.7.3.3.

Ok, this post sounded like a rant... And not at all what I was supposed to talk about in the first place. No worries, I'll blog about the next thing shortly :)

Have fun,
Marine