This Summer has had some highs and lows. SL21B was a great success – the exhibitions, the events & performances, the town halls and the beta launch of Second Life mobile app – we enjoyed celebrating with all of you! But the rollout of PBR has been rocky and we know that it’s caused a lot of frustration. If you are having issues such as lag or texture loading with the latest release, please see this blog post for details on what happened and what you can do for better performance.
Now let’s catch you all up on recent product developments! Continue reading for mobile updates, server changes, news for creators and Viewer releases.
📱 Mobile Update
Our Second Life mobile app – in Beta for Premium and Premium Plus users since SL21B – received a bunch of updates last week including the following bug fixes + improvements:
- Fixes to the client against bad extended material data
- Reduced sensitivity of v-stick resulting in improved control of avatar movement
- Support for new voice chat functions
- Lighting falloff calculation is improved
- Groups: Fix so Groups identifies correct members
- New Memory Allocators: iOS and Android: We’ll now use the OS memory reports to hint our memory allocations in real-time, allowing us to load a bit more content before we run out of RAM.
- Fixes resizing the app on Android folding devices (e.g. Samsung Z-Fold)
- Prevents several issues relating to executing UI operations on the wrong thread
- Water no longer appears in weird places after you teleport
- More fixes for BOM-using avatars where textures would not load
And UI Changes:
- Wear or remove a group tag
- UI to show (or hide) group titles
- Fix to not include self in nearby count
- L$ balance (in developer settings)
- Modal dialog updates
- Simplified loading animation for Destination Guide
Please give WebRTC Voice on mobile a try! Enable via menu > Settings > Developer tools > Voice
and visit one of the following WebRTC Voice regions:
And never miss a message from friends (or non-friends!) while offline when you enable Notifications!
🌐 Server Changes
Some important fixes and features have made their way across the grid in the last several months.
We fixed the hovering-on-login issue. Your floating avatar landed as soon as you moved, but we’re still very happy that this fix landed!
We also shipped support for 2k textures which allows artists to add much more detail to their creations.
We made several under the hood changes to support upcoming Lua scripting and fixed a bug with region restart scheduling.
And this week, the grid also welcomed a bunch of changes in support of Combat 2.0 – read more below – and we shipped support for gamepad input to LSL scripts.
Lua Scripting
We are working on Lua scripting for compatibility with LSL, there is a lot to be said here, so perhaps it’s better to link you directly to the Lua FAQ.
🪀 Creator news
💣 Combat 2.0
Combat 2.0 is here with the Tuesday 8/20/2024 update to Second Life Server
- New LSL functions and region settings to support building flexible combat systems using the built in damage system.
- Damage adjustment for armor and healing.
- Damage types, allow for vulnerabilities and resistances.
- System supported combat logs for leader board support.
- Region settings allow control of death teleports and damage throttles.
- More in depth information in the wiki https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:LSL_Combat2
- Find cool combat destinations in our new Combat category in the Destination Guide
Coming soon:
💻 Viewers
🗺️Atlasaurus
In addition to several performance fixes for Macs, VRAM budgeting and improved memory handling for all, Atlasaurus includes support for taking large groups of items back into inventory as individual objects, instead of a coalesced bundle of items, leaving you wondering if your favorite chair is really in there with the rest of your living room set. There is also a new Max Nearby Lights slider in Advanced Graphics Settings, for when things seem too bright. Plus a sneak peek at GLTF model imports which allows you a local, preview-only version, of what an imported model will look like. Plus all of WebRTC merged in! More below.
🗣️WebRTC Voice Viewer
We are very excited at this opportunity to update the voice experience for all Second Life residents! In fact it’s worthy of its own blog post.
🧰Maintenance Viewers
DeltaFPS will be the next Release Candidate (RC) which will contain many more performance improvements focusing on bringing frame rates up to and if not better than, where they were before. With the move to GitHub we are also trying a new development method called GitFlow. This will mean fewer parallel Release Candidates (RCs) and more frequent, smaller feature releases with only one active RC at a time. For this reason both Maintenance B and C, which were published and had several thousand user hours each, were closed and merged into the develop branch. All those users were offered an upgrade to Atlasaurus already.
Default Viewer
Materials Featurettes
This viewer was promoted to default release in June and contains support for Mirrors, PBR Terrain and 2k textures. We are excited about supporting these features and improving the visual quality of content in Second Life. Now it’s time to focus on those performance issues though.