SLDev-Traffic 27

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sldev-traffic no 27

sldev discussions through September 16, 2007

Steam Survey

Laurent Laborde linked to another Steam hardware survey, singling out the fact that 3/4 of reporting users still have under 1G of RAM as interesting.

Multiple SVN Branches

Rob Linden notes that there are now multiple source branches in the subversion repository, documented at Source branches. Jason Giglio updated the page significantly, including a large diagram that shows the branches' relationship to each other.

Straightening Out the Mac Build

The OS X build of the open source viewer has been largely neglected owing to few comments from residents building this platform from source... likely because of the neglected condition. Barney Boomslang and Lawson English described some of the problems, which are now fixed internally, including the outdated llkdu, missing icons, missing cursors, and giant unstripped executable. Of these, all but the executable stripping will appear in the next release candidate source drop. The remaining problems appear to be cross-platform openjpeg performance and lossless decoding issues.

SVG on a Prim

Many sldevers participated in a discussion about how svg on a prim could be implemented without initial server changes. One proposal was creating a special texture that cues the viewer to fetch a notecard contained in an object, which contains the svg description. It wasn't clear whether anyone intends to implement the feature, and the point was raised that it's not tough to describe infinite loops or computationally complex svg objects that could completely stall the viewer.

UI Rework Questions

Lawson English was surprised to find that the UI relies on OpenGL to do some of its clipping, rather than having a traditional view hierarchy. Callum Lerwick brought people's attention to Cairo as consideration of one cross-platform open source framework. Ryan Williams (Linden) expressed love for Cairo, but pointed to a lack of development resources and more pressing grid-wide problems.

OpenJPEG Insertion Project

Callum Lerwick nominates himself as openjpeg czar, seeking to establish 100% stability of openjpeg in Second Life. As performance is nearing that of kdu for Second Life's use of the library, it may be nearing time to replace the library. At present, Callum points to VWR-2383, asking Linden Lab to keep the distributed openjpeg library up to date, and to consider including symbols to help trace through crashes. Bryan O'Sullivan (Linden) indicates that Windows DLLs and Linux shared libraries are coming.

How Fast Can Packets be Sent to the Grid?

Dale Glass has a viewer feature he intends to ship in his own viewer which will make many, many data requests to retrieve some information not currently sent in regular object update packets. He asked if there were any guidelines for how much he should throttle these requests to be kind to the grid. To date, there have been no answers.

The original thread is here:
https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2007-September/004657.html

Japanese Bugs

Dave Simmons (Linden) noted progress on VWR-250, where Japanese text entry was being displayed poorly. Alissa Sabre uploaded updated versions of her modified viewer files to help Dave with his integration efforts.

Second Life Grid Architecture Working Group

Several active participants on this mailing list participated in the Architecture Working Group discussion led by Zero Linden. Much of what was discussed is now on this wiki, and much discussion ensued on the mailing list. SLDev will be the primary mailing list for this work.

This is still a live issue, so look for more details in a subsequent -traffic.

Thanks for readin'!