Changes
- Sit, stand, walk, and fly now work. Bring the cursor to the bottom of the screen to reveal the stand/walk/fly buttons.
- There is a "pie" menu now, triggered by right-clicking on objects. Currently, the only option is "Sit".
- It's now possible to ride on and operate vehicles.
- There is more information in the "Statistics" window about what nearby regions are doing. Regions which are fully live show as "Live" in green. "Connected" in red means that the EstablishAgentCommunications message is late. "Discovered" in red indicates a region just beyond the active area, which may become live shortly or may go away, depending on the avatar's movements.
Known problems
- "Run" is not yet supported.
- Clicking on objects is very coarse. It's using a bounding box around the entire prim. So get close and have a clear shot to the thing you are clicking on.
- Left click"Touch" does not do anything yet.
- Touching down after flying will not end "Fly" mode.
- Some Second Life regions will still be slow to appear. This sim-side bug is now fixed on a few regions on the beta grid, and should be fixed grid-wide in the near future.
- Double region crossings with vehicles in Second Life do not work very well. They don't work reliably in the classic C++ viewers, either. There's some extra diagnostic capability for region crossings in the statistics window. Normally, the current region and avatar location appear at the top of the window. If anothe region name appears in red below that one, it indicates a simulator-out-of-sync condition. Two simulators are both claiming to control the avatar.
- Region crossings in Open Simulator only work in some regions with a recent fix. Ubittest <-> Ubittest2 works.
- Results in other regions may vary. We're working with the Open Simulator developers to clean this up.
- In Open Simulator, entering a new region with an avatar on a vehicle may result in some vehicle parts being missing. The next region crossing will clean up the problem. This is a combination of a simulator bug and the lack of a workaround in Sharpview for that bug. The C++ viewers handle this more gracefully.
- Motion extrapolation across region crossings needs work. Motion is far too jerky.
- Frame rates vary too much. This is a problem with lock conflicts at the Rend3/WGPU level.
Working on that.
- Open Simulator regions larger that 1024m x 1024m will cause an error, because the land mesh builder does not yet optimize large land meshes.
1024 x 1024 regions and smaller work.
There's also 1-meter gap in the ground at each region boundary, because region splicing is not implemented yet.
Notes
- The four nearest regions are displayed. Objects are always shown at High level of detail.
The world looks good, but we pay for that in network bandwidth.
200Mb/sec is normal and 400Mb/sec is possible. If your Internet connection has data transfer limits,
this can result in high bills.
- If the viewer's cache is on a rotating hard disk, performance will be disappointing.
A solid-state disk is needed.
Unimplemented features
- Avatars are still blocks. Viewpoint is always first-person.
- Texture animation is unimplemented.
- New materials (PBR) are unimplemented.
- Teleports are unimplemented.
- Very little of the standard user interface is implemented.
- Windows and Linux are supported, but not, as yet, MacOS.
Reporting bugs
- If there's a panic, there should be a popup. Please take a screenshot
and send to "info@animats.com".
This test release is being made available to a few volunteers for initial testing. Please do not re-distribute. Use a low-value alt account when testing.
Report problems to info@animats.com. Please attach a screenshot of any panic messages. |
