On Tuesday night, the core database on the preview grid suffered data corruption which took the database offline in a way that wasn't easily recoverable. Rather than risk running on a potentially corrupted database, we instead decided to start from a fresh snapshot of our production database. Unfortunately, this means that any inventory which was created on the preview grid has been lost. We understand that there was a fair amount of content created, and apologize for the loss.
Now, the good news:
The good news is since we used a recent database snapshot, all user accounts that existed as of late Monday night (5/
will be able to log into the preview grid. Also, if you left content in the world (and not in your inventory), it should still be there.An additional note about rendering features - please read:
With release 1.9.1, we have begun the process of converting the Second Life render pipeline to use GLSL (OpenGL Shader Language). The reason for this is to accommodate some of the changes we are planning to introduce to the graphics engine, including the new lighting model,
Unfortunately, during our testing process (which includes Preview) we have found that many graphics drivers either do not fully support GLSL, or have significant performance issues with GLSL.
As a result, we have decided to scale back our initial introduction of GLSL support. Instead of using GLSL for the majority of our rendering, we are initially only using GLSL for rendering avatars and for ripple water. Previously we were using Cg (another shader language) for these features, and a non shader fall back is still available.
What this means:
- The new lighting model currently only supports "Sun/Moon only" and "Nearby local lights". The "Nearby local lights" option is still a significant improvement to the "local lights" option in 1.9.0, largely due to the fact that it has a relatively small performance impact on most machines. The limitation of this option however is that only the six lights nearest your avatar will be used to light the scene.
- Some subtle rendering effects that were available in Preview with shaders enabled will not be available yet (specular highlights and some advanced fog effects).
Coming soon:
- We hope to be able to provide the "All local lights" and "Shadows" lighting options soon, but these rely on GLSL and will have to wait until we have had more time to test the new shaders. We hope to make this available in the next release.