Viewer 2009 rumors, scuttlebutt, etc. ?

Dunno but the total reworking of the texture handling is exciting. I would presume that has to do with how things are cached and recalled in particular.

"Viewer 2009 seems like it will involve an almost complete rework of the much-maligned Second Life user-interface, with two big-name companies reinventing it. Big Spaceship (whom we already know) appear to be primarily involved with design and feel, while 80/20 looks to be producing the implementation. We don't believe that any additional customer input is being entertained in the meantime, judging by Benjamin Linden's long absence from his regular office hours."

:0 i was thinkin' the other day when i read that stuff, that y'know, some people probably -do- want the 'simish' experience when they come to sl... default avi (of course), but they might also expect a pre-alloted slice o'land and a prefab house all ready for them, like they might get in 'the sims'. i wonder if the lab might pre-package something for that and offer it for 'sale' (rental really) up front for new users?

Damn, and I was hoping that they were working on something actually useful, like the alpha mesh that was supposed to start getting into the client for 1.23.

A new user interface? From Big Spaceship? Oh god.

I've heard rumors about that but of course LL isn't commenting on avatar meshes or anything. You probably have access to more inside sources than I do though so you'd know before me

Not a new avatar mesh, an alpha wearable for the regular mesh. Like this...

That too, from what I can gather allowing alpha meshes would actually lower the load needed to rez an av for thing such as tinies, child av's, robot av's, (some) furries, and certain other non standard av shapes. Of course since they won't acknowledge that they're working on it all we seem to have is dropped hints and hopes that they are.

IMPORTANT NOTE: We realize that there are a few workarounds out there other than invisiprims for this issue. However, some of these rely on techniques such as attaching megaprims to your avatar. Due to the potential implications of this, we are not officially supporting this workaround and may even take steps to disable this in the future. Please be aware that these features may be disabled in the future and should not be expected to work indefinitely.

This feature has been a large part of the end-goal of an avatar pipeline improvements project that several lindens (myself included) have been working on for a while. We have some internal demos of the functionality that are currently going through testing as we speak. I will post images of what kinds of things you can expect to see with this feature shortly. We will be rolling out our first round of changes in the 1.23 client, but due to backwards compatibility issues, will be unable to expose the functionality for a couple more versions of the client. This will give us sufficient time to get the interface and other aspects of the design solidified and working 100%.

Once released, there will be two options:
1) hide your entire base avatar

2) Use alpha-masking to mask out pieces of your base avatar

Alpha masking will work much like Brent Linden's design above, however, we will not be changing the UV mapping of the meshes. These "alpha masks" will be assets that you can wear & detatch and will cause parts of your avatar mesh to not be drawn on a per-pixel basis. There will be no alpha blending with these masks which means you will not be able to have your avatar appear semi-transparent, but there will be no blending issues that there are with invisiprims.

[https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/technology/blog/2009/03/30/intensifying-open-source-efforts]
We have created a new version of the Second Life client in a public repository where we will allow direct committing from community members alongside our own daily work. [...] We will also make this version available as a download alongside the official SL client, once we have it sufficiently stable.

I don't guess I'm seeing much there on Viewer09 or much on the cache system either. A lot on flexie-sculpties.

Here's a comment on V9 from massively.com:

The contrast between Big Spaceship's homepage and 80/20's homepage is considerable.

These "alpha masks" will be assets that you can wear & detatch and will cause parts of your avatar mesh to not be drawn on a per-pixel basis. There will be no alpha blending with these masks which means you will not be able to have your avatar appear semi-transparent, but there will be no blending issues that there are with invisiprims.

first expected hack besides for digigrade legs and invisi-avs?? dithered semi transparency

Is Viewer 2009 - which I propose we call V9 - going to be a separate viewer or is it going to replace the "normal main viewer", the Second Life Release?

Is V9 going to be open source, or is it already?

Scuttlebutt is a naval term used for "gossip/rumors/latest unofficial info".

I always find it odd when i see civilians using it.

I'd like to see alpha blending on avs. Would that be problematic? I was wondering why they don't go the whole hog and provide that option.

Scuttlebutt is a naval term used for "gossip/rumors/latest unofficial info".

I always find it odd when i see civilians using it.

Alpha blended avatar + prim alpha hair (or anything else alpha near the avatar) = Lose.