SecondLife 1.7.0 will be released soon-- please log into Preview to help us test!

We are planning to release SecondLife 1.7.0 sometime during the week of October 16th, 2005 (an exact date has not yet been set). We truly appreciate all of the hard work that's been done by residents on the Preview grid, and ask for one final testing push before 1.7.0 is released.

Residents born before September 20, 2005 can download the SecondLife Preview viewer from http://secondlife.com/preview/ and join us in the Preview grid for some testing fun. If you find a problem, use the Help menu > Report Bug option to report the issue to us automatically.

Thanks again, and see you in Preview!

While the 1.7 preview can handle an impressive amount of agents per sim and seems to have a lot to offer over 1.6, it has serious issues with video.

I bought a parcel of land, rezzed a house, then threw up my FreeView TV screen. My machine locked up solid as soon as it started rezzing. Cursor was unreponsive, the whole nine yards. Had to reboot.

I returned to my house (located in Brilliant) to find that the screen was now rezzed, so I clicked on it to set it up, went through the bookmarks, picked the feed I wanted and told it to play, then crashed that time (at least my machine didn't lock up...which has never happened with 1.6 *knocks on wood*).

After returning again, the video was set up and ready to go, so I pressed the play button on my movie control and crashed yet again. I am now stuck at this point. Multiple relog/play video cycles have resulted in the same instant crash as soon as the play button is pressed on the movie control.

FYI, after having crashing issues with QuickTime in 1.6, I uninstalled QT, uninstalled SL 1.6, rebooted, installed "Quicktime Alternative", rebooted, then did a fresh installe of SL 1.6. After doing this, SL 1.6 crashed only a couple of times, as opposed to frequent crashes before. I am running 1.7 Preview on the same machine, but there seem to be problems in 1.7 Preview now that make the 1.6 problems I was having appear to be minor in comparison.

Having streaming video in my home and club on the main grid are things I realy enjoy and I would hate to have to disable them when 1.7 is released for public consumption.

Please squash these video bugs.

Feel free to contact me for further details or if you would like me to try out any incremental builds, etc. that may help with this serious stability issue before you release 1.7 to the world.

Thanks!


Edit: I found a couple of brave neighbors willing to try and reproduce my crashing problem. They both saw the video fine without any issues. Could it be that 1.7 has some optimizations or work-arounds to make it more stable with the Apple Quicktime client that perhaps is causing it now to be less stable with Quicktime Alternative (The inverse behavior from that seen in 1.6)?

Edit Numero 2: After confirming that both my neighbors were also on PC, but running the Apple Quicktime client (as I expect all but a few people are doing), I uninstalled Quicktime Alternative and re-installed Apple's Quicktime client and now the video works as expected. I haven't returned to the main grid yet to see if I still have stability issues with the Apple Quicktime client there, but it seems to work better than Quicktime Alternative on the preview grid.

The testing done yesterday at 4 PM was nothing short of impressive. You cannot imagine what it feels to be in the same sim with 107 avatars (!), an "old machine" at that, with over 3000 active scripts (of course, counting the ones "worn" by the avatars there), and have about the same frame rate as a normal day in the 1.6 SL. In my case, I got around 6-7 fps when turning shiny & terrain detail off, but strangely enough, even when we dropped down to 18 avatars -- I remained at 6-7 fps! (logging early this morning, I found out that the empty sim has around 30 fps on my "replacement PC", a 2.67 GHz Celeron with a RADEON 9600).

It's utterly incredible and it has to be experienced to be believed in. I attached a few images, but with 100 avatars around you, it's hard to get an angle where you can get them all except by flying away and seeing tiny dots on the map

We even survived a sim bomb (only 5 crashes out 84 people who were online at the moment) and several shootings The machine was rock solid (despite its "age", people could safely log out and log in again without fear of crashing their SL clients, and it worked all the time (since many were playing around with the graphics settings, the "Guiness Book of Records" world record for avatars on a sim was only sustained for 10 seconds - but there were over 100 avatars around for a quarter of an hour or so and most of the 80+ avatars were around for well over an hour). Notice that people were being nasty - bringing their primmed hair, their blinged shoes, their dance bracelets with tons of animations that had to be uploaded first, etc. Everything worked as expected. Just much faster!

Really, really impressive. Lag at the Welcome Area or at "busy" clubs will be a thing of the past by the end of this month, if all goes well

Hey Gwyngwyngwyn, remember that time last year when it was totally late for me and we talked about "four corner clubs" with like 40 people on each corner?

It seems so long ago, and yet, the future is so very near.

Altho, I must say that busy clubs can only stand to get busier.

So, in 1.7 a four corner club would allow for a massive 400+ people gathering?
I wonder what the dwell on that will be

I keep going into the twilight zone while flying around in vehicles. It usually happens on handoff, but every now and then it happens when I am in the middle of a sim. I've made this point to one of the Lindens in email. Hopefully it's just the age of the machines.

I also notice attaching a HUD object to some point will load it up with whatever offset it had before. So you attach something to Center, move it to the left of the screen, detach it, then reattach it to Top Left or whatever, and it's clear off the screen!

That's right, Damanios Imagine how the next Anniversary Party will look like!

And yes, you could see some of the participants in this "stress test" drooling about the dwell they would get in their clubs...

Hehe, very much so But the best advantage is that a club with 40-50 people (and not necessarily twice as much) will be so fast and unlaggy that the experience will be awesome instead of struggling. The expression "oh, I'm tired of laggy clubs with people dancing at 1 fps" will simply drop off SL's vocabulary

Well, to be honest, while the sim hardware in the Preview Grid may be old (and thus making the stress test more realistic), the truth is that there is an asset server and a login server just for the 100+ people who were around. That will also make a difference, we'll just have to see how the "real" asset servers, handling 3,000+ people at the same time, will behave in the main grid.

I had so much fun at the Preview party in the WA yesterday. I would like to see them leave the dance floor up for the first day 1.7 goes live to celebrate.

Not sure if this explains gwyneth's low fps when people left but on both my machines and the friends i had their i found it took quite a bit of time to log off and quit the preview program after the event, so not sure if after taking that many people the app has some cpu issues, its hard to tell when the app always takes up 99% of windows time but it just felt very sluggish even after the people left.

Yea i've noticed the vehicle thing too, think its a mix of 3 problems, firstly the vehicles scripts are now having to deal witht he script scheduler, and in the preview people test out all kinds of stuff, the asset server isnt the same as the main grid so i dont expect it to be anything special, althought most of the sims are quite good, being class 3's. and lastly is the whole sim handoff equation lol, personally i'd rather get some twirlies and funny flying than loose communications with the sims or loose my attachments and have to relog.

As for attach offsets an object only remembers its last offset, no matter what point it was last attached to on your body, otherwise you'd have to store so much data for each object and each point that would all need to be streamed to you depending what point you wanted it to be attached to.

I showed up around 5:30.

Only about 30 people there at that point.

My job tonight is to go and actually finish a test.

Gotta do my lindenly duty.

Also, i should say goodbye to my fur.

I picked it up in preview lusk.

Gunna miss the lil guy.

LOS LOBOS!

And by the way, it *was* strangely fun at the party...

and i managed to crash out when i alt-tabbed to yahoo.

Week of the 16th of October 2005 is about done and yet to see 1.7 in main grid... given them 2 days before the week of the 30th of October 2005...
Sorry not complaneing Im just impasiant. Yes Ive heald on this long I can hold on longer...

Hurry Lindens.... Please?

Easy wont happen this week, they never update on a friday unless they can help it. and although i'd love to see it go live i'd prefer it be bug free upto the branch point.

I vote for Monday or Tuesday.

Hi folks,

We ran into a couple of major snags about mid-week. We solved them all yesterday and today. Karen is preparing build 50 as I write this, which should be our final release candidate. We are going to continue testing the rest of the week and plan on launching 1.7 bright and early Monday morning. Please be on the lookout for Karen's official post in the announcements forums.

Chris