Massively^™

Linden Lab has released the twelfth 1.20 Second Life release candidate viewer. Release candidates start counting from zero, so the first one in the series is RC0.

Linden Lab says this release candidate cycle will be extended, and some of the skinning project that was slated to come after 1.20 is being moved up, so that users will be able to switch the UI skin before this becomes the official viewer, rather than in some unspecified future release.

So, there will be a couple more release candidates before 1.20 becomes official, and it is pitched to take a bit longer between them.

This edition fixes some more crashes and freezes, but still has that nasty buffer-rendering offset glitch that afflicts snapshots, among other things.

Bridie Linden has updated the development roadmap (actually, it's not a roadmap so much, as a set of directions, but bear with us) for upcoming releases. The release cycle for the 1.20 viewer is going to be longer than usual, expecting to end in June.

The map is a bit tangled, with a commingling of server-side and viewer-side changes kind of munged together, but there's a new feature in the long, long list of bugfixes and bughunting tweaks: New feature: VWR-4794: Basic voice lipsync for voice visualization. Now that's going to be interesting.

Viewer 1.20RC7 and Simulator 1.22 are both expected to see the light next week.

Nothing much new in SLS1.22, except work to further ease load on the asset servers (if some of you are winding up at infohubs and welcome-areas instead of at home, or getting teleport routing failure messages, those are a part of this work), and code to help identify possible failure points in other systems.