SL Go's Fitted Second Life Mesh Display Problem Fixed

The SL Go streaming service for using mobile devices and low end laptops with Second Life had a problem with displaying fitted mesh in SL (as Iris reported here), but SL Go creator Onlive has fixed the problem, Senior Product Manager Dennis Harper just told me. (He sent the before and after screencaps above as proof.)

Trouble was, when SL Go was being prepared for launch, as he explains, fitted mesh "wasn’t a big thing at first because [it] was a high-end, experimental feature only used by super-builders. But then in May 2014, Linden released 24 new newbie avatars that used the fitted mesh feature. All of a sudden, we saw these stretched out avatars everywhere. We needed to fix it."

How did they do that? "Warning: techie stuff ahead," Dennis warns, and then tells me:

"Merging code is not easy. And in this case an entire year had gone by, so Linden’s code looked very different from ours. To make things worse, we use a different source control client than Linden. We had to figure out a way to bridge between Linden’s Mercurial system and our GIT system. It was extremely complex.

"However, we have great engineers. Our developer here, Robert Kavert, pulled this thing apart and literally merged the two codelines by hand. Every change and merge was a manual process. Once we got the build, there were still pesky bugs that took some weeks to work out.

"But regardless, we are now out and clean. Our code represents the very latest branch of the Linden Second Life viewer, with all the new features including fitted mesh. We will be keeping our code current, and working on cool new features now."

So there you are. If you use fitted mesh, maybe give SL Go a whirl, and report back here.

Disclosure: I was recently a consultant for OnLive to help them launch SL Go, but not in the last couple months.

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Comments

[Inara Pey]

It's not only the fitted mesh fix that was rolled out in last week's SL Go update.

The SL Share 2 capability with post-processing filtering for uploading images to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, was also included in the update, as I reported here at the time, and also dropped Dennis a line about as well.

[Tracy RedAngel]

They also now accept Paypal, which is a very good move for those who either don't use credit cards, or don't want to keep a credit/debit card on file with SLGo. I'm hoping they will release a version for iOS soon