In order to improve the voice experience available in the First Look: Voice client, we will be issuing a rolling restart today starting at 9:30 AM PST. The restart should finish by 12:00 PM.

During the rolling restart and for a few hours afterwards, residents making use of the voice client may experience intermittent problems with voice. These should all be resolved by 3:00 PM.

Regions will being restarting at approximately 10:30. The restarts occur in a wave that progresses North to South through the grid. Residents can teleport southward to avoid being logged out.

[UPDATE @ 1:24pm] The restart is complete.

[UPDATE @ 2:24pm] We’ve discovered that several hundred regions did not restart during the restart wave. We’re restarting those now to make sure that the voice updates will behave correctly. We apologize for the inconvenience, and will be investigating why the regions were not restarted with the rest.

[UPDATE @ 3:10pm] The final batch is complete. This time for sure!

Some people have been having difficulty with the 1.14.0 update. A very small percentage of people it turns out, however they are very understandably concerned and upset. We are doing our best to address these concerns.

Below are some suggestions and workarounds for people having issues:

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ATI has just released their 7.3 drivers. We have installed them and verified that they work with Second Life under Windows Vista!

You can download them here: http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html

We have postponed the 1.14.0 viewer update until Tuesday morning in order to address a bug affecting terrain textures on lower end hardware that was identified over the weekend. A First Look update is available with these changes: First Look 1.13.4.59748.

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See 1.14.0 Viewer Update postponed until Tuesday Morning. Preview available for an update on this.

I am happy to announce that at long last we will be releasing the Second Life 1.14.0 Viewer on Monday.

For a preview of this update, you can download First Look 1.13.4.59668. which is identical to 1.14.0 minus the version number and complete release notes which will be available in the official release.

Update: We just pushed an update, 1.13.4.59668 that fixes a crash bug and a texture animation bug (see below for details).

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As some residents have discovered, Second Life will not run on Windows Vista with ATI video cards. We tracked this down to a bug in the ATI OpenGL drivers, and have just confirmed that this issue is fixed in ATI’s Catalyst 7.3 drivers for which are still in development. ATI hopes to have these available by the end of the month. Thank you for your patience.

-Steve

First off, thanks to everyone who updated to the previous First Look patch, we were able to confirm that the texture bandwidth issue has been addressed. However, we also introduced a bug that causes some textures to never load after teleporting or changing regions. (Fortunately this should have a negligible effect on total bandwidth). We have fixed this here: First Look 1.13.3.59558.

Note: we are still working on the editing notecards from within objects and messages in postcards bugs and hope to have them fixed soon!

Cheers,

-Steve

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Another update to First Look: Render Pipeline Improvements fixing a few more bugs. First Look 1.13.3.59492 is now available for download.

This has some fixes to the HUD attachments, and an important change to the texture pipeline code that should reduce a lot of unnecessary texture requests. This may make a small improvement in your individual experience, and if we were to ship without this fix it would hurt the overall system performance significantly.

We need to test the impact of this code, so if you have veen using First Look, please update to this version.

Thanks,

-Steve

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Another update to First Look: Render Pipeline Improvements fixing a few more bugs. First Look 1.13.3.59315 is now available for download.

Our intention is to release this shortly after we replace the old llMake* particle systems with llParticleSystem approximations on the server, probably next Wed. (more…)

Another update to First Look: Render Pipeline Improvements fixing a few more bugs. First Look 1.13.3.59036 is now available for download.

Mostly small fixes this round which is good news. Notably the child object payment bug has been fixed.

Thanks,

-Steve

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