The OpenSim-specific Dayturn viewer was updated this weekend with Bakes on Mesh support.
According to Dayturn developer and Xmir grid founder Geir Nøklebye, this viewer is a big improvement over previous versions.
“It is a significant change for anyone using a mesh avatar because it lets you use old system clothing textures on a mesh avatar and mesh items,” he told Hypergrid Business. “It completely does away with the onion layer mesh avatars that have been such a performance killer in SecondLife.”
The MacOS version, 2.3.1, was released on Friday and is designed to work best with MasOS Catalina, 10.15.
The Windows version, 1.5, was released on Saturday, and the Restrained Life version for Windows was released today.
You can get the downloads here.
However, the Bakes on Mesh functionality is only available on grids or regions running OpenSim 0.9.1 or later.
“It does introduce an incompatibility between viewers in that older viewers will see the Bakes on Mesh avatars untextured and poking through the underlying system avatar,” he said. “So there is a bit of a break there, and we have not figured out how to — if even possible — to work around this at the moment.”
The Bakes on Mesh functionality is also available in the latest Firestorm and CoolVL viewers, he added.
You can get more information about Bakes on Mesh at its SecondLife community page.
And you can watch a video about Bakes on Mesh in SecondLife below:
One difference between the way that Bakes on Mesh works in SecondLife and in OpenSim is that SecondLife puts the functionality inside the server code — the the software that runs the regions and grid infrastructure. In OpenSim, however, the baking happens in the viewer.
“The behavior and result will therefore be somewhat different,” said Nøklebye.
For Firestorm, the process of implementing Bakes on Mesh in OpenSim was so tricky that the latest release can actually cause the viewer to crash, according to a note posted earlier this fall.
“There are clearly issues in terms of implementing Bakes on Mesh on OpenSim,” Nøklebye said. “I was therefore in doubt if it was the right timing to introduce it now at all, but as far as I can test it works reasonably well.”
One possibility is to add additional code to Firestorm and DayTurn to make Bakes on Mesh work better for grids that don’t yet support the functionality.
“A possible solution to this could be to only present the underlying system avatar to those,” he said. “But that might result in awkward looking avatars as, for instance, system avatar shapes can be quite odd in able to make the worn mesh avatar look good.”
Source: Hypergrid Business
