Coffee Time and Beta 1.3
Beta 1.3 — Hello again, everyone! Beta 1.3 is here, and it will very probably be the last of the 1.x betas. There may yet be a 2.0 — I haven’t decided — but there’s still a little time before my self-imposed finish line over Christmas, so we’ll see how it goes. Grab a cuppa, because I’ve got one in hand too. As I sit here sipping my coffee, I’m watching the Second Life viewer world get turned on its head. New Vulkan-based clients are popping up like a code-frenzy game of whack-a-mole. One of them, Aurora, is a from-scratch Rust viewer that went from first release in late October to version 0.9.3 by 6 November. Slipstream is another, built around Vulkan 1.3. It’s genuinely intriguing, and if I’m honest, a little frightening at that pace. It also raised a wry smile to see FSR upscaling and BC7 texture compression turning up on everyone’s to-do lists, hot on the heels of S24. But I’m rambling again — on to what’s new :) Hardware detection and smarter shader compiling The headline...
