SVN Snapshot 3172

 

Snapshot Time Again !

Another build for the testers, and this round leans a little more on the technical side of things. Think of it as a care package for the curious, the tweakers, the sim‑hoppers, and the lunatics who enjoy poking at the guts of a viewer just to see what happens.

This build brings in a handful of new toys:

• A quick chat bar for fast-fire conversations

• Advanced profile data

• Group chat mute (for when the noise gets a little too much)

• Motion blur VFX (actually better than I expected)

• A re‑engineered low‑level tuning panel for the power users

And then… something special.

The Return of an Old Experiment: Dynamic RAM Cache

A long time ago I played with a dynamic RAM arrangment for objects and textures. It never made it into the public domain (was an idea on linux originally) — until now.

This version is still highly experimental, but it’s packed with fun ideas:

• Hot‑loading your most-used or most-seen textures from the disk cache at launch

• Idle‑cycle dumping, pushing less-used textures back to disk when the viewer is quiet

• Soft and hard limits that automatically evict entries when RAM pressure rises

• Object cache commits that can store around 20 sim-crossing events for 64 KB.

• Texture cache scaling from 128 MB all the way up to 4 GB depending on your hardware

To keep tabs on things, there’s a live stats window so you can watch the system breathe in real time. The system is disabled by default — this is playtime tech — but if you’re a sim hopper or a machinima buff who wants near-instant scene presentation, you might have some fun with it.

As always: speculative, experimental, and entirely in the spirit of “let’s see what happens.”

Enjoy the ride.

Much love, KL