by SW Comit | Nov 24, 2010 | General News
AW Build 1183 brings a much wanted feature to AW:
Build 1183
23rd Nov 2010 beta
Objects loaded through a group file from local disk, will be selected as soon loading has finished.
Loading objects from disk has improved by 6 times in speed, and the loading progress is displayed in the chat log.
In summary, not only do AWGs load faster, but they built in a selected state. No more needing to build directional variants of all your AWGs! 
This sounds like a good excuse to finally update the AWGs on the academy 
by SW Comit | Nov 6, 2010 | General News
Just a reminder that voting for the CY Awards ends on the 8th. Still time to cast your votes
http://vote.cyawards.com/
You can pick up your login temporary password in Cyawards world if you need it.
by SW Comit | Nov 5, 2010 | SW City News
SW City Town Square is about 11 years old and has undergone changes all throughout this time, retrofitted with the latest n’ greatest AW had to offer.
I can’t overstate how much effort has gone into making this area run at peek performance over the years, applying any new performance trick that came around. Throughout the last couple weeks, thanks to some performance related Q&A with chrispeg, the latest series of performance sweeps has been completed.
What’s changed:
- Reducing object count by replacing clusters of objects with scaled objects while maintaining the exact same appearance as before. This has been going on since scale first came out, and the object count has been reduced several thousand in the area.
- Many objects built before prims came out have been upgraded into their prim equivalent, which shaves off many unwanted polygons.
- Only showing particle emitters when you can see them (applies to PEs that were indoors or underground).
- Some underground areas are invisible until you go down there.
- Removing over-zealous use of the ‘visible no radius=#’ commands. This does more harm than good when used on low poly objects, whoops!
- Replacing all the tbtree###.rwx tree objects with the newer t_awtree##.rwx objects (2162 vs 191 polygons!) Approx 20k polygons removed by doing this alone.
- Replacing masked based windows with opacity commands
- Thanks to Absolute Monarch’s texture counter app, I was able to track down textures that were only used a few times in the scene and replace them with more commonly used textures. A texture uses the same amount of memory whether it’s used 1 time or a 1000 times, so too much texture variety is bad!
- Replaced the ad rotators with php rotators, removing the need to store all the ads in the rotation in memory.
- Replaced all the signs that were spelled out letter by letter (using the letter masks) with single object signs. Less objects, less texture variety.
- Upgraded all the astart/astop/animation sequences around town with the new timer commands.
- Countless more one-off tweaks specific to buildings in the area
You still won’t get butter smooth performance in the 150m-200m vis range, though I can at least get into the teens frame rate @ 200m vis which is not too bad considering the density and complexity of the area.
Are you familiar with how laggy town square is? I’m curious to hear if you notice an improvement now
by SW Comit | Nov 1, 2010 | SW City Interactive
Various users have been complaining that they’re having issues with SWI, which we had tracked down to the session system not maintaining their session. I’m not really sure what the problem is and why it’s happening all of a sudden, but I used this as an excuse to rewrite the sessions system 
You may need to relogin into SWI to rebuild your session. And by “may” I mean you will
by SW Comit | Oct 30, 2010 | SW City News
Happy Halloween everyone 
SW City town square has been spruced up for the event, including a special visit from a certain NPC who may be giving out goodies