[sldev] Article in LinuxWorld

[Dzonatas]

I should chime in on this one and I done did that here. I usually don't 
care about the fame, but this is even written as.... if Lerwick did all 
the optimizations to "bring it up to a usable level"...

um... ya and people wonder why I hesitate to write any code!

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One proprietary library that's still in use is Kakadu Software's 
product, which supports JPEG2000. The open source alternative, OpenJPEG, 
is catching up, however. "It's just not as fast as Kakadu right now, and 
Second Life decodes a lot of JPEG2000 textures," Giglio says. "When 
Second Life was first open sourced, OpenJPEG was very unsuitable, but it 
has improved a lot due to the efforts of people working on the Second 
Life client. [Lerwick] did a lot of work there. Soon we will be able to 
drop Kakadu."

"My ultimate goal is to make the Second Life client available in the 
official Fedora repository. This is made difficult by the client's 
dependence on some closed-source libraries," Lerwick says. He took on 
the job of optimizing the OpenJPEG library to bring it up to a usable 
level of performance, and wrote a patch for the Linux client to use 
OpenAL for audio.

Mike wrote:
> I simply love this quote from the article:
>
> " "I've never really worked on a C++ codebase as large and complex as 
> Second Life before, so I don't have a lot of basis for comparison. But 
> the codebase overall seems to reinvent a lot of wheels: It doesn't 
> take advantage of existing libraries as much as it could, and the 
> various subsystems are not very well abstracted from each other," says 
> Callum Lerwick, an aspiring video game developer, who works with the 
> Fedora project and has been developing the Second Life client for that 
> distribution.   "
>
> It sums up my feelings(and experience) perfectly. From what I've seen 
> the code is archaic(to a degree) due to the fact that a large portion 
> of it hasn't been updated since it was initially built(during this 
> timespan, many libraries were developed that are a LOT better than 
> what's in SL right now). However, I am excited that it seems 
> significant work is being done in overhauling the viewer at LL. I 
> think a large portion of the code can be replaced by open source 
> libraries, and I hope this gets a lot of attention in the overhaul.
>
> -- Mike
> On Nov 2, 2007, at 8:50 PM, Jason Giglio wrote:
>
>> http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/103107-second-life.html
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-- 
Power to Change the Void
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