Eyewire Release Report 10/28/2016

As detailed here, every few Fridays we’re sharing which bug fixes and tiny features our developers have released into the wild. Apart from bigger changes that have received their own posts, here are the releases on Eyewire since the last report.

• We have a brand-new RTM (real time mesher), which is the program that visually renders the cell overview. It will often display freshly spawned cubes without requiring a browser refresh. Other visible differences include the following…
• Overview portions still in the process of rendering are now displayed as little solid-colored cubes rather than empty space. Once the RTM has prepared them, they will pop into existence as branches.
• Heatmap color changes are now task based rather than volume based. This means that whether you’ve changed the color of a cube by reaping, completing, or flagging it, you will only change the color of the actual cube you’re affecting, rather than coloring all overlapping cubes in the same part of the volume. You will still notice a small “spattered” color overlap effect, but from this point forward it should be fairly clear that you have only reaped part of one branch rather than everything in its vicinity. This will massively help avoid unverified cubes sneaking under the radar due to lack of clarity.
• Cube loading should also be noticeably faster than before, as our developers have further compressed the data for each cube since our last speed improvement. Combining that update and this one, we have significantly reduced the necessary network bandwidth for our players; the amount of data per cube has cumulatively dropped from 30-40 MB to about 8 MB. (This does involve an increase in the amount of RAM that your computer uses once it has downloaded each cube. If you still experience lag, check how much RAM you have and consider boosting it.)
• As part of this data compression, the in-cube 3D now looks slightly different than before. Based on beta feedback, the 3D should now resemble the older version as much as possible, including the “metallic” sheen, so this should minimally impact strategies for using the 3D to identify missing segments and mergers. Further adjustments to the 3D may be made as deemed necessary.

Please note that because HQ is now using more advanced tools, we do recommend that you upgrade to Chrome 53 or higher if you have not already done so. Firefox may also prove a more stable browser for these changes. Should you have trouble loading the in-cube 3D and you’re in a 32-bit browser, please use 64-bit instead. Now is also a good time to reiterate that Eyewire works best on the most recent edition of your operating system, and we especially advise Windows users to upgrade to Windows 10.

Next report will be in a couple weeks, though in the meantime you may see new feature posts anyway. For science!