Image by AlannaRalph – Flickr
I seldom cover this viewer because I don’t use RLV to play in Second Life™. Marine Kelley makes the viewer. This is the type of viewer we used to have when I first came to Second Life. I started using the Nicholaz Edition because it had more bug fixes and crashed less often. Nicholaz was all about making things work. In this release that is what Marine seems to be doing, making it work.
RLV is currently in last place in the list of Third Party Viewers. They are ordered from the most stable to the least stable. So, with any luck this release will start to change those numbers.
I found Marine’s discussion of the problems and crash sources interesting. Again it is the open source JPEG2000 library that is to blame for most of the problems. Marine has been working to make the viewer and its use of the JPG2000 library more robust.
The blog article Restrained Love 2.8.3.4 has a good discussion of the problems. If you are into those geeky details, I am, then it is interesting reading. I cover the main points below.
Temporary Attachments
You may remember Griefer Monday and the release if the Advanced Creator Tools. One of the tools is about the ability to attach a temporary HUD or other attachment. Marine is not convinced that the feature is ready for prime time. The viewer, especially if you use RLV, is not ready for it. There are some serious security concerns.
To deal with the security issues RLV will not allow an attachment you do not own to attach itself.
Image by poolski – Flickr
The Lab’s viewer is not supposed to allow an attachment by an object you do not own, at least not without asking you first. The Lab regressed to using Run Time Permissions in place of Experience Permissions. Run Time Perms are what you see used by about everything every day for years. The Experience Permissions you only see used in the Linden Realms and Wilderness games made by the Lab.
Avatar Rez
Marine found a problem with Outfits and attachments that cause the avatar NOT to rez. Marine thinks that is fixed.
Mouse Aiming
When you are in mouse view you can press Ctrl or Shift to make the mouse more precise. It helps you aim. The idea is the mouse DPI is scaled down so it takes more mouse movement to move the cursor. Several game mice have the feature. My RAT 7 has a button that changes my mouse DPI from something like 1600 DPI to 800 DPI. Now you can use keyboard Ctrl and Shift to adjust the movement sensitivity. If you press both you get an even larger effect.
Summary
This is not the most ‘robust’ viewer out there. But, Marine’s effort is encouraging and reminds me of viewer development in my first days in SL.
Point of information: llTeleportAgent and llAttachToAvatarTemp depended on the run_time_permissions event back on Griefer Monday. The problem then was that once a script had been granted PERMISSION_TELEPORT by its owner, it assumed it had permission to teleport anyone. Experience permissions didn’t come into it. Griefer Monday was about a glitch in run_time_permissions.
As to llAttachToAvatarTemp, at present, items that want to attach to you temporarily need to ask for permission to attach. If you use RLV, though, and are under certain restrictions, many permissions are granted automatically by the viewer that otherwise you would have to OK.
Marine’s concerns about llAttachToAvatarTemp and RLV (which are shared by many people, including me) stem from the fact that if you’re using RLV and these temp-attached items start issuing RLV commands via llOwnerSay, that’s potentially seriously bad news.
Her work-round in the viewer, as I understand it, has been to force items that don’t belong to you and want to attach to you temporarily always to ask permission to attach; that is, whatever restraints you’re under in RLV, temp attach items will behave as they would were you not using RLV at all.
However, the issue will be exacerbated if and when Experience Permissions are rolled out on the Main Grid, since once you’ve granted experience permissions to a particular experience, then things that are part of that experience are going to be able to attach to you automatically, without your being able to do anything about it, whether or not you’re using RLV. This means that once Experience Permissions are live, anyone using RLV will need to be very careful about granting Experience Permissions to anything unless by that time LL have made it possible for the viewer to tell whether an attachment issuing an llOwnerSay message is a temp attach one or not.
Thanks for the corrections and additional information.
Apropos OpenJPEG, well, it’s really not that bad. She could have asked us nicely about what we have been doing there years ago if she wanted to. The bulk of the changes have been developed by Thickbrick Sleaford back for Imprudence, later me and him re-evaluated them with regard to newer OpenJPEG versions and i contributed one more.
If she gets in touch with me, i’ll help out.