There is good news coming from Oz Linden about the viewer. You probably remember I’ve been writing about a memory leak in the Beta and Development viewers. Their crash rates were way up from previous rates. Oz thinks the latest Beta Viewer 3.4.1-265434 has the problem resolved. Grab a copy of the viewer and try it out. They need as much testing data as possible. The data from over the weekend will give them good information on whether they have found the problem or not.
The Project Download Page
The problem has been difficult to reproduce. That means it is very hard to know what to fix. In #SL Viewer 3.4.x Week 37 I wrote about the problem in more detail.
The Development Viewer has been stalled at 3.4.2-265141 for about a week. The Lindens have been pulling updates and fixes out of the viewer code to narrow down the cause of the crashes. I suspect they are doing that work in a temporary code repository (repo for short) and using internal builds for testing. So, we don’t see activity in the Dev Viewer repo. The latest fixes are probably only in the Beta version.
If the problem has been resolved, development can move forward again. Oz says they have several interesting features waiting in the pipeline. He just won’t talk about them. So, what’s interesting to him, a p r o g r a m m e r, and us may be different… But, there is hope there is something fun waiting.
Keep your fingers crossed and run a copy of the Beta Viewer. Use the link in the left column labeled SL Viewer Release. The Beta Viewer’s link is a little further down the page. I downloaded it yesterday. I’ve only used it for a short time. I will be using it more latter today. However, it has yet to eat my computer or crash
So features waiting in the pipeline… That sounds pretty interesting. May be more or less “fun” as you suggest from the point of view of a common user than from a programmer. But still I do love new features even if those one arent so noticiable. And new features are (usually) to make a better game experience. So lets cross fingers and see what is coming soon.
PS: I cant wait for Normal and Specular maps, the waiting is getting so long since they asked for some people to help them. I hope you keep us in touch when there is something new about them 😉
Looks like there are still some issues with 3.4.1 – a new Beta version appeared on Monday.
The Beta 3.4.1 has had several builds. I did not see one for Monday. I looked today and got the latest from Saturday the 6th: 3.4.1-265642. My previous one was from Wednesday the 3rd: 3.4.1-265434. Without the build number it is pretty hard to know which one someone is talking about.