The Third Party Viewer meeting was last Friday. I’m just getting around to watching the video of the meeting. There is a lot of interesting news. I’m going to put it up in several parts. I can better index it and my new enhanced search will produce better results for smaller articles.

Third Party Viewer Meeting 2013-34

The interesting stuff:

Interest Lists

Still no project viewer from the Interest List people. Oz Linden doesn’t know what is happening with the project other than it is being worked on. His belief is the Interest List viewer release will provide more optimizations. Otherwise there is nothing that significantly changes. 

Group Bans

This is a much anticipated feature for many. Baker Linden has been working on the feature for weeks. He is said to be polishing the viewer code and figuring out how to handle some ‘corner cases’. Those would be rare situations that come up now and then which require special handling.

So, we should see a release candidate viewer with that feature ‘pretty soon now.’

If you have not been following Group Bans, the feature is about banning problem people from a group. Currently the limit is about 500. The feature includes some tools for working with the ban list entries.

Greifer tend to run through lots of avatars. So, there will be some churn in any ban list as avatar ID’s are burned up and new ones appear.

Animation Interfaces

This takes a bit of explaining. I think everyone knows what an Animation Overrider is. The ZAOH II is a popular one. Also, the Firestorm Viewer has a built in AO, as do most (?) third party viewers. I don’t pay much attention to viewer AO’s, so I need to look to see if most really do have them. I like my ZAOH II as I set it up once and it works across all viewers.

Recently, well early this year, Kelly Linden began providing us information on new LSL (Linden Scripting Language) functions that would give users access to the server side avatar state system. We saw the functions arrive in a server release candidate in April 2013.

The servers maintain a ‘state of the avatar’, like running or not, so they can provide information to others that can see you (you’re in their Interest List) without having to ask your viewer. When you change state, go from walking to sitting or running, that information is sent from the viewer to the server. The server remembers it and tells others about your avatar’s state as needed.

The Lab via user group meetings announced the coming of the LSL functions; llSetAnimationOverride(“Walking”, “sassywalk”) and llGetAnimationOverride(string anim_state). I reported this in March 2013. See: Breaking Second Life AO News. See Second Life Scripting Changes for more details on the functions.

These functions gave users the ability to make more efficient AO’s that perform better by directly changing the server’s state information. But, the user still needs a viewer side script (well, scripts are server side things, but…) to change their animations. This has left many wondering if the Lab would add something like the third part viewer’s built in AO Interfaces.

At the recent third party viewer developer’s meeting Oz said the Lab is willing to work with third party developers to add such an interface. Kitty Barnett has started on such a project already.

So, we may eventually get some type of AO built into the SL Viewer. That will likely change how AO’s work again as the Lab seems willing to make more server side changes to accommodate a viewer side feature.

Conclusion

There is more to come on SSA, bake fail, HTTP, etc. Check back later.