Friday’s Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developer’s meeting was long, 2 hours. The last hour is covered in Second Life 2.0 Coming. That is the exciting news, SL 2.0 is coming!

Viewers

As of Friday there were two RC Viewers; SL Share and Snowstorm. SL Share has been in the cue for some time. It is the likely candidate for promotion, probably late in week 26 or in week 27. The Snowstorm RC has a bug that is in the process of being fixed. I expect a new version to make it out to RC in week 26.

The Project Viewers haven’t changed since I last wrote about them.

The code for the Group Ban viewer is here: https://bitbucket.org/baker_linden/voorhees_groupban. With the code released to the wild TPV Dev’s are integrating it into their viewers.

Jessica of Firestorm says they are integrating ‘Interesting’ and hopefully SL Share features for their next release. The Sunshine AISv3 changes probably won’t make the next release. Experience Tools may make it. But, the team has not had time to examine the changes needed for Experience Tools.

There are Library and HTTP Pipeline viewers in the works. Monty says the Library RC is in QA. So, we will probably see it in a week or two.

The Library Viewer is using the cleaned up libraries that Monty Linden has been working on.

Layers

We can currently wear 5 layers of system clothes, shirt, pants, etc. People have been requesting more layers. (BUG-6258)

I suspect the main problem is the problem many are running into with alpha layers, with all the various attachments more than 5 are needed. For now we are seeing designers making combined alpha layer masks.

Some TPV’s are playing with adding more layers.

The problem here is in regard to render performance. As more textures are added to the avatars more processing power is needed. The Lab currently limits textures by ‘local limits’, meaning 5-shirt layers, 5-pants layers, etc. These limits are apparently imposed viewer side. Thus TPV Dev’s can go around the limits.

At this time Linden Lab™ is deciding how to handle the textures per avatar limit. For now the Lab is requesting TPV Dev’s hold off until the Lab can decide an which way is best to handle the issue.

For now the Lab is thinking they may treat these layers as they do attachments. Attachment limits are imposed as a max total limit rather than a per attachment point limit. This would mean that if we needed more alpha layers and not multiple pants  layers for an outfit, we could use the unused count of pants-layers for alpha layers.

Whatever the result, the Lab is currently in the decision making process now.

Height Issue

There is still a height issue. When Server Side Avatar baking was introduced the method used by TPV’s to adjust height was broken. Nyx Linden, on his personal time, added a hover feature to Appearance to help with the problem. But, it is a course adjustment.

Between Hover, Shoe, and Height sliders we can usually compensate for our feet not touching the ground or sinking into it. Jessica Lyon made a proposal to thee Lindens for a way to solve the additional problems beyond whether our feet touch or sink into the ground.

Some of the big remaining for height problems are non-modifiable shapes, where hover does not work, and where there are sit animation problems.

The Firestorm Team is making a proposal to fix these problems. See: Height offset Proposal, written by Zi Ree – Firestorm Team. There is a JIRA item where one can comment. See: SUN-38 – As users of kneel/lay/sit animations and tiny/giant avatars, we need a way to change the body size in SSB sims. (Created: Feb/24/2013)

This presents the user cases in a solid way that the Lindens can bite into. So, it will get some attention.

Cocoa Bug Fixes

This is an ongoing annoyance. More fixes are out and in testing. One of those is the Mac’s Alt-Cam bug that sends the camera flying off to wherever. The fix will be in the next Maintenance RC Viewer.

Firestorm has fixed the typing lag problem. If the fix is working, Firestorm will soon be blocking the 4.4.2 version of their viewer.