This Friday (4/10) there was a Third Party Developers’ User Group (TPD UG)meeting. We have some news about Second Life™ from the meeting. The scheduled 60 minute meeting ran a little over 30 minutes.

Viewer Managed Marketplace (VMM)

Brooke Linden opened the meeting as Oz Linden seemed to have poofed. Brooke is telling us that they have started deploying parts of the Viewer Managed Marketplace server side. They hope to have a couple of parts rolled out later in the month. Then they can start what I’ll call an open beta. I take it this means it will be moving from the Preview/Beta Grid to the main grid.

Meeting Schedule

Oz was suffering a bad throat and sounded horrible. So, it is no surprise the meeting was short.

The TPD UG meetings are normally every other Friday. Oz is planning to be taking some Fridays off. So, that regularity is going to be upset. Some meetings will occur very other Friday but some may be three weeks apart rather than two. This will mean, I think, Fridays off in place of a longer vacation period. It’s his choice.

Maintenance Viewer

Grumpity Linden tells us that the Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.27.300636 is almost ready for promotion to the main viewer. Problems have been delaying this version. Those seem to have been solved. Good results in the RC channel suggest this viewer will soon promote and is looking like the next likely candidate for promotion.

CmdrCupCake says there are still errors in the pointer math of this viewer. If you’re not into programming, take this to mean there are memory leaks. That there are memory leaks doesn’t tell us much. They can be small and no problem or big and force frequent restarts. Since Gumpity isn’t seeing a high number of crashes in testing, we can assume any leak is small.

Whatever, CupCake will be posting a report in Bitbucket. So, it may get fixed before the viewer goes to final version and gets promoted.

Tools Viewer

This is the RC viewer compiled with the new Build Tools. ToolsUpdate Viewer version 3.7.27.300242.

It is the send most likely candidate for promotion to the main viewer.

When this viewer does get promoted then all internal Linden processes will change. With the release of this viewer TPD’s will have to move to the new compile processes too. All viewers will compile with the latest tools so that they work correctly with the various libraries of functions.

This viewer will mark the end of support for Mac OS 10.7 and earlier. Those running on older Mac operating systems won’t be able to run newer viewers. The same is true on the Windows side as XP and Vista will be pretty much out of the picture too.

Avatar Layers

Bazz Fazz (Vir Linden) talked about the change coming for classic avatar clothing layers. The limit is going to 60 wearable different clothing items. The limit of 5 per designated layer will be no more. So, we will no longer limited to 5 alpha layers, tats, etc.

You will have some problems if you are going between the Layers RC Viewer and other viewers not supporting the change. I’m not sure how much of a problem it will be. I guess we’ll find out.

Backend updates will enforce the limit, or basically release the stricter type limits. SSA, Server Side Appearance, will be changed to work with the new 60 total wearbles limit.

Attachments will not be changed. Bazz tells us that attachments place a heavy load on the viewer’s render process as it has to iterate through a lengthy process to figure out how to render avatar attachments.

There was no information given on how heavily attachments weight on the process verses texture sizes or mesh complexity. So, about all we can say is less  in all areas is better for render speed.

See the Project Big Bird Viewer version 3.7.27.300377 if you’re interested in trying this change out.

HeatWave

This viewer is not currently available. I thought I had written about this one before, but I don’t find it in the blog. I see it in my private viewer status notes as RC HeatWave Viewer version 3.7.27.300424 that was first posted in Alternate Viewer 4/3.

This viewer fixes the No_Link> problem we see in the current SL Viewers.

Experience Tools

Oz thinks they are making good progress on backend issues. No ETA on this project…

BUG-8802

BUG-8802 – Snapshots posted to Facebook at current window size are terrible quality. There isn’t much we can do about this right now. The Lab will have to fix it.

Vivox

A week or so ago we got word the Vivox had updates out. Implementing those changes is in progress. The first attempt at adding the new Vivox changes did not make it through QA. But, we should see them arrive soon.

Abuse Report Categories

There has been a change to the Abuse Report categories. There isn’t a category for everything. You will have to figure out what you think is closest to what you are reporting.

Other

Lazy people just used Other category and did not bother to find the pertinent category. This was making categories useless from the Linden side of things. So, it has been removed.

If it had just been catching whatever didn’t fit in the named categories, they could have lived with it.

Under Age Avatars

Too many people misunderstood the point of the Under Age Avatars category. So, it was removed too. Now there is only the Age Play category, which is a bit clearer in intent.

Seems the previous one was being applied to any small and child avatars because people thought size and age appearance of the avatar was the problem. It isn’t. The problem is age play, child sex stuff.