Second Life News 2016 w27

Servers

Surprise. There is roll of a new package to the main channel. I did not expect that the day after a Monday holiday.

This is the package that has been running on the RC channels. It contains security fixes… or a fix… depending on how and what one reads. Also, the Bento animation file size for animation uploads is increased. And there is some fix to email address problems from within scripts.

Adah

Adah

There is no roll to the RC channels this week. So, the entire main grid will be running the same server software. 

Viewers

This past week I’ve covered the Third Party Dev’s meeting, mostly about the viewer, and noted some viewer upgrades. Today not much has changed from that news.

RC Second Life Inventory Message Viewer version 4.0.6.315555 – We should see this promoted to main viewer today. This version allows the Lindens to start moving all viewers to the new inventory API and to remove old process from the servers. This is a step in the overall plan to improve the reliability of the Inventory System.

RC Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 4.0.6.316883 – This version is a collection of fixes and improvements. See: Release Notes. No change since last week. Expect a new version of this viewer with the Inventory Message updates to come out this week.

Second Life Project Bento Viewer version 5.0.0.317134 – This version is pretty much how it is going to be for final release of this round of Project Bento changes. There are a couple of bugs being worked on. As those get resolved or at least move toward resolution we will see new versions. No ETA.

Second Life Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 4.1.0.317313 – This version is the long awaited update to Oculus support for Second Life. Early reviews are it doesn’t perform as well as the previous version. I can’t test that, no VR head set. Follow the Oculus conversation here.

You’ll find video that purport to show the difference in render quality between the old viewer and the new one. To see the quality difference they are talking about you have to change the YouTube video from 3D to 2D in settings. WARNING somewhat NSFW. See older Oculus render: Dec 2015 Oculus in SL and Sep 20, 2014 and May 19, 2015. See the newer render: Jul 3, 2016. But, I’m not at all sure the 2D view of these tells me what those that made the videos are on about…

They also point out it is no longer possible to run the old Oculus viewer version, as many were doing. Well… many is relative and possibly misleading. Say a dozen or two… we don’t know. Only a few are commenting in the Forum.

David Rowe’s CtrlAltStudio viewer at http://ctrlaltstudio.com is still available for download and supports Oculus 0.8 driver versions. This is an Oct 2015 version. But, word is it no longer works in Second Life™, if you use new Oculus drivers. I’m unclear if the CV1 Oculus hardware will work with older drivers. So, I’m confused.

Some people are having a problem with newer video cards preventing the viewer launching. I can’t tell if they actually know what they are doing or are just whining. There are people running on the latest nVIDIA 1080 cards. Some of them are whining about low frame rates and unmet expectations. But, that tells us it works to some extent and the video card is unlikely to block a viewer launching. Since I’m not playing with this version, I can only guess at what may be their problem.

Second Life Project VLC Media Plugin Viewer version 4.0.6.316258 – No update since last week.

Second Life Project VOB Viewer version 4.0.6.316123 – No update since last week.

Second Life Obsolete Platforms Viewer version 3.7.28.300847 – June 2015 was the last change. The Lindens will not be upgrading this version. As the Inventory Message version becomes the main viewer how inventory tasks are handled will change. By the 4th quarter 2016 the old inventory API will be removed from the servers and this viewer will lose functionality.

My understanding is the version won’t be blocked. But, it is losing the ability to handle money and manipulate inventory. So, I don’t see how it will be usable.

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