I’ve put what I consider the big news from the meeting in the post: Peace Comes to Second Life… Really?!? If you are having problems with things that use mouselook, read that article.
Viewers
The Maintenance RC Viewer was promoted to the main viewer: 4.1.2.321518. There are a lot of fixes in the update. But, it includes the fix from previous versions that broke mouselook weapons and other mouselook stuff. For details on the bug read the Peace Comes article.
The Bento RC Viewer is going to soon have an update. The Lindens explained in the meeting how the sliders interact with the groin bone causing it to grow over time, which is sort of hilarious and the Lindens didn’t find all that funny… telling third party dev’s to NOT put a switch in to retain the problem. I suppose having a viewer named the Viagra version viewer was not appealing to the Lindens.
By the time the fix passes through QA we will probably be too close to the Thanksgiving holiday to release it. So, we won’t see it until early December. The chance of seeing Bento go gold in November is gone. If things go well, we will see it release before Christmas.
Oz Linden says they are almost ready to start building the 64-bit Viewer. The understanding to take away is the difference between writing code for and compiling. The later being the stage of building I think Oz meant. Work is proceeding. No ETA. I am guessing not until after the holidays. So, January or later. But, they may surprise us.
The Project 360 viewer is getting changes and updates. They are working on changes to the interest list to get it to work correctly with the camera. Your best chance of getting the things to work is to make a slow 360 turn before trying to capture a 360 image.
The interest list is the viewer’s list of things your avatar can see. Those things and only those things download from the SL servers. You see it at work if you wait for everything in your field of view to render then turn 180 degrees to look behind yourself. Kind of an obvious problem for the 360-camera.
Also, Oz told us they are working on the viewer’s update process. We can see those changes in the 360-camera viewer’s code branch. The server side is not to change. But, the viewer side will.
I suspect the Bento Project’s change to RC status revealed some update problems. I know it was about then my updating of the 3 Linden viewers I have installed (360, Bento, main) seemed to go sideways. I had to remove Bento and cleanup my installs then download and install Bento. I still have problems as the process seems to get confused when the main version tries to update after a RC Bento is installed as a separate viewer.
There is a process for avoiding the problem. I just don’t take the time to do it as I have to look up what it is that I have to change. I can just install and use until the next update. So, I suppose they are fixing something to do with that.
Grid Status Changing
The grid status page is changing. It seems the delay in getting status updates out is because of a cumbersome system on the Linden side of things. That is being fixed. It will be much easier for Lindens to update status when the new page goes live. Apparently, the person knowledgeable about the problem can then easily update it the status page. I take it they avoid the chain of command to get to the guy that does the updates now. They just update the page.
Also, we are getting more status detail. See the beta version of the page here: New Second Life Grid Status page. Don’t get excited and change all your links. The page is not accurately reflecting actual status. It is still in testing, currently mostly SMS testing. SMS… text messages to your phone…
Once live you may have to tweak your RSS feed to stay updated. They will redirect URL’s to the new page. However, there is some problem with redirecting RSS feeds. So, you’ll need to use:
- http://secondlife-status.statuspage.io/history.atom
- http://secondlife-status.statuspage.io/history.rss
They hope to take the new page live Nov 28, Monday, next week (47).