Second Life News 2016 w51

I thought we would be in the no change window all this week. But, the Lindens have decided to roll last week’s RC update to the main channel… or they automated the forum posting like they did the status reports… naw.

♥ Believe in the Magic of Christmas ♥

♥ Believe in the Magic of Christmas ♥

The package rolling to the main channel is listed as having ‘improved internal server logging’. So, it makes sense to me that there is little likelihood of new bugs being introduced by adding and changing logging features. The week in testing probably revealed no performance change problems for this package. So, why not roll it out? 

Getting this package out where it can bring in data over the holidays makes sense. When the Lindens come back to work they will have a nice collection of new data to look at.

A quick look in-world at my ‘server restart’ logger says the region I live in, a main channel sim, did restart this morning, 2016-12-20T11:56.57… or about 6:56 AM SLT, converting time from GMT to probable local server time… So, there was in fact a roll that restarted the server.

The viewer’s HELP->ABOUT… shows the region as running version Second Life Server 16.12.09.322268, which is the new package said to be rolled… It is a for real update.

Viewers

This morning there is no change in the Linden Alternate Viewers List.

Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 5.0.1.322219 – This version hasn’t changed since last week.

Second Life Project 360 Snapshot Viewer version 4.1.3.321712 – This version hasn’t changed since last week. We know work has stopped on this version until after the 64-bit version rolls out as a Project Viewer.

Does that suggest the Lindens need some 64-bit something to get the 360-Camera working as they want? May be. May be not.

64-Bit… We may still see this project viewer pop up. But, we are getting toward a point where the Lindens are unlikely to risk introducing a serious problem to the system. They don’t want to call people back from the holidays to fix anything. I’m not taking any bets either way.

Third Party Viewers

Firestorm: Bento OK. I like the 5.0.1 update. It is faster, a bit. I haven’t used it for long sessions. But, in the 30 to 90 minute sessions I have used it, no crashes. In that limited use the previous version was crashing. So, this version is better.

Cool VL Viewer: Henri corrected me saying the Cool Experimental became the main version for Cool last week. So, it is Bento capable.

Catznip: Now on releae R11.0 with Bento support. There are new features in Catznip.

Black Dragon: December 6 Bento support was added, in a release way. Now RLVa has been added. I may have to install this viewer and play with it some.

Alchemy: The blog was last updated June 2016. The latest download version is listed as 4.0.0 37571. So, no Bento. Rumor is it is coming.

Kokua: This viewer updated to version 5.0.0.40327 December 17th. It now has Bento support and is said to include all the Linden Viewer features and fixes.

Singularity: Their blog has not updated since June 2016. Rumor is an update is in the works… So, no Bento.

UKanDo: This blog has also last updated in June 2016. We were informed RL work was preempting work on the viewer. So, no Bento. No Rumors.

RLV: Is on release 5.0.1.37454 with RLV v2.09.21.01 and they say that relates to the Linden’s SL 5.0.0.37453… So, it has Bento support. But, I have found it incredibly slow loading textures… But, I have just installed it and that may be a transient thing as the cache fills up.

Bento Summary

So… most of the regularly updating viewers now have Bento. Of 10 viewers 7 have Bento. How many users have updated is another question. The Linden users are on automatic update by default. So, most all of them have updated. Firestorm users get ‘pushed’ to update. But, I have no hard data on how many of those users actually do update. I do know their download servers crashed from the rush to get 5.0.1. I would guess that means the majority of Firestorm users are updating.

Those two viewers are used by ‘most’ of the SL users. So… most of the SL users now have Bento.

Also, older viewer versions are getting blocked. Firestorm limits their active versions to 3. Just after the first of the year they will instigate a new round of blocks. Lindens block login for older versions. So, I think we can safely assume 90+% of users now have Bento capability.

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