Second Life News 2017 w18-2

The Third-Party Developer’s meeting ran 36 minutes. There is some interesting news. So…

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A new RC HTTPAsset viewer is out, 5.0.5.325940. This version is significantly better than the previous, crash-wise. There are still too few people using it to have good stats on the viewer’s performance.

There has been an update to the voice viewer. Problems were fixed. At the first of the meeting Oz Linden thought the viewer would be out any minute. The new release actually posted during the meeting.

The new SL Voice plugin will not work with older viewers and older the SL-Plugin will not work with newer viewers. So, third party viewers have an integration thing to do with the new plugin.

The Lab does plan to disable the old voice. Oz says there is no plan on calendar.

A change is now voice persists in trying to get a connection until it gets a hard error and stops. So, there should be way fewer voice-connection fails at login.

It is known that aggressive firewalls can mess up SL voice. As yet they do not know which AV programs are a problem. Until they have way more experience they won’t say a brand name. I suspect even then they won’t say. It will be up to users to figure out which ones are not working.

So, voice problem troubleshooting should include disabling AV.

Also, the Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer will probably update again Monday. QA is happening over the weekend. There are a bunch of fixes in this update. Havok is added and lots of new web stuff. A remaining big fix the viewer manager process and updater code. Those changes are being integrated now and will be in a subsequent update that should follow quickly.

A mistake in the updater code updated 64-bit users to a 32-bit version. More about that later. The result too few users to have good stats.

I expect Alex Ivy to go RC in a couple or three weeks and quickly on to main default.

This last round of updates took some of the 64-bit users back to the 32-bit version. I’m one that got bit. Look in the viewer’s HELP->ABOUT… if it says 32-bit, it is 32. Download the 64-bit from Alternate Viewers. Example: Second Life Project Alex Ivy 5.1.0.504536 (64bit).

Once the updater code is complete it will make an attempt to figure out which version, 32 or 64, you should be running. So, those on a 64-bit OS will get a 64-bit viewer. This code is 2 updates away. Then when installing the default viewer, the install process will be deciding on whether to install 32 or 64.

You may have noticed the 64-bit viewer is much larger. The 32-bit SL Viewer installs as 258MB of disk space.  My SL 64-bit Viewer takes up 337MB of disk space. Because of the bigger address space all memory addresses take more bytes of memory. Plus, there is a bunch more web code. I’m not sure what Oz means by ‘web’ code.

Viewer build instructions for the 64-bit will be appearing on the wiki as soon as the 64 goes RC.

Soon after 64’s main release the Lab will be upgrade to VS-2016 or 17. This is the software that builds the viewer. The upgrade should speed up the build process and maybe the viewer.

A maintenance Viewer is in QA. We should see it early next week (19). It is going to have several important changes.  Important to viewer developers. Handy for users. Things like inventory item deletion, which is getting more protection like wording and are you sure questions and you will see that at least once per session when deleting inventory items. The Backspace key on Windows will not do a delete. Only on Mac will it do a delete as there is no delete key on Mac… really?

Plus, they are changing UI of parcel permissions. The new UI should more accurately express what the settings do. This is the change that allows EM’s and EO’s override a parcel owner’s ban… access setting.

They are changing how many names you can see in ban list when editing and how it works, keeping it simple but doing more.

The default volume setting in the Linden viewer is now lower. This has been a goal of the Firestorm team. I’m not surprised that new people hit a loud region and go nuts trying to find the volume control. Now that should be less of a pain and certainly reduce the desperation.

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Work is starting on the 360 viewer. Alex Ivy staff is moving over to working on the 360 viewer.

Premium Access or the ‘population increase’ server update went to main channel this week (w18). I’ve actually been using it. Yay! I can get in busy places. I was worried there would be so many premium members trying to get in events it wouldn’t do much for me. But, the few times I’ve tried it, I got in. No wait.

Oz Linden tells us a lot going on in the server side of things. But… they can’t talk about it…

You may remember the old problem of attaching whole inventory. That can no longer happen in the Linden viewers as they have a limit on how many things you can try to attach.

Linden Lab did hire a programmer and is now fully staffed. Oz Linden is happy. Oz is going to a class to learn how to make a Linden mesh bear…

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