Servers

Corrections made 8/9

The main channel was updated with version #17.07.27.327933 this morning, Tuesday. Last week the main channel was running version #17.07.11.327548. Both of these are listed as having “internal changes”. Geek-speak for changing data reporting, debugging, and performance information… usually.

Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum were supposed to update to #17.07.27.327933 tomorrow, Wednesday. But, Simon tells us that isn’t going to happen. There probably won’t be a restart as they restarted with last week’s update. The Lindens try to restart regions once every two-weeks even if there is no planned update.

No big problem, but enough of one the Lindens decided to hold the RC update back. It had to do with regions names not being applied correctly in the restart, so they never appeared to come online.

The Deploys thread is dying. There is very little discussion or information to be gleaned from reading the posts. They are basically a day, time, and link to release notes. So, I suspect fewer people are reading the posts. I expect the posts to go away at some point.

The Beta Server group where server changes are discussed is getting smaller too.

The most new information is coming from the Content Creation UG meetings on Thursday. Medhue streams those meetings live on YouTube Thursday at 1 PM SLT (PDT). I record a video and clean up the video and audio then write a topic index and post the video. That takes some time. So, they appear between Friday and Sunday depending several factors. You may notice the quality changing as I learn more about video processing.

Land Problem

A few people are seeing terrain change in small ways on region restart. Laz Dresler manages the terrain for a golf course in Second Life™. Small changes are a big issue for Laz. The changes are small, but they affect the game.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-7922 , https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-41609 , https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-1750, https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-100693

Generally, it seems land is moving down and/or prims are moving up.

Viewers

The main viewer is still 5.0.6.326593. No change for about 3(?) weeks. I am mostly running Firestorm 5.0.7 and Linden’s Alex Ivy.

Firestorm almost always crashes on exit these days. Otherwise, it hangs in there for hours totally destroying my shopping budget. The Linden’s Alex Ivy Is my ‘oops, something is wrong fix it’ viewer. I like using Alex Ivy. But, it doesn’t have the tools I want, Photo Tools and RLV.

Second Life Alex Ivy Viewer version 5.1.0.507412 – No updates since last week.

Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 5.0.7.327958 – No updates since last week.

Second Life Voice Viewer version 5.0.7.327253 – No updates since last week.

Second Life Project 360 Snapshot Viewer version 5.1.0.506743 – No updates since last week.

Last week the Lindens were having their periodic planning meeting. So, it isn’t surprising that we see little activity with the viewers. We may see the main viewer update this week with the Maintenance version being promoted.

I’m not sure what is up with the 360-viewer. It appeared the images being output were only lacking the meta data, making it difficult to use those images as 360-images at the various services, Flickr… Facebook. So, I am hoping they are working on additional improvements.

We may start hearing bits of the plan for the coming year… or months. That may depend on whether Oz Linden got yelled at for leaking the opening of Sansar. Since we heard little at the Server-Scripting UG meeting… may be not.

If you don’t know, Sansar is a Rift and Vive only world, well for VR. It runs on a plain 2D computer. I am still struggling to figure out how to get it to come up in my Gear VR. The new Oculus Home release (1.17) is supposed to make it easier to get Steam and other third party games into the Oculus menu system. I’m still banging my head on that wall.

Alchemy 3.8.5 – Released 10 weeks ago. There is a beta version released 41 days ago. Release 5.0.6.41161 July 24, 2017. Bad link in my Feedly… :/ Alchemy Viewer and Download

Black Dragon 2.7.9 – NiranV has made some interesting additions to the Black Dragon Viewer in this version. One is the ability to control individual lights in a scene. Rather than have to turn off EVERYONE’s attached lights you can turn off just the supernova face light someone is wearing. That is a way neat feature. Download

Cool VL Viewer 1.26.20.30 – Released Aug 5, 2017. Download. If you use Chrome, you may get a warning about the site or the download. It is a false positive. The viewer is fine and the site is safe.

CntrlAltStudio – Discontinued. You can still download and run it. There is no Bento support. But, you can see the SL world in VR. It takes some tweaking to get it working with VR headsets.

Firestorm 5.0.7 – This version was released in June (21±). The next release should be 3 months out, September. There are no significant changes to the SL System so I would expect this release to be pretty much on time. But, one never knows.

Kokua 3.8.4 – Released 20 days ago, it is likely to be discontinued after it releases in 64-bit without RLV.

Marine’s RLV 2.9.21.3 – Last updated in May.

Singularity 1.8.7 – It is hard to follow Singularity. The blog itself is confusing, well getting to it can be confusing. The URL we have been using for Singularity.org leads to a site not updated since June 2016.

You may find a Google version of the site in Google’s news feed. But, it is further out of date.

To know what is happening with Singularity, you have to be a member of the in-world user group: Singularity Viewer. I had trouble getting it to come up in SL Search. Searching by the Lab’s web search it only came up in non-English languages. Using Firestorms in-viewer search it came up third on the list (3,669 members). Switching over to Alex Ivy and searching for Singularity Viewer, the group comes up first.

As a member, you learn about Singularity’s alpha builds. The last update was 3/28/2017 (4 months ago) build 6937. This is the version Singularity users are most likely to use.

Catznip Viewer R12 – Released in April 2017. You’ll find their blog at Catznip Viewer. There is a Catznip.com, but it is more a wiki than an informative blog. This is the viewer for those with nightmare inventories. – CORRECTION: The R12 information is from Kitty’s blog and the story is about a ‘coming’ release. When you try to download R12 you’ll find only R11 is available. There are ‘Beta’ releases and a Beta Testing Group. To get that viewer read Catzip Viewer Beta Testers.

UKanDo Viewer – Discontinued. The code can be downloaded. An installable version can be downloaded. But, the viewer is way out of date and considered incompatible with Second Life.

Summary

There isn’t a lot of actionable viewer news coming out. When I first came into SL in 2008 the Lab was suffering the shock of falling out of favor with the media. They were trying all sorts of things to make Second Life™ popular again. That included lots of viewer changes. Sort of an “if we can just get the viewer right…” thinking.

Virtual worlds were new and businesses were experimenting with them. I expect to see some of the same stuff happen with Sansar. We’ll see if Ebbe can pull off mass market acceptance. Lots of things in the way.

Inara has a good article pointing out her thoughts on Sansar and how people are reacting. SANSAR CREATOR BETA: PERSONAL THOUGHTS. Basically, we SL Users are spoiled by SL. Sansar has yet to catch up. The way we use SL is not likely to fit into Sansar. All the things we do, we can do there. But, It will never be a large social gathering the way SL is.

Think about how quickly we can move from region to region. If the place we are gets boring, we can TP and be in another region in 5 to 15 seconds. Doing the same in Sansar becomes tedious.

Keep your SL stock…