Second Life News 2017 w52

Christmas is sort of over. We are on to the post-Christmas battery buying days and OMG, why-did-they-think-I-would-wear-this returns…

Second Life is in a ‘No Change’ window. Many Lindens are off work this week. So, there is little news. There is however a Friday post from the Lindens in Featured News: Unboxing 2017 and Looking towards 2018 in Second Life! Worth a read.

without thinking of anything

without thinking of anything

Other than saying they will make Second Life™ better in 2018, they don’t say much about what is coming. If you have been reading here you know of some things.

I used to do reviews of the events of of the year. It is a bunch of work. So, Inara is doing her year-in-review: 2017 IN REVIEW – PART 1. I’ll leave that work to her. I am thinking of doing a review in video… If it proves fun, you’ll see it. If it turns into work, I’ll probably abandon the project.

Servers

There is no deploy post today. Nor do I expect one. We were told last week there would not be releases then or this week. Any restarts this week will likely be from region owner request.

However, my home region shows a restart today at 15:12 GMT or 7:12 AM PT/SLT.

Oddities

I spend time helping people in the SL Forum’s Answers. A few lag posts are popping up. People rubber-banding, stuck in a spot and only able to turn (spin in place), logins not working (login then can’t move or tp), and other problems usually caused by poor network connections.

Now I’ve started running into them too. Not often but it happens daily. My packet loss and ping are good, 0 to 0.1 and 50ms. But I see ping hit 3,000 and my avatar is on auto-pilot. Running ping from outside the viewer using an Admin prompt with 20 to 30 pings shows LL servers will show 3 large delays in 20 pings.

If you are seeing these problems, ask about them in Answers.

Viewers

You will find the following Linden viewers here: Official Alternate Viewers.

The main viewer is still 5.0.9.329906 as of this morning, 12/26.

Second Life Alex Ivy Viewer version 5.1.0.511248 – Last updated in week #48. This is probably the best viewer has, right now. Subjectively it is the fastest. On some numerical points others are faster. But, it just seems faster when I use it.

Caroling

Caroling

Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 5.0.10.330123 – Originally released and first appearing December 13, week #50, this version is updating quickly. This version is and update that appeared late in week #51, just before the no-change-window. This is a bug fix release.

Second Life Voice Viewer version 5.0.10.330039 – Released week #50. There are some changes that impact third-party viewers and how we will hear voice when making a teleport. The changes are:

  • Adds support for a higher quality voice using SLVoice version 4.9
  • Fixes the apparent position of the speaker in nearby voice
  • Improves retry behavior when there are problems connecting or during temporary connection problems
  • Logs more detailed information to the Lab for quantifying connection issues
  • Improves security of the communication between the viewer and SLVoice
  • Unrelated to voice, improves the validation of TLS certificates (security improvement)

Notes:

  • local teleports will cause a short (a few seconds) voice interruption because the viewer now detaches from voice a little earlier in the teleport sequence.
  • With some SLVoice changes, the SLVoice executable can be copied into another viewer – that will not work with this one. There are changes to the connection between the viewer and SLVoice that are required. Talking to any viewer version should work.

If you are having voice problems, try this viewer. Installing it will replace the main Linden viewer. And you will need to have ‘Willing to use RC versions’ enabled in Preferences… before you do the install.

There is another page… link below.

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