For now, you will know if a region is in an RC channel because it rolls on Wednesday. But that too will eventually change as the Lindens work toward doing all the rolls in one day, Tuesday. Oz Linden says they will keep the roll days predictable. But, having main and RC channels roll on the same day is predictable…

So, from the user side, all we will have to work with is the version ID, Second Life Server 2019-08-23T17:54:14.530353. This will force the reporting to be more precise.

However, Oz Linden said. “…and we’re going to try to give you more in the release notes including linking back to external BUG reports.” Hopefully, that means they will expand on ‘Internal Changes’.

The linking thing will be handy. As it is now the JIRA we file is imported to the Lab’s internal JIRA, which is a part of the JIRA system we can’t access. So our BUG-##### reports convert to MAINT-%%%%%. Reports. So, a server release note reporting MAINT-%%%%% fixed doesn’t tell us much because we can’t pull it up in the JIRA. Occasionally a Linden will provide the information that MAINT-%%%%% is the internal version of BUG-#####.

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Oz is telling us the new Release Notes will tie MAINT reports back to their BUG report, which we can pull up and read.

The change is creating drama. It will push some people out of their normal workflow. But, in general, I think it will force things to improve and remove a lot of noise from the bug reports.

If you are observing, you will likely notice the Lindens are finding they get better bug reporting when they don’t tell us much about what is being changed or fixed until ‘after’. That leaves users in a less informed state. So, they have to report what is actually happening and cannot make up something using recent information.

This is the problem of correlation and causation. Fred updated his computer and just as he finished and shut it down for a reboot the electrical power in the neighborhood went down. Now Fred is out telling everyone not to update because it will kill the lights in your home.

Fred doesn’t understand how computers or the electrical grid work but he is certain the software update caused the outage. He’ll argue the point forever because he thinks he is right. Defeating his thinking requires more knowledge than Fred has. Educating Fred to provide the basis is tedious, time-consuming, and maybe impossible. It is easier for everyone around Fred to let him continue in his delusion and just ignore him.

The Lindens can’t really ignore the users. But, they are reducing the number of things to which users can mistakenly correlate their problems.

Viewers

The main viewer is now 6.3.0.530115. Release Notes. This is the Bakes On Mesh Viewer.

If you are using the RC versions of the viewers this change in the main default will force you to the latest EEP RC Viewer, which may not be what you want. To get back to the default viewer go into Preferences->Setup and uncheck Willing to update to release candidates. Then download the 6.3.0 version and install it.

EEP – 6.4.0.530150 – Monday, August 19, 2019, week #34. A couple of the reliable people I pay attention to are complaining that this version of EPP has more problems than the previous version. But, with RC versions you do not have a choice of which RC version to run.

Maintenance – 6.2.5.530030 – August 15, 2019, week #33. If you are having difficulty logging in and you run on HD 2000 graphics, download this viewer and try it.

Second Life Project 360 Snapshot – 6.2.4.529111  – Released Tuesday, July 16, 2019, week #29.

Second Life Project Legacy Profiles – 6.2.3.527749 – Released Wednesday, June 5, 2019, week #23.

Second Life Project Muscadine – 6.4.0.530100 – NEW – Monday, August 19, 2019, week #34. The Muscadine project viewer supports animesh customization via new LSL commands. To use this feature, you will need to be running a supported viewer and in a supported region of the Aditi test grid. For details, see the knowledge base. It gives you ‘where’ to test info and acknowledges a couple of bugs you will need to workaround.

There is a forum thread just for this viewer, First Project Viewer for Muscadine.

Back in April Vir told us “Animesh shape support is in progress, although it’s been sharing time with several other things recently so not moving as fast as I’d like. That’s not quite the same as having a general resize capability but would give some level of control over height and proportions via the shape sliders.

I meant that shape sliders are the things that are encoded in the shape wearable, so that’s the mechanism by which animesh is ultimately customized. What the exact set of new commands will look like is still TBD, but it’s likely to all be LSL-based. No current plans to allow interactive tweaking of sliders in our UI for animesh.”

In the discussion thread, Animats points out the necessity of having an animesh-model oriented with Z+ as up and X+ as forward. This allows it to be used with Pathfinding.

I’ll point out that Pathfinding has not been popular because it is a bit buggy and complicated. But it has great potential. So, I expect there to be a round of fixes at some point. The increasing popularity of animesh will likely drive the need for fixes.

Vir has also pointed out that these additions to animesh are just a first step in making additions to animesh. (ref)

Animats has posted what he has learned about making clothes for animesh. See How to make clothing for animesh. There is important information there for clothes makers that hope their mesh clothing can also be used with animesh characters.

Other Viewers

PS: Kokua has updated adding BoM capability. See Nicky Perian’s comment below. (Link)