There are some interesting bits of news floating around. Nothing spectacular.

Viewers

We now have Linden viewers with controls and intelligence for the new Premium Levels and EEP. The release of EEP is a big deal as it has been holding other viewer releases back. With its release we will see new versions of the viewer releasing faster.

The way the Lab develops software is to release a viewer version. Then add all its features to the other release candidates. This merge often causes problems that have to be resolved. Other viewers were held back so EEP could finish and release by having fewer problems to resolve.

Wonder what is waiting in the wings? Me too. We will be finding out for sure in the next couple of months. What we know now is we have 3 release candidates in the cue and 4 project viewers with one in the pipeline with changes to the mesh-uploader.

Also, in progress is the effort to move up to Visual Studio 2017. There are a couple of crash issues holding that move back. But there is active work on those issues.

VS2017 is the programming tool used to build the viewer. It translates the programming written by humans to machine readable binary information. We build on previous programming work, like how software opens a file and presents the choice to the user. That is written and compiled into a chunk of machine code and placed in a library. All the tasks common to most apps are handled similarly. The viewer code refers to these ‘library’ chunks rather than rewriting and re-translating them.

With each version of the programming tools the libraries are improved, bugs found and fixed, smarter and more efficient ways of doing things, and adaptions to better hardware. These changes often require the programming for an application to change and that is the case for the Lab’s update to VS2017.

In this update the Lab is working to make the tool updates easier. They learn for update problems and change the viewer code to avoid future problems. No one can ever anticipate all future problems but one can reduce the possibilities for them.

CEF in the viewer, the part that runs the internal browser, is to get newer codex so more stuff will work with Media On A Prim. I suspect that will be a separate project viewer soon.

And… there is a feature coming to allow EEP settings to persist across logins. Oz was not in favor of the feature; which I think I understand. But those that make the final decision decided it was a thing to do. Oz talking, well… mostly joking, about it is here (YouTube).

The current viewer lineup is:

• 6.3.9.538729 – Camera Presets RC
• 6.3.9.538760 – Love Me Render RC
• 6.3.9.538719 – Maintenance RC
• Second Life Project 360 Snapshot – 6.2.4.529111 – This is an old old project that has kept getting bumped back for higher priority projects.
• Second Life Project Legacy Profiles – 6.3.2.530836 – This is the change to how the SL Viewer does profiles. The supposed to be Facebook-like section is what I think is going away.
• Second Life Project Muscadine – 6.4.0.532999 – This version adds ‘shapes’ to animesh, if I understand correctly.
• Second Life Project Copy-Paste – 6.3.5.533365 – This version will add the copy-paste features to the Build panel. I suppose something like what Firestorm has and has had for some time.

For a time I was supposing everyone was assigned to project Uplift, the move to the cloud. Now I suspect the production work on the viewer was just hidden by the EPP hold up.