Second Life and Virtual Worlds
We don’t hear much about this Second Life™ change. But, Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) is coming and will affect our use of Second Life in many ways.
The viewer currently uses Webkit, an old unsupported tech, to display a number of viewer panels (like Search). It is also the tech used in Media On A Prim (MOAP). It is a part of SL Televisions.
You may remember that weeks ago a point came up about how the little profile icons used in chat are never flushed from viewer memory. The more people that enter chat the more memory is used and never released until the user logs off or memory is consumed and you crash.
As tiny as they are they have a larger impact than one would suspect. The profile image has to be download and is the source from which the tiny icon is made. It is, as I recall, it is the memory for both images that is not released.
Last Friday word in the Third Party Developers meeting is Cinder Roxley started writing a fix. I would guess that we’ll see one this year, but I have no idea what Cinder’s schedule is like – which you should read as I have no real basis I can point to for that guess. I expect the fix would be tested in the Alchemy viewer before appearing in any other viewer.
For most, all this means is another memory leak is getting fixed and we will crash less often.
This is a PROJECT viewer, meaning it is more crash and bug prone than the Release Candidate viewers. I crashed and hit 100% disk use with this version of the viewer almost always in the first 15 minutes. But, I wanted to see the new features. So, I keep re-starting it. Sometimes it runs longer than other times. I have yet to pin down what I am doing different between a quick crash and longer run times.
It is important to note that during this Project Viewer time that you can provide feedback to the Lab and they are much more likely to listen and make changes. After the features are in an RC viewer they are MUCH less likely to make changes. So, if you think you may have a grip or suggestion, get it to the Lindens (JIRA Feature or Bug Report).
Other bit of news from the Third Party Developer’s meeting (7/31):
RSS feed for Grid Status is moving to new platform. The URL will not change just the format is changing from RSS1 to RSS2. But, if you read the status pages, the change is visually significant.
The setup is said to be coming soonish, but seems to be working now. A temp URL will let TPD’s test the feed. See: http://beta.status.secondlifegrid.net which redirects me to https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Status-Grid/bg-p/status-blog.
From Second Life’s Third Party Developer’s meeting we learned the Lindens have been thinking about the issues people have filed in regard to how System Damage is working …or not working. They now have a list of Simulator and Viewer changes to support the planned behavior changes:
At the Second Life™ Third Party Developer’s (TPD) meeting (7/31) Brooke Linden spoke. So, we know as of Friday, all merchants have been migrated to VMM. Only minor problems were encountered. They are working on fixing those. Brooke and Skylar are working with a few merchants that have run into issues from the migration.
The plan moving forward is to shut down MagicBoxes August 17th. On that date MagicBoxes will STOP working. The XStreet market, the current marketplace, will come down on August 27th and they will run solely on VMM.