There is an article in India Times’ Economic Times on a company making US$16k/month from virtual animals, Fennux. It seems there are 1.2 million of the little guys in SL.
Fantasy Fair 2014
We find they think there are about 4,000 users logging into SL from India. I am not sure how they know that. Also, that they spend 67,000 hours in SL. I wonder if the Indian government is logging their Internet activity?
I see that Oz Linden added the Alchemy Viewer to the Third Party Viewer list. They describe it as: An experimental Second Life™ viewer striving to be at the forefront of stability, performance, and technological advancement in the open-source metaverse viewer field.
Derivative of Henry Jose’s image – Flickr
Sovereign Engineer is the lead in this viewer’s development. The blog is here. The downloads are here. The blog still lists the viewer as a beta version. There are only 32-bit versions, AFAIK.
The list of people working on the viewer is shown as:
Not much going on here. The Deploy post arrived on Sunday. No rollout to the main channel this week. The RC Channels will get an update that eliminates a crash condition.
Open Source UG – 2014-34
Viewers
The main viewer is now 3.7.14-292638. This is the Library Refresh Viewer. There is a fix in this version for gray avatars. If you have gray avatars, look in your log file for Transferred a partial file errors. They think they have it fixed, but cannot know as they have not been able to reproduce the problem in the Lab.
You can find the list of updated libraries in the viewer’s release notes.
There are some great fixes in this version. One for Mac users is the Alt-cam clicking that sent the camera flying away. There is still work being done on selecting things in Mac versions, so there is more to come along this line. And there is a 64-bit Beta Mac version. They also have a partial fix for the s l o w typing bug on Mac. I’ll refer you to Inara’s article for the details on that.
She points out that Mac users on 4.4.2 will be able to continue using it. It will not be subjected to Firestorm’s 3-version rule UNTIL all the Cocoa bugs are fixed. This is a big concession from the FS Team. It would be easier for them to not have to support more than 3 versions.
If you are running 4.5.1 Beta, it is going to be blocked soon. So, upgrade before you find yourself locked out of SL on that viewer.
We know that a new release of the Firestorm Viewer is getting close because the team has been talking about it. Today I am seeing the wiki changes that proceed a release. So, we are getting very close. The wiki changes mean they have likely gone to feature-lock. Not much point trying to write about what’s changed while things are still changing.
Firestorm Logo
The current version is 4.6.5 (40833). The new wiki pages are using 4.6.7.42398 as the new version number.
All this is in progress and may change, but I suspect it won’t. The wiki pages are being edited and THEY will change. It is hard to tell what is new and what is old in the pages as to some extent they seem to have been copied from a previous update page. There are several “Fix It” notes here and there.
The current editing on the page says the viewer merges to Linden Lab 3.7.5 codebase… the last release was merging up to 3.7.4… I am hoping this is just an editing stage and the 3.7.5 number is a place holder. The current Linden code base is at 3.7.13 with the Linden wiki now showing changes indicating a coming release of version 3.7.14, which may happen today or Monday…. That’s my pure guess, it could be longer.
The updates to Firestorm are mostly fixes. But, there is a healthy dose of new features and feature tweaks currently showing on the preliminary pages. It is not a huge page but there is plenty of good stuff listed and some nice feature improvements, like Radar now showing typing or sitting indicators and the ability to omit blocked avatars from showing on the map.
In all it looks like a version to look forward to.
I am using Firestorm more for photography now than I have over the past year. I also hope to do more machinima and get better at it. The Firestorm Viewer is certainly my choice for those tasks. So, I am looking forward to the coming release.
As previously reported the main channel got the maintenance release with a JSON rollback.
Nachwerk July 2014
RC Channels
This week the RC Channels are running the same release as the main channel.
Maestro Linden tells us that next week the servers will get fix for a sim crash. After the fix is in place we MAY learn what it was. But, for now they are not saying.
Other Server
Maestro looked into the BUG-6925/BUG-6908 bug of attachments ending up on invalid attachment points after a teleport. The Lindens are having trouble reproducing the problem. Speculation is the low ping rate within the Lab eliminates the problem.
Whirly Fizzle is reporting that the Mystitool HUD sets the bug off as well as another couple of HUD’s.
