Second Life

Things about SL

Dolphin Viewer 3.3.5 Released Review

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New Machinamists Tool Panel

A new release of the Dolphin Viewer is out: 3.3.5.23763 “Fellini.” This release gets a new graphics floater panel. The idea is it can be used by photographers and machinamists.

The Dolphin Viewer also gets the ability to click a worn item in inventory to edit it. This will be way handy for moving those belly, lip, and nose rings that rez inside the avatar.

A feature to allow clicking a land mark in inventory to open on the world map has been added.

The Mesh Deformer control could previously be found in Preferences -> Dolphin Viewer 3 -> UI. The control is gone, so I assume the deformer did not make it into this version. It seems there are some problems with the Deformer code causing crashes. Also, there is a Linden factor in that Oz says the Mesh Deformer is a TPV Policy 2.k item. This means developers can’t put out their standard public release of a viewer that includes the Mesh Deformer. It can only appear in test viewers.

Download & Install

The download is standard and quick. The install is typical. I did not need to clear the cache or settings before installing. It seems to work just fine without those steps.

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Nirans Viewer Release 1.33 Review

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UPDATE: Be sure you read Niran’s comment at the end of the review. My first impressions make up my article and not all of them are completely accurate. The ATI/AMD Pink Textures problem is a bit confusing. I’ll let you sort it out if you have an ATI/AMD video card. A note added to Niran’s blog says the problem is fixed.

There is lots of news about Niran’s viewer this week. Inara has her experience of using the viewer posted here: Niran’s 1.33: super smooth and totally flexible. She likes the viewer and it is a positive review. Inside the viewer this version is labeled: Nirans Viewer 3.3.5 (1083) Apr 26 2012 23:49:31 (Nirans Viewer).

Image from Nirans Viewer

Third Party Viewer Directory

Niran says the viewer has qualified for the TPVD list. We should see it there in the next week.

It is likely not going to be in the first section of the list where viewers are listed by stability. A viewer version must see 200,000 hours of use in a reporting period to make the rankings. TPV Dev’s get stats the rest of us are not allowed to see. The idea is it helps them with development of their viewer. Apparently those stats or feedback from the Lindens is that more than 200k hours are logged by those using the NiranV Viewer. BUT… that is across all versions of the viewer.

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#SecondLife Land Impact Costs to Change

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Friday Falcon Linden made a late appearance at the Sever/Scripting User Group meeting. He announced with the coming of Pathfinding we will see a change in the costs associated with Land Impact. In no small part the change is being influenced by PATHBUG-69.

The Brain behind Torley?

PATHBUG-69 – llVolumeDetect(TRUE) is broken. According to the wiki:

If detect is TRUE, VolumeDetect is enabled, physical object and avatars can pass through the object. This works much like Phantom, but unlike Phantom, VolumeDetect objects trigger collision_start and  collision_end events when interpenetrating. Collision events will trigger in any script in the object.

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#SL Possible Down Time

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There is a post on the Grid Status page. It gives a bit different spin to Thursday’s down time than what I heard. Whatever, there will more work done to fix some things on Monday and that work may take SL offline for a time Monday morning. [UPDATED 2:30pm PDT, 27 April 2012] On April … Read more

#SL Server News Update Wk17

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Seems we had a major melt down Thursday morning (USA morning). One of the Linden Lab® data centers had hardware network failures. In systems this size there is usually considerable effort put into load balancing to distribute the workload. So, with the center dropping offline everything went out of balance as the servers remaining online could not carry the load. The Lindens turned off some services until they could get the data center back online. Mostly money related services went offline. It took several hours to correct the problem.

During that time login’s were closed or inaccessible and the main Second Life® web sites went offline.

There is no truth to the rumor that one of the gerbils peed on a router after waking up from a hard night of partying in Zindra.

Main Channel

This week a roll did make it to the main grid. This is the package with the Inventory API’s. So, with luck we will see better inventory and delivery performance. As Thursday the Tuesday roll has not shown any problems.

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