Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
The Lindens have posted on the SL blogrum that the Emerald Viewer will be blocked Wednesday 9/8. See their post here: Emerald Viewer to be Blocked From Second Life
Most importantly it appears the Lab may close the accounts of those that attempt to circumvent the block.
Please be aware that attempting to circumvent our blocking to access Second Life with a banned Viewer is a violation of the Policy on Third-Party Viewers and may result in the loss of one’s account.
Today Jessica Lyon announced the Phoenix viewer is now on the Third Party Viewer (TPV) List. Congratulations!
See: Second Life Viewers and the Third-Party Viewer Directory and Phoenix is on the TPVD by Jessica.
I see that two other viewers are on the list since I last looked. One is Ascent. The other is Emergence.
All of these viewers are based on Snowglobe 1.4 and 1.5 code for now.
Phillip, at SLCC 2010, talked about how the way Linden Lab develops code would change. Effort was to be made to get changes, fixes, and new features out faster. In that line the server code team is changing how they rollout server upgrades.
There is a Beta Server Team that does Quality Assurance (QA) on the Beta grids. The group is moderated by Oskar Linden. Beta Server Office Hours are on Thursdays at 3 PM PDT in Morris on the preview grid, ADITI.
Oskar and Lil Linden explained the changes in Beta Server Office Hours (09/02). The code is still tested on the Beta Grids, ADITI being the grid most of us know and some of us use. But once it reaches Release Candidate status it gets tested on the main grid, AGNI. Previously they were rolling all the changes into a single RC and rolling it out to the pilot area on AGNI. The Quality Assurance team would try to catch the problems and get back to the development teams.
The newest release is: Imprudence Experimental Release: 2010.09.04
The Imprudence team is changing the name of their Weekly Release to Experimental Release. They feel the term “Weekly Release” has some people thinking the Weekly is a required download and install, which it is not. The hope is this change will make it easy for new Imprudence Viewer users to tell the latest Stable Release from the Experimental Release. I have both but I actually use the Experimental most of time.
This release has several new features. See: Imprudence Experimental Release: 2010.09.04 Viewer
Voice chat using Vivox is now part of the install. That makes voice chat on SL much easier.
Updated 2010-09-04
I think many of us were expecting something like this. Jessica Lyon is heading up a team to build a TPV (Third Party Viewer). The name… Phoenix Viewer… ok… it is not that novel but it certainly is appropriate. See the announcement here: From the ashes….
The new team currently consists of; Dakun Flux, Dimentox Travanti, Jessica Lyon, Kitty Barnett, LordGregGreg Back, Techwolf Lupindo, Tonya Souther, Vortex Saito, Wickman Gibbs. We are told more are to come.
They have a web site up, incomplete… very incomplete. One can get a copy of the Phoenix Viewer (1.5.0.1) there now. I downloaded my copy. This viewer is based on the Emerald Viewer code and that on Snowgobe 1.5. Their plan is to move quickly to the Snowstorm code base, which is the SLV2 code base and the future of SL viewers. We may yet get a good interface for SLV2 improvements.
A couple of days ago Emerald Viewer 2600 was released. This viewer is compiled post team lockout. I commented on the viewer and the lockout in the post Emerald Viewer DEAD!!!. This viewer appears to somewhat be a direct taunt of Linden Lab.
According to an audio post on YouTube.com and reported by Alphaville Herald (See Emerald Viewer DEAD!!! For links) this viewer version has the ability to spoof its version and ID. There is in fact a debug setting that appears to allow one to do that.