This is a brief round up of the Third Party Viewers for Second Life that I find interesting. Not in any particular order. The popular feature to be adding is: Restore to Last Position. I explain that in the section on RLV.
RLV 2.9.15 Update
Marine has updated the RLViewer she maintains. She is adding in the feature from Firestorm and Kokua: Restore to Last Position. This is a controversial feature the Lindens have omitted from the Linden made viewer. It apparently generates too many support calls.
What’s that sound? [Good facial expression]The controversy centers around a problem the feature creates. Imagine you have a parcel in, say, Fishergate and it is in the northwest corner of the region. You build and rez stuff into that parcel. You then take them into inventory. You go to a different region, say Furball, and get a parcel in its south central area. When you use Restore to Last Position to rez those items they will poof away. You will most likely find them rezzed at the 0,0,0 point in the region.
RC Second Life Notifications Viewer version 3.8.6.305981 – This is the one with changes in how notices are handled. Earlier I was wondering if the server change running on the RC Channels was related. No hard information, just speculation that there is probably a connection.
From the Third Party Developers’ meeting last Friday we got some news. Not much from the Linden side. I am often wondering if there is really so little for them to talk about in regard to Second Life™ or if the community is wearing them down and they are talking less as a defense. We have been down that road before.
Fantasy uprising
Viewers
RC Second Life Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296 – This view is often left behind. Oz describes it as being ‘preempted’. They have more important things to do and spend time on those rather than updating this version. I suspect few people are using this version as the Oculus type headsets it is designed for are not yet in retail release.
NiranV has made a couple of recent releases of the Black Dragon Viewer, now at version 2.4.4.1. Version 2.4.4 the previous version has a long list of fixes.
Year of the Dragon
The big addition is for Viewer Managed Marketplace (VMM). Or maybe the more important change is fixes to the RLV section of the viewer. Whichever is more important to you, the viewer is better.
VMM is coming to all the viewers. When your favorite viewer gets the feature is not all that important. The only think you cannot do without a VMM compatible viewer is add items to the marketplace. All other tasks can be handled through the marketplace web site.
NiranV has added a modified version of the Linden’s new Notifications Panel. If you read anything about the Third Party Dev’s (TPD) meeting this weekend you know the Lindens have a project viewer out with a Notifications feature change.
Look me into the ice…
Normally TPD’s leave project viewer features out of their viewers until the Lab stops changing them, which is usually when the viewer goes to RC status. NiranV is usually experimenting with user interface (UI) and panel arrangements to avoid screen clutter. Adding the feature early gives users a chance to see how a new feature can work and see a UI that might be better.
This version has more RLVa fixes.
You may not know that in most viewers shadows are rendered according to how you have your draw distance set. NiranV has added more control by adding a slider control that gives you access to the shadow setting. Read more in NiranV’s blog. There is an image showing the effect of the control.
The new shadow control also affects Volumetric Light, God Rays.
The version 7 release adds the Linden Maintenance Viewer version 3.8.1.303166 updates. A large collection of fixes. (Release Notes)
There are some known bugs in 6 & 7. One is the ability to accept animation permission requests and group join requests.. After the request fades you can’t accept. NiranV is aware of the problem and plans to wait for the Lindens to fix it. NiranV is playing with other stuff.
There have been a couple of updates to the Black Dragon Viewer since I started using 2.4.2.6. NiranV is up to release 2.4.3.1. The changes fix some minor problems, adds Windows 10 support (Win 10 coming the end of the month), and includes the change to how we can use clothing layers.
177. | House Targaryen by Taylor Wassep, on Flickr
RLVa is still broken… but, that’s not a Black Dragon issue, if I remember correctly.
