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.
Niran has a new release out.Black Dragon Viewer – Update 2.4.2.1. This viewer fixes 3 annoying problems. A crash from a texture error, broken Volumetric Lighting direction control, and a Sound Preference not working.
Yes some of the chat servers have been having troubles in the last few days. I’ve been looking into that … the code running there isn’t super new, and the outages might be timed with some of those [hardware update] restarts.
In any case, there is an update soon for the chat servers, and already another in the pipeline.
Servers
Photo Shoot w/Mr. S
This week there are no rolls for either the main channel or RC channels. Next week is a no change week. So, I expect no roll outs that week either.
We can expect tweaking to the CDN system. This week whatever they are doing that requires multiple restarts is ongoing.
The main reason for no updates is the hardware updating requiring the restarts scheduled for this week. Estimating time for any individual update or the group is difficult as Simon says, “We also have to actually open up the server box and look inside to see if it needs an update, so it’s random how long each one takes.
This shouldn’t do anything grid-wide, aside from extra region restarts.”
