Firestorm

Third-Party Dev Meeting (Leaks) 2017 w44

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There is some news this week. Most are from a couple of leaks. They give us a clue as to why the release of the Firestorm viewer is delayed. So…

The Linden Voice RC Viewer has 1 bug still left. The Lindens are hunting for the cause of an intermittent channel misconnection. If I understand the voice system mistakes which region you are in and connects your voice to the wrong region. Of course, voice doesn’t work when that happens.

in simple words
in simple words

Vivox, the providers of SL voice, is working on the problem and thinks it is in the SDK….

The Alex Ivy RC Viewer got an update Thursday. The viewer is doing well and Oz Linden is happy with it. However, there was a bug in the updater part of the code. It caused those updating some problems. I ran into it. A manual install corrects the problem.

The Lindens can’t get a good grip on how well the 64-bit viewer is doing as the 32 & 64-bit versions report as the same viewer. From other indicators, the Lindens know 32-bit version has people crashing way more often than previous versions. The 64-bit version is crashing way less than previous versions. Apparently, there is a WAY SIZABLE difference between 32 and 64-bit versions.

Crashes are typically early in the login… Oz suspects it is crashing during the benchmarking tests.

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Second Life Third-Party Dev Meeting 2017 w38

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The Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer will update early next week (#39). The last couple of blocking bugs are being fixed. Oz Linden thinks they are probably down to 1 problem last blocking problem, pipeline stalls. A special branch of the viewer is designed to find and fix that problem. Those experience the problem will get a copy of it for testing.

Voice is getting a new SDK update. It addresses couple long-standing problems.

There is a fix in Linden Viewers where the Lindens extended the retry time. So, they are being more successful connecting to voice. It takes longer to connect when there are problems, but it is more successful. If there are no problems, it is a quick connect.

Darling
Darling

Manually killing the viewer’s voice server prevents it restarting as it once did. Now, restart the viewer to kill and start the voice server. Then it works.

The Maintenance viewer just went out a couple of hours before the meeting (Friday noon). It uses new Vivox SDK. This version is Not compatible with previous versions. Some third-party viewers and Linux versions commonly require users to copy the app from the Linden viewer and drop it in the third-party viewer. Or to use older versions of the voice app with new versions of the viewer, for various reasons. That is not going to work.

Now the viewer and voice app will need to be versions made after the change to the new Vivox SDK are built in.

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Second Life Third Party Dev Meeting 2017 w36

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Some interesting stuff this week.

There is little change in the viewer pipeline. There is a new maintenance version, a new Alex Ivy version, and a new Voice version. All these versions are basically a folding in of recent main viewer update.

Horses
Horses

Alex Ivy, the 64-bit viewer, has 1 or 2 more bugs to be fixed before it is a candidate for promotion to the main viewer.

The Voice version has an elevated crash rate, but it is better with this last fold in.

All viewers have been tending to crash more over last few months than previously.

Third-Party Dev’s are not getting Linden reports on their viewer performance. Oz will be getting reports out Monday… events permitting.

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Second Life News 2017 w35

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I’m a day late… busy with other things. I try to get the update out on Tuesday. That gives the Lindens a day to look at data from the weekend and decide what gets updates rolled out or queued for more attention.

Servers

The main channel was restarted and updated to #17.08.11.328152. This adds the MIME Type changes for HTTP with LSL talked about here: MIME Type changes for HTTP with LSL.

As of the time I am writing this a package for Blue Steel and Le Tigre has yet to be decided on.

● i see you ●
● i see you ●

Magnum will get #17.08.22.507928, internal fixes… Simon Linden says there are no user-visible changes… Apparently, the changes are switching built tools. Sort of like building the same car on a different assembly line.

If you are into the tech on your region, you may have noticed restarting regions restart faster now. I hear it takes about 6 to 7 minutes. But, regions are doing double restarts. The region restarts but comes back online with the same version as before the restart. Then an hour or so later restarts again then comes up running the new version.

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Second Life Photography Tutorials

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Flickr has a ton of Second Life™ images. Today: 2,901,249 images. Some are pretty bad, others REALLY kinky, and some amazingly gorgeous. For the people interested in SL Photography William Weaver has made 12 video tutorials. They are about using the Firestorm Viewer’s Photo and Camera Tools and controlling Windlight.

There is a well thought out design for these tools. The tutorial shown here shows how to take advantage of the tools and use them efficiently. Subsequent tutorials show how to use the various aspects of SL lighting to create great images.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6XiUkyPQ-w

Phototools Tutorial: 01 – Interface Introduction

This is a 4-year old starting tutorial giving an overview of the Photo Tools. The tutorials advance over those 4-years to the 12th tutorial streamed live a week ago.

Note: 2020-05 – Some of these tutorials were taken down then later put back, and now some are ‘private’. It seems to be changing. I can’t predict which will appear and which will disappear. Good luck.

I’ve covered some of these as individual tutorials over the years.

William Weaver also has a Flickr channel plus, a marketplace store, and additional art is on Issuu. Numerous SL bloggers have covered his art at various times.

Second Life News 2017 w/32

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Servers

Corrections made 8/9

The main channel was updated with version #17.07.27.327933 this morning, Tuesday. Last week the main channel was running version #17.07.11.327548. Both of these are listed as having “internal changes”. Geek-speak for changing data reporting, debugging, and performance information… usually.

Street at sunset
Street at sunset

Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum were supposed to update to #17.07.27.327933 tomorrow, Wednesday. But, Simon tells us that isn’t going to happen. There probably won’t be a restart as they restarted with last week’s update. The Lindens try to restart regions once every two-weeks even if there is no planned update.

No big problem, but enough of one the Lindens decided to hold the RC update back. It had to do with regions names not being applied correctly in the restart, so they never appeared to come online.

The Deploys thread is dying. There is very little discussion or information to be gleaned from reading the posts. They are basically a day, time, and link to release notes. So, I suspect fewer people are reading the posts. I expect the posts to go away at some point.

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