Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Third Party Developer’s meeting ran 28 minutes. Attendance has been low. There is news and word on where the Lindens are focusing their attention.
The RC Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 4.0.7.317394 fixes lots of stuff and has some nice contributions by third parties.
RLV = Restrained Love Viewer, formerly Restrained Life Viewer. But Linden Lab® thought that use of the word Life in the name infringed on or put at risk their Second Life™ trademark. So, they pushed on those developing RLV and it changed.
What RLV is, is a set of tools built into a viewer that extends what we can do with Second Life™. The RLV capable viewers have a way for users to program/control each other’s viewers. Just as the Lab’s Advanced Experience Tools (AET) allow a programmer to; attach a HUD to your viewer, teleport your avatar, and do other things without the normal user interaction. So too, RLV allows a programmer to do similar things with your viewer and avatar. The difference between AET and RLV is in the flavor and amount of control the user gives to a third party.
In my reading I came across this article on the Intel Developer site: Unity Tip: Using Second Life As A 3D Modeling Package.
Quoting:
You may need to use 3D modeling to create objects for your project but do not have the technical experience yet to do so, or find that your package of choice does not provide the feature that you need (for example, creating spheres in SketchUp is very difficult). There is an alternative, user-friendly solution though. You can create your objects in the online virtual reality world Second Life
I think that is pretty interesting…
Even more interesting is they promote the Firestorm Viewer as the viewer of choice. Their reason for recommending Firestorm is the Collada export feature found in Firestorm.
The article provides a tutorial on how to export 3D items from Second Life™ using the Firestorm viewer.
There are several bits of news out from the Firestorm Development team.
RLV – Jessica Lyon gives us some history on the development of the RLV code. (See: RLVa) Marine Kelly is the author and developer of RLV and RLVa code for all third party viewers. Plus having a RL job she is having health issues making it difficult to sit and develop RLV for new viewer versions.
Daeberethwen Arbenlow has a 20 minute video (3/27/2016) on controlling your Windlight settings for photography in Second Life. She uses the Firestorm Viewer and the Photo Tools feature it has. Those using the basic Linden viewer can accomplish the same changes to Windlight, just not as easily nor will the video help you learn how to use the Linden viewer, just the Firestorm viewer.
Daeberethwen does a good job of explaining all the settings and what they do. Along with the verbal description is the video example allowing you to see the changes.
Firestorm has the best set of features for photographers and machinigraphers (or is that machinamists?).
Firestorm updated sometime after I posted this…
See: Firestorm Update
I was expecting the Firestorm Viewer to update the 16th. That expectation came from a comment at the Third Party Developers’ meeting. Obviously that hasn’t happened.
I am seeing the wiki updating. Lots of new entries for version 4.7.7-48706. This is typical pre-release updating of the wiki. So, release is eminent. I doubt we will see it today or before Monday. The team doesn’t like to release a new viewer before the weekend. If something unforeseen goes wrong and people have to work on the weekend to fix it, that makes for bad juju.
This version of the Firestorm viewer caught up with the Linden Lab viewer 4.0.1. Of course the day Firestorm releases the Lab released and is now pushing 4.0.2 as their main viewer.
If you are thinking FS is behind again… well sort of, but probably not as much as one might think. Some fixes from the Firestorm team go into the Linden viewer, or at least inspire Linden fixes. Of course those FS Team fixes are already in Firestorm. So, it is hard to say who is a head, on par, behind…
Use the viewers and see which ones work best.