Second Life: Windlight Tutorial

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?). 

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Second Life: Firestorm Viewer Week 11

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 … Read more

Firestorm Viewer News 2/26

We are to the final stages of a new Firestorm Viewer release. Jessica Lyon, team leader, says they have pushed all new work into a new development branch as the finalize testing on their release candidate. This next release will have TLS 1.2 (Transport Layer Security).

Would you refer a friend to Second Life? Take my latest survey.
Would you refer a friend to Second Life? Take my latest survey.
See: Canary Dec 2015

TLS is sort of part of SSL and sort of a replacement. It is enough to know that it is the part of the viewer that secures all the viewer’s money handling communications. I forget the cutoff date, but there is a date coming soon when a viewer MUST have TLS 1.2 or the SL servers will refuse to talk to the the viewer for money things. You can use your viewer and run around SL. But, you won’t be able to buy things.

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Firestorm Team Thank You

Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.

Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.

Firestorm Support Jacket - Link farther down the page
Firestorm Support Jacket – Link farther down the page

You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.

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Second Life News Week 2 – #2

This past week a Third Pary Develpoers’ meeting was held. Not much in the way of NEW news, but lots of updates… except for one big block buster.

Cyborg
Cyborg

Viewers

The Maintenance RC got prompted Friday morning and is now the main SL viewer: 4.0.1-310054. If you have been having problems and low FPS this release should help. This version is the second main viewer with the CEF. It also has lots of fixes. 

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