Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Not much new information. But, from the Third Party Developers’ meeting I hear a new version will released March 16. This version will have the update to TLS 1.2, the security upgrade needed to do money stuff in Second Life™.
Usually this close to release I am seeing things about a release in the FS Wiki and other places. But, not this time. But, since the ‘word’ is from Ed Merryman of Firestorm Support, I believe we’ll see the release.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is probably important for some to know that Firestorm Viewer 4.7.1 Public Beta will be blocked starting tomorrow 1/7/16. Reference Also, after the next release (February? March?) the version 4.6.9, used by Windows XP and Mac 10.6 users, will be blocked.
The Firestorm Team has made a second request for help with their gateway project. This time they are asking for user testimonials. They will be adding these to their web gateway pages that lead new users to their gateway regions. See: Share Your Love of Second Life with a Testimonial.
If you have a blog or other web site, you can help by linking to Firestorm’s gateway landing pages. See their ‘share’ post for a list of the 6 landing pages. You’ll also find them in my blog roll.
This time I’ll warn you up front, the title is a deliberately ambiguous headline.
We have lots of interesting Second Life™ promotions stuff going on. Firestorm is asking for people to submit photos: Share your photos this weekend to promote Second Life. The photos will go in the Firestorm Gateway section of Flickr. Canary Beck is moderating the photo pool. It has 4,678 images as I write this.
CAUTION: SPOILER AHEAD!