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.
Strawberry Singh is one of the better Second Life™ photographers. She recently tried streaming a photo tips tutorial. It worked pretty well. You can see the result: I clipped the first couple of minutes where she was figuring out the streaming software. This is a good example of using the Firestorm Viewer to adjust your … Read more
Last Friday was the Third Party Developers meeting. It lasted about 20 minutes. So, not much news and almost no new news. Sigh. I’ll put it all in one post.
Bambi Foxdale #paparazzoted
Viewers
The main viewer is 3.8.4-305119. Expect that to change this week (42).
RC Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 3.8.5.305531 – This is the most likely viewer to get promoted. It is doing well, I suppose not crashing nor getting BUG reports. So, it is Oz Linden’s best guess at the viewer that will get promoted. But, that isn’t a guarantee. Release Notes: Big batch of Maintenance work to improve performance, fix bugs, address feature requests and give Second Life love. It has almost 100 fixes.
RC Second Life Notifications Viewer version 3.8.5.305555 – Release Notes:
New Notifications floater separates incoming notifications into Categories. It provides a better way to view, interact with, prioritize and manage incoming notices for busy residents.
System – Displays general notifications, such as inventory transfers and friendship status changes.
Transactions – Displays notifications that result from Linden dollar (L$) transactions.
Invitations – Displays group invitations.
Group – Displays notices from groups you are in.
Each notification in the list can be expanded or collapsed by clicking the arrow at the bottom right of the listing. You may also use the Collapse all button to collapse any expanded notifications. You may delete notifications from the list by clicking the x button at the upper right of each listing. Alternatively, you may click the “Delete all” button to delete all notifications in the current tab.
A special thank you to Aki Shichiroji for initial feature design.
RC Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.5.305528 – Release Notes:
Graphics Presets You can now create different saved “presets” for your graphics preferences, and quickly switch between them using a new top bar pulldown. Create one with a short draw distance and support for lots of detail to use when going to a dance club, another with long views for exploring, and any others that you find yourself using frequently.
Avatar Rendering Complexity Controls For many users, the most expensive part of rendering a Second Life scene is rendering the avatars around you. For some time, the viewer has had a measurement of how much each avatar around you is affecting your performance; this viewer introduces some control and feedback based on that measure. A new *Avatar Maximum Complexity* control lets you prevent expensive avatars from lagging you; any avatar over the limit is displayed as a solid color rather than rendering full detail. A default limit is set based on the rendering performance of your system. You’ll also get a notice when your own rendering complexity changes, and an indication when you’re over the limit of too many of the avatars around you.
RC Second Life HTTP update Viewer version 3.8.5.305771 – Release Notes:
This viewer release is a complete replacement of the under the hood HTTP infrastructure. It provides improved performance and stability by replacing the self deleting responders with coroutine implementations. These coroutines also provide a finer grained concurrency allowing the Viewer greater control over the numbers and types of HTTP requests that can be simultaneously outstanding. This release also removes a considerable amount of deprecated and unused code from the viewer. These changes impact all areas of the viewer that use Sim Capabilities. A non-exhaustive list includes:
From last Friday’s Third Party viewer Dev’s meeting we learn the Firestorm Dev’s are looking at what will be in their next release. As it stands now the Mesh Importer changes are likely the latest they will include. Tentatively the Firestorm Viewer will go into feature lock Oct 18. Figure two to four weeks of testing then a viewer release. So, a good guess, operative word ‘guess’, is a new Firestorm Viewer in early to mid November, if things go as planned, which you can’t count on.
Bonfire – what I love in summer
The last Firestorm release was mid August. The one before that in May. So, November is the target for the next release based on the team’s plan of making a release every 3 months. Seems they are staying pretty much on schedule.
It isn’t contagious. This problem passed quickly, I think. I didn’t run into it, so it is hard for me to know. But, it revealed another part of how the Second Life™ system works.
Knowledge is not everything…
Backend Serve updates – there are a number of backend services needed to support Second Life. When the Lab is changing/updating them they generally provide no public notice, unless users need to change behavior, like refrain from transactions or rezzing no-copy items (which hopefully is changing).
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.
