Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Lots of people want to know when the next release of the Firestorm Viewer will be. I’m one of them. Well, Jessica has explained when. See: When is the next release?
The TL:DR is the next release is soon… feel cheated? Oh well…
The Second Life™ Third Party Viewer Developers meeting was yesterday (7/10). It was another short meeting, 25± minutes. There is a bit of news, but not anything really exciting. There is a bit about when the next Firestorm Release will arrive.
The first 4 minutes are so were spent talking with the Lindens about when they were going to release the Viewer Managed Marketplace (VMM). The release is problematic for Firestorm’s team. They want to include VMM in the next FS release and release as close as possible to the Linden’s release of VMM. But, the Lindens have to be done and stop making changes to VMM before the FS Team can finalize their work.
We still have a debate ongoing in Second Life™ over on SLUniverse in the discussion started by Adeon Writer, Dear Mesh Content Creators: Please stop making your content on Firestorm, continues. I provided my thoughts in Second Life LoD Problems – Is Firestorm to Blame. In that article you’ll see I think designer and consumer ignorance are to blame. I also see plenty of fascist rule makers out proposing their solutions.
I prefer freedom and free market solutions over rules.
One of the solutions proposed in:
BUG-6243 – Provide an informative warning when creating sculpts or mesh that may render improperly for others.
That places everything on the designer and provides no incentive for the designer to comply. I prefer something to provide information to everyone about what everything is doing to our render efficiency. That is why I filed:
The Firestorm Viewer Team is deciding whether to go into feature freeze in 2 weeks and release a viewer version 2 weeks after that. They want to avoid having a viewer out without Viewer Managed Marketplace when the Lab starts their 30-day countdown clock on VMM implementation. That could leave FS users out in the cold on VMM. The real issue with VMM is for those using MagicBoxes. But, the team is anticipating FS users would not be happy.
If you do nothing with your Marketplace items then auto-migration will eventually run and migrate you. That will eliminate anything you are still selling via magic box. There is no longer a need for magic boxes. The new system does all the things that MagicBoxes did.
Lots of Second Life™ people use the Firestorm Viewer. Creators are certainly part of that group. A number of people think the Firestorm Viewer is to blame for LoD problems in Second Life. Can that be?
Personally I think this is a case of a fascist mind set running the standard victim line and wanting someone else to fix their problems. See what you think.
Every so often I hit a point where my Second Life™ experience sucks from poor viewer performance. When that happens I start changing viewer brands in hope of an improvement. I troubleshoot starting with the easy and work to the hard. But, this time I over looked an obvious problem.
These days I mostly use the Linden made viewer and it is almost always one of the RC versions. I like being on the cutting edge. Over the years Imprudence, Emerald/Phoenex, Exodus, Kirsten’s, and Niran’s were the viewers to use, at various times, to be on the cutting edge. That has changed.