Second Life News 2013-49

There will be a roll out Tuesday morning. The package running on Blue Steel and Le Tigre will get promoted to the main change. This is the one that includes the vehicle region crossing fix.

RC Update

Wednesday there will a single package rolling out to all three RC channels. This package contains a fix for: llGetAgentInfo() so that it now detects AGENT_CROUCHING correctly for avatars who have custom ‘Crouching’ or ‘CrouchWalking’ animations (BUG-4431). There is also a crash mode that has been fixed.

Since they aren’t saying much about the crash mode, I assume it is some exploit or other security fix.

Viewers

There is one RC viewer and one project viewer on the RC Viewers page. As of late Monday those haven’t changed from last week. The Interesting and Fitted viewers are it.

In the Third Party Viewers class Firestorm has moved back into first place for the most stable viewer. I say first because I don’t count Radegast as a viewer because it is not a graphical viewer in the sense that other TPViewers are. I just don’t see it in the same class.

Firestorm to Start Blocking Viewers

Jessica Lyon, the project manager for the Firestorm Viewer, posted that they will begin blocking older versions of their viewers. Jessica is anticipating the drama this will bring on. By her writing you can tell she is expecting a chorus for complaints one might hear from a 10-year old trying to manipulate their parents.  I suspect she is right.

Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

Jessica points out they have little choice. It is either the Firestorm team blocking or the Lab will take over blocking. I’m not sure that is completely accurate. But, I can see how some will see things that way. In general the Lab does not block viewers. But, if you use the newer viewers you really don’t have a choice about updating your viewer. It automatically updates by default. But, that can be turned off.

There are mandatory updates that the Lab requires from time to time. I expect as some of the current changes being made allow better overall SL performance, which are viewer dependent, more updates are going to be mandatory. So, whether there is a misconception about what is and is not going to be blocked and by who, you are going to be updating your viewer or find yourself unable to login. Otherwise you will be degrading other people’s performance. 

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Firestorm 64-Bit Viewer?

Seems the Firestorm Development Team is thinking about a 64-bit version of the viewer. Jessica Lyon has placed a post on the Firestorm Viewer blog about a 64-bit viewer. See: Firestorm 64bit Viewer o.O.

Image by: DoctorWho80 - Flickr
Image by: DoctorWho80 – Flickr

There is a link to the explanation of what 64-bit software is and how it differs from 32-bit software. Unfortunately, the link leads to a Microsoft site. My experience is you need to be a graduate of some geek college to understand what they’re saying. So, I’ll give you the short version… well… at least a version with, I hope, understandable language. 

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Firestorm Meeting 2013-37

The Firestorm team is having the meetings they promised. Saturday the 14th they had a meeting Q&A. In this meeting there is lots of good troubleshooting information. There is a video of the meeting that runs 2 hours and 12 minutes. I’ll get to the link later.

I’ve paraphrased the information given in the meeting. Several subjects came up more than once. Speakers also wondered off into various subjects then come back to the main topic. That happen in a live discussion. I’ve tried to get all the information on a subject into a single section here.

Ed Merryman spoke about viewer settings. He is stressing less is more. 

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Firestorm Blocking Update

Today Jessica Lyon posted on the Firestorm blog about Saturday’s 3 hour Q & A meeting. See: Q&A – Don’t be surprised… be informed.

In the comments the key question was asked. When will Phoenix blocking start? Jessica answered:

We haven’t decided yet what we will do with Phoenix. I may not have been clear at the meeting but the 3 version rule will start as of now, existing builds don’t really fall into the rule because we expect SSA will kill them off anyways. However if after SSA is fully deployed for a few weeks, we see there are still thousands on Phoenix, we ‘may’ decide to block it. I would rather avoid that if I could though.

Explosive Firestorm Meeting

This is going to be controversial and upset a lot of people. What it is, is a two hour and 45 minute video of a Firestorm meeting that showed up on YouTube. I didn’t see any announcement of the meeting. I do watch for such announcements. Some get past me. Whatever, there is some hot news in the video. If your in a hurry to see what is going to upset people, look for the red text (hint: page 2).

The video below is from a Firestorm-in-development viewer. It shows Materials in Firestorm. This version has not yet been released it is coming. It is not the video of the meeting.

[youtube gAdKIvbnQtA]

I doubt many will have time for watching the whole three hours of video of the August 10th Q & A meeting. I have a link to it at the end of the article. I decided to index it while I worked my way through it. It would be great if it were an MP3. I could play at 1.5x speed.

I am paraphrasing the whole video index I’ve made. My biases and prejudices can color what I hear. So, if something tics you off, watch the video then start your rant.

This is a Firestorm Q&A meeting where Jessica Lyon gets into some hard to swallow news. This is the end of the Phoenix Viewer.

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