Viewers

Second Life Viewer 2014-23

2014/06/052014/06/04 by Nalates Urriah

There is a new RC Viewer out: MemShine Viewer version 3.7.9.290582. This viewer is a combination of versions; MemPlugs Viewer version 3.7.9.290405 and Sunshine Viewer version 3.7.9.290131, I have been writing about for 3 weeks or so. I think this version has new fixes for each of the parent versions.

Firestorm Logo

This combining of RC versions appears to be an attempt to speed up the release of changes made to the viewer. It seems once again viewer release speed is holding things up. Limiting viewer releases to two per month is a basic guideline the Lab adopted to avoid annoying users with too frequent updates. It would seem the result is things are backing up.

Second Life Bits and News 2014-22

2014/05/27 by Nalates Urriah

The Memorial Day holiday is over in the United States. I’m back and staff is back to work at the Lab.

Servers

This week there are no server rollouts.

I’ve seen a couple of comments about unusually intense griefing. But, I haven’t seen it happening in my travels, but SL is a big place. I know there are some places that get lots of attention from griefers. Other regions like mine seem to seldom see a griefer.

I do get noobies coming from a landing hub that get trapped in my house and can’t figure out how to get out. It is sort of like having flies in the house… they fly around bumping into the walls.

Oculus Rift and Second Life

2016/05/112014/05/22 by Nalates Urriah

The Lab has announced that they have a viewer ready for the Oculus Rift. The Lab’s announcement is here: Using the Oculus Rift with Second Life. It includes the video I have here.

The big announcement is the release of a project viewer: OculusRift Viewer version 3.7.8.289834 – download. It features:

Full Oculus Rift Hardware Support
Full UI Support
Customizable UI
Avatar Head Motion
New First-Person View
Align to Look
Action Key

The viewer detects a Rift and provides quick setup. The Lab writes you can use HUD’s and all of the viewer’s interface functions. We are told we can customize the interface. Also, a new first person (mouse look like – use the M-key to enter it) view has been added. There is a new ‘Action Key’, which I suppose takes the place of a mouse click.

Second Life Bits 2014-21 #3

2014/05/21 by Nalates Urriah

Blender – Baking Normals

I came across a simple to the point video tutorial on baking normal maps in Blender 2.6, which is enough like 2.7 it doesn’t matter. He manages to crash Blender before the end. But, the important part is complete by then.

[youtube bck1eU4e8xo]

SVVR

We are seeing more videos of the SVVR conference. The sound in the current batch is awful. Rumor is some professional grade videos are coming. I am waiting.

Second Life Down Time

The Thursday down time is being postponed. See: Scheduled Maintenance. Presumably the problem from Tuesday that stalled the main channel’s rollout and pushed the RC channel rollouts to Thursday are the cause of the postponement.

Second Life Bits & Pieces 2014-21

2014/05/19 by Nalates Urriah

The basic SL News is here; servers and viewers. But, there isn’t much to say about those so I’ve mixed in the bits an pieces of news from around the grid.

Second Life will be down for an hour on Thursday, 22 May beginning at 7am PDT. If you are in-world you won’t be ejected. But, you won’t be able to do much. Avoid pulling things out of inventory or changing outfits. Of course don’t attempt any Linden$ transactions. Building is probably out of the question.

This has something to do with the assets database and backend systems. Firestorm will have the grid status on screen as usual. I’m not sure how many people will notice. I’ll have to see if the SL Viewer’s splash says anything about it.

If the SL Forum is working (I suspect it will be), we’ll see a load of people asking why they cannot login.

Server Rolls
The main channel will get a roll Tuesday. This will be the maintenance release that was running in Magnum this past week. This is a fix for a network issue occurring in busy simulators.

Server RC’s
The Blue Steel and Le Tigre channels will continue to run the AISv3 update package for Server Side Avatar baking. The Sunshine viewer is getting updates and hopefully went into QA today.

Second Life News 2014-20

2014/05/13 by Nalates Urriah

Servers

This week there is no roll to the main channel.

RC Servers

Blue Steel and Le Tigre will remain on the inventory update package, Sunshine/AISv3.

Magnum will get a new maintenance package that fixes some network issues affecting busy regions.

The main viewer this morning is 3.7.7-289461. No change since last week. This version has lots of code clean up work. It is the Interesting Viewer promoted. It should render a region faster and more intelligently.