Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
There was a Firestorm Q&A on Saturday afternoon. Inara Pey has a synopsis and index for the video (2hr 37min) and link to the video on her site: April 12th Firestorm meeting: video, transcript and notes. The points that interest me follow.
The 64-bit Firestorm download was offline for a short time while the FS Team got a certificate problem resolved.
The Dynamic User Interface (DUI) that was the center of the April Fool’s Joke is put into some more perspective. It is real. It is possible to build a viewer that allows the panels to be moved outside the viewer window. The current version of the DUI viewer is broken. It is only a proof of concept viewer. So, while the moving the panels works it is not for everyday use… or any use, other than to see the panels move.
The current main viewer is version 3.7.5-288464. This is the Google Breakpad RC Viewer promoted to the main release viewer. If you dig around in the log files section you’ll find more ‘marker files’ and more logged information. The Lindens have moved the start of logging, no easy task, further toward the beginning of viewer start up and the end of shutdown.
Marker files are uniquely named and often have no data inside or very little. The purpose of the files is to basically leave breadcrumb trail for the error reporting process to follow. They are written because if the viewer crashes it often won’t be able to log an error. So, at certain points a ‘marker file’ is written so the next time the crash reporter runs, which is before viewer actually starts, it can check to see what the viewer did in its last run and report when it crashed. The marker file gives some idea of how far the viewer got in its process before crashing.
My readers will know Mac users have a problem. There is no near term solution to the problem for several reasons. Even more confusing is there are multiple problems. And today a group approached me hoping to put together a movement to show Linden Lab the extent of the problem and the interest in getting it fixed.
So, I’m scratching my head wondering if the Lab is in a position to fix the problem… and which problem are we talking about? Since I’m not a Mac user, I’m probably not the best one to write this, but no one else seems to be covering it.
I’ve touched on Mac issues in the past; Second Life News 2013-11, Firestorm Viewer News 2014-7, Viewer Release Pipeline Update, and others. The SL Viewer and Third Party Viewers are moving to support Apple’s Cocoa frame work or may be I should say did so move in 2013. But, that has left Apple users on older operating systems behind. SL apparently has problems running in the older Apple OS’s. This has resulted in Apple users staying with older viewer versions.
As we near another release of the Firestorm Viewer those issues are coming to a crisis point for some users. The recent blocking of Firestorm 4.4.0 is bringing home the point of the team only allowing 3 versions to run on the SL grid and blocking older versions. People are getting the idea the team is actually blocking older viewers.
Some are seeing behavior changes in the viewer. It doesn’t seem anyone knows if they were intentional. Whether they are or are not, some people are not happy. Ardy Lay describes the problem as: Expectations: A) Avatar is expected to stop watching mouse pointer after a short period of mouse inactivity. B) World Map is … Read more
You may remember a time when there were something like 1600 different versions of viewers in Second Life on any given day. The problem with that is it so dilutes crash stats developers are hampered. There isn’t enough data on any single version to provide a developer good information for tracking down a bug. The … Read more
