Second Life Bugs

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 expected to close-couple pan with mouse movement and stop panning when mouse motion is stopped, regardless of mouse button state after stop.

Results:

A) Avatar is watching mouse pointer long after mouse pointer motion stops.  This defeats a mechanism by which life-like behavior is imparted into avatar motion.

B) World Map exploration is being awkward as the mouse button must be released to stop the map from panning away from the desired view.

These changes start to appear in SL Viewer versions 3.7.3 and 3.7.4. I find them in version 3.7.6.

With the map, I like the change. To see it click on the map part of the World Map and flick the map left or right. Hold the left mouse button down after the drag/flip motion. The map will continue to scroll. How fast you jerk the image does not seem to matter.  The map scrolls at the same speed.

You’ll see some odd behavior when you move quickly. I think our hand bounces a bit at the end and that can confuse the map scroller. Try it. You’ll see.

As to the avatar eyes following the mouse, I have mixed feelings. I gave up trying to control the avatar for pictures with that feature. See Strawberry’s recommendations for pose tools. So, this is not much of an issue for me.

Firestorm Viewer 4.4.0 To Be Blocked

Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

 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 Firestorm Team decided they would do something to help their developers. The decision was to limit the number of versions of Firestorm on the grid at any one time to 3. They block their old viewers and prevent users from logging into Second Life with old viewers. I’m not sure if that blocking includes use on other grids.

In this case ‘old’ means not one of the current three newest versions. Currently version 4.4.0 is the fourth running version. The team is announcing that on Thursday they will block that version. There are about 5500 people using that version. They are encouraged to update now rather than wait until they’re blocked on Thursday.

See: Blocking Version 4.4.0 – 33720.

Firestorm: A Joke… Not So Much

Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

 The Firestorm Viewer Team is thinking. Their recent April Fool’s Joke about the Dynamic User Interface (DUI), the detachable control panels, has been the goal of many developers for some time. Now Firestorm Team member Nicky Dasmijn has built a proof of concept version of the viewer with those detachable panels. In this version window and panel layouts can be saved for later use.

There is no release version of this viewer, beta or otherwise. But the team is releasing the code some other developers can work on the project. The Firestorm Team is hoping the code will inspire developers to come up with new innovations for the Second Life viewer.

See the official announcement here: The real joke… DUI is no joke!

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Second Life News 2014-15

Viewers

The main viewer is  version 3.7.4-288138.

Immersiva Photoshop Night Vision
Immersiva Photoshop Night Vision

This is the version that got the FMODEX fixes that solved a race condition. For the less geeky, a race condition is a common problem in multi-threaded programs. You can think of the threads as separate processes or programs that run at the same time. Once up on a time computers had only one CPU running programs and race conditions were not as common. Now with 2 to 8 cores (CPU’s) built into a single CPU chip the computer can do more than one thing at a time.

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Second Life Bug

We get them from time to time. We have one that is annoying for those of us using the Preview Grid.

BUG-5563 – My Password and Inventory don’t update on Beta Grid (aditi).

The idea on the Preview Grid is that it updates your inventory to be what you have on the main grid when you change your password. This bug means that is not happening.

It is a bit confusing but the report is the Preview Grid does not get your new password. So, if your main and preview grid password was fred and you change it to Sue111, you will use Sue111 on the main grid and have to use fred on the Preview Grid.

Some find that both passwords will work on the Preview Grid for a time.

If you are confused, so are others.

Facebook, Flickr & Twitter from Second Life

SL Share is the feature name the Lab uses for their sharing feature. You probably remember that Facebook sharing was blocked for a time. Facebook advised the Lab on what had to change for the feature to be unblocked. The Lab made those changes. Now Facebook sharing is back.

While the Lab was making changes they added the ability to share with Flickr and Twitter. Torley Linden made a video tutorial that posted with announcement about the newly enhanced SL Share.

[youtube uVlNa2O9if4]

To use these new features you need to download and install the  Project SL Share2 Viewer version 3.7.5.288424. 

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