Viewers

General Viewer Information

Second Life and WebKit

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Webkit™ is a core Internet Browser, sort of. More precisely it is the render engine for the Safari web browser. Until mid 2013 it was the render engine for Google’s Chrome browser on Mac. The Internet Explorer browser that Microsoft uses is powered y the Trident engine. Firefox uses the Gecko engine. A number of mobile devices use Webkit.

In 2005 it was announced by Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Bertrand Serlet that WebKit would be open source. In 2010 a WebKit 2.0 project was announced.

All this is of interest to us because the Second Life™ viewer uses Webkit to power its internal web browser and Media On A Prim (MOAP). You see it used most by in-world TV’s. I suspect panels like User Profile are also displayed using WebKit.

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Second Life Depth of Field

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Honour has a post up titled: How Deep is Your Field in Second Life? She was having a problem getting the viewer’s Depth of Field (DoF) feature to work. She links to Ricco Saenz’s explanation of how to get it working: How to actually capture depth of field on your SL photos. But, not why it does what is does.

Viewer Size Image
Viewer Size Image

DoF is one thing I have found I cannot control in my RL S4’s camera, or have yet to learn how. It is a reason I still use my Sony digital camera for RL imaging. DoF is something I seldom use in Second Life™ because I prefer the control I have in Photoshop. But, I can imagine that some will find DoF more usable in the viewer than adding it in post production. 

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Second Life News 2014-4

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Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. day in America. It is a holiday for government and numerous businesses. The Lab considers it a holiday, so the Lab was running on holiday staffing levels. This usually means Tuesday and Wednesday server rolls are skipped or pushed back a day.

This week will be different. Maestro Linden told us last week that a rollout is planned for Tuesday and an RC rollout for Wednesday. We did not have one last week, so may there is a push or they are trying something differently. Whatever, we get rolls Tuesday and Wednesday.

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Your View

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 Shug Maitland (post) suggested to Strawberry Singh that she should do a meme on how people view the Second Life world. Meaning mostly a screen capture of your viewer window. I actually had to think about that for a minute.

What my viewer looks like really depends on what I’m doing. If I’m exploring, I have all the panels pretty much closed. I’ll keep the mini map open. But, if I’m attending a user group meeting, I tend to have chat windows open, sometimes even covering most of the screen. Our I may have the word processor open covering most of the viewer. If I’m working on appearance, I often have the view covered with inventory windows and the outfit window.

I decided that my view ‘of the world’ is mostly my exploring mode. But, that really isn’t how my viewer looks most of the time.

My Screen - January 2014
My Screen – January 2014

Above is a screen capture of how my screen generally looks right after I login.

Meanwhile, Strawberry has a new meme up titled: Second Life Helpful Tools Meme. It’s a great meme. She’s using some tools I didn’t even know about. So, that’s the end of this article because I’m off to find some new tools.

Second Life’s HTTP Tech Note Explained

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There is a section in the Second Life™ forum about technology: Tools and Technology. Thursday afternoon (1/16) Linden lab posted article there titled: Raising the Roof: The HTTP Project. The post is about the changes coming to how the SL Viewer and SL servers communicate.

The abbreviated point in the post is: communication between our viewers and the servers is and is going to be better and does and will use less bandwidth. This means fewer problems logging into Second Life. Also, more reliable connections and fewer disconnects. The changes will mean fewer capabilities from routers and gateways will be used, allowing the less expensive routers to handle Second Life better. And in general things will download faster. 

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Second Life Interesting Viewer 3.6.14-285213

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Interesting RC Viewer

This viewer is not yet the main viewer for Second Life™, but it did get an update Tuesday 1/14. This is the Interesting RC Viewer. It is known for faster scene rendering. You can download it here: Second Life RC & Project Viewers. If you are doing photography, this version could save your sanity. Even shopping things are rendering fast. I haven’t got to use it much. But, it seems great, better than previous version.

Interesting RC Viewer - 2014-01-14 - Fast Render
Interesting RC Viewer – 2014-01-14 – Fast Render

Remember. To run the RC you need to turn off Automatic Updates or have Automatic Updates and Willing to use RC’s both enabled. The later is preferred.

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