Viewers

General Viewer Information

#SL News 1 Week 49

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This week is short on news. A couple of user group meetings were canceled. A couple of Lindens are on vacation too. So, there isn’t much coming out of Linden Lab™ this week. It is the holiday season.

Server Beta Meeting Dec 2012

Servers

Tuesday there was no package roll out. It seems a number of regions were restarted. I suspect because of the server side memory leak. It seems to be related to rebuilds of the Pathfinding Navmesh. So, any building that affects the Navmesh, like making an obstacle Static and clicking the Rebuild button, is going to push the server closer to a crash.

On Wednesday the Lindens did roll a maintenance package to all three Release Candidate channels. The same package rolled to all three channels. I has the bug fixes built after last week’s testing. Unfortunately there is a new one: Email messages sent by scripted objects are not triggering emails when the owner-recipient is offline. That is a pretty big problem. Maestro Linden has confirmed this is a problem.

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New Major Firestorm Release 4.3.1.31155 Review

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Yay! A new release of the Firestorm Viewer (FS) hit the net last night. You can read the team’s release announcement here: Firestorm Major Release 4.3.1.31155. This is a big release for the Firestorm team. It has lots of new features. Since the SL Viewer released a load of new features the FS team usually feels they can release their implementation of them.

Firestorm Splash Screen

Get your SL downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux here: Firestorm Viewer Download.

For OpenSim use this link: OpenSim Firestorm Viewer Download. More about this later.

Download & Install

The files size for windows is about 40mb. The download is fast, taking only a couple of minutes.

With this and the last several releases the team has recommended a clean install, meaning remove the previous install. That of course wipes out your viewer settings.

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Niran’s Viewer 2.0.4 (2321)Release Review

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The 27th of November Niran released version 2.0.4 (2321). The download is about 50mb. Source Forge is the code and binary repository. You download from Source Forge. It was very slow this morning taking 15 minutes to download.

Nirans Viewer – 2.0.4 or 3.4.4?

I don’t use Niran’s viewer much anymore because Niran experiments with the user interface. I think that is a good thing, it just makes using the viewer inconvenient for me. I am forever in: where did ___(some control here)___ go mode. I needed to look at the viewer for another article I am working on, so I updated and checked it out.

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#SL Viewer Update Week 48

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SL Viewer Updates

It seems the memory leak problem has finally been solved for the SL Viewer. We’ve had a number of false hopes that it was fixed. But now the main production viewer has updated. That is a sure indication the problem is fixed. That does not mean every problem is fixed. But, the problem causing a high crash rate in the Beta & Dev viewers is fixed. So, fixes can now start to roll again. For the last few weeks updates had stopped while the problem was tracked down. So, we sort of have open floodgates and a surge of updates rolling out. Viewer versions are changing quickly.

The Development viewer is at version: 3.4.4-267322

The Beta viewer is at version: 3.4.3-267135 – Release Notes

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Exodus Viewer Beta 9 Release Review

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If you are following my coverage of viewers, you know that most Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developers are NOT releasing production viewers, but instead release Beta or test viewers to save on paper work. So, I am not surprised that Exodus has another Beta version out.

Exodus Viewer gets the Navmesh

The Exodus blog lists the New, Fixed, and Changed features in this release. See: Beta 9 (12.11.24.1).

The release comes in both a 32-bit and a sort of 64-bit (LAA) version. The download file size is about 37mb and the download is quick. The install is simple and typical. I installed it over the top of my previous 8.1 install and it seems to work OK.

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Kokua and Imprudence

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I don’t keep up with Kokua and Imprudence as much as I might and certainly not as much as I used to. Imprudence Viewer was for some time my favorite viewer for both SL and OpenSim. Soon it slipped to being my choice just for OpenSim. Then it fell so far behind I stopped using it. I still have it installed… I’m not sure why.

There is a small effort to update Imprudence. But, I think it is so far behind it is no longer usable.

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Kokua was to be the primary OpenSim viewer. I had hoped to see Aurora and Kokua offer some competition to Second Life™ by providing combined viewer and server features creators could use. I got the impression there was a goal to develop viewer and server dependent features more quickly and lower the wall between the viewer and server.

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