There is a new blog post up announcing a new Project Viewer: 3.4.1-266120 Project Viewer CHUI. See: The Second Life Communications Hub User Interface (CHUI) Launches Today. This viewer has some new features. I suspect these are some of the features that were being held up by the 3.4.x memory leak problem, which apparently is not completely solved… and thus resulting a 14±% crash rate, which is still way down from what it was.
This is a feature in CHUI that shows you all the conversations you have had in the last 30 days.
Conference Chat
You probably know you can already select multiple people in your friends list and open a conference chat. A new feature now allows you to add people to the conference after it is opened.
No not a viewer release. Jessica has posted on the Firestorm blog about what is going on with Firestorm and their development effort. See: Status update.
New Firestorm Region in OSGrid
In my Kokua article: Kokua Beta Status & Review, I wrote about the rates that developers were releasing versions of their viewers. Jessica is explaining their release philosophy and how that will be changing.
Included is a list of coming features in the next release. Some we have seen in preliminary versions in other TPV’s. I expect the Firestorm release to have features with more polish and improved user interface.
The Team is also focusing on stability. Firestorm is currently the most stable viewer used with Second Life™. Jessica says they have even more stability fixes.
Today I see a post on the Kokua/Imprudence blog. NickyP wrote about the problems added when a developer moves from a Beta release to a production release. They are the reason that the Kokua viewer is staying a Beta Viewer.
The Team is able to develop faster because they keep it a Beta release viewer, which is a good thing.
Kokua/Imprudence Viewers
Back when the Viewer Policies changed some developers were warning that development would slow down because of all the stuff they were required to do. Now developers are finding their way around some of the more tedious requirements.
Kokua and Exodus both release numerous beta versions. They release few production releases.
The Firestorm viewer is infrequently released as it mostly comes out only in production releases. The typical beta release for Firestorm is to their QA people or maybe we should call them beta testers. Beta releases when they are released are versions that are intended to be a future production version. Some other TPV Dev’s are releasing beta versions that are much more in the line of experimental viewers that have fewer restictions.
If you have looked at the Viewer Statistics (Ctrl-Shift-1), you have likely looked at PING. The term comes from the use of echo location in submarines and other marine uses. The active echo locators make a distinctive PING sound as the send a sound wave out. Electronics hear the echos coming back and create picture for human use.
Lots of PING – Image by: mknowles Flickr
When testing network connections we use a ping. It is actually a command to send a network data packet to a remote location and request a packet be sent back. The travel time tells us how well the connection is working.
What most people likely don’t think about is whether the Viewer’s PING is the same as the PING our operating system generates. For your information it isn’t.
Oz Linden has given us some news on the crashing problem they have had with the Beta and Development viewer. The Lindens believe the current Beta viewer (3-4-1-265642) has the memory leak, or whatever, fixed. The crash rate is back to low rates.
For the techies, the problem had to do with how the cURL wrapper was threaded. The cURL thing has to do with computer network communication over networks. It is a programming library that makes it easier for programmers to implement communication protocols like HTTP and HTTPS. It helps with encrypting communications.
Wind Vectors Displayed – Red Lines
One more round of testing in the Beta viewer is in progress. Once completed the basic fix and changes will move to the main release viewer, likely next week (42).
It takes a couple of days of testing to collect enough data to make a determination on whether a fix is working or not. The current Beta Viewer was compiled on Saturday and released on Monday. If you have Auto-Update on, you got it before it was on the web site.
There is good news coming from Oz Linden about the viewer. You probably remember I’ve been writing about a memory leak in the Beta and Development viewers. Their crash rates were way up from previous rates. Oz thinks the latest Beta Viewer 3.4.1-265434 has the problem resolved. Grab a copy of the viewer and try it out. They need as much testing data as possible. The data from over the weekend will give them good information on whether they have found the problem or not.
The Project Download Page
The problem has been difficult to reproduce. That means it is very hard to know what to fix. In #SL Viewer 3.4.x Week 37 I wrote about the problem in more detail.
The Development Viewer has been stalled at 3.4.2-265141 for about a week. The Lindens have been pulling updates and fixes out of the viewer code to narrow down the cause of the crashes. I suspect they are doing that work in a temporary code repository (repo for short) and using internal builds for testing. So, we don’t see activity in the Dev Viewer repo. The latest fixes are probably only in the Beta version.
If the problem has been resolved, development can move forward again. Oz says they have several interesting features waiting in the pipeline. He just won’t talk about them. So, what’s interesting to him, a p r o g r a m m e r, and us may be different… But, there is hope there is something fun waiting.
Keep your fingers crossed and run a copy of the Beta Viewer. Use the link in the left column labeled SL Viewer Release. The Beta Viewer’s link is a little further down the page. I downloaded it yesterday. I’ve only used it for a short time. I will be using it more latter today. However, it has yet to eat my computer or crash
