Viewers

General Viewer Information

Kokua Beta Status & Review

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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.

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Second Life Viewer Statistics PING

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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.

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#SL News 2 Week 41

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Viewer 3.4.x Problem

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.

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#SL Viewer 3.4.x Week 37

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Linden Viewer updates are a bit balled up right now. This version got too many changes and fixes poked into one update. Somewhere in all those changes is a memory leak that crashes the viewer. This has caused problems. The Pathfinding Project’s formal release has been delayed, for instance, as have other viewer updates.

Third party dev’s have been splitting the various update items apart and implementing different parts of the 3.4 code in their viewers. Pathfinding Tools are mostly operational in Firestorm and their crash rate is still really low. So, the problem is not in the PF Tools. (You can now see those tools in more viewers, but not yet the official Linden viewer.)

The Lindens are trying to get a viewer version with just the PF Tools into testing with the 3.3 code. They feel that could pass testing and move to Beta and Release quickly.

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