Viewers

General Viewer Information

Nirans Viewer Gets Mesh Def 0.2

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A couple of days ago Qarl release a revision of the Mesh Deformer code. Today Niran got it working in Niran’s Viewer. Niran posted a comment on the Deformer update article. Nirans link leads to this Nirans Viewer Download page. The 1.24 version is still on the Download Button. Find the 1.25 version, which has the Mesh Deformer.

The download is slow this morning, but I’m having network problems.

As soon as I get a copy downloaded and the network retuned, I’ll be checking out the new deformer.

Remember. The Deformer is still alpha code.

Niran’s Viewer Update 1.23.5

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The speed of updates to various viewers is overwhelming. If I reviewed every release, I would never have time to do much else. Fortunately several of the viewers do a good job of blogging what’s changed in their viewer. The problem with those updates is they tend to only tell one the good stuff, which makes sense if you think about it. If they find a problem, they tell the development team so it can be fixed. So, the problems they know about have been fixed.

Give a viewer to a regular user and we’ll do something odd with it that the developers haven’t tried. That is why users always find bugs. As good as the developers and testers are, they can’t think of or do everything that can be done by a user.

So, reviewers always have things they can find. The problem is finding it all.

Version 1.23.5 of Nirans is out and has a load of fixes and additions. As usual the interface has changes. Some you’ll like and some not so much. But we learn from experimenting.

Downloads

Niran’s now has both 32 and 64 bit versions of the viewer for Windows. The 1.23.5 was released in the 64 bit version about 10 AM today. Nirans Viewer download page.

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#SL Animation Changes

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Avastar in Blender - Image by Machinimatrix

In January of this year Laurent Bechir filed a user story in the SL JIRA, STORM-1803. The JIRA item points to Machinimatrix’s post on Second Life’s animation format. The animation format controls what we can upload into SL. In a way this user story is a feature request.

Oddly it is the Biovision Hierarchy (BVH) file format used for uploading that restricts much of what we can do with animations in Second Life. Internally SL uses an .anim type file format that allows more animation controls than BVH.

Some of the things an ANIM file allows are:

  • Different animation priorities per-joint
  • Keyframed animation control of eyes!
  • Variable length joint offsets per frame (allowing cartoon-like “stretchy” bones)
  • Keyframed rotation and repositioning of attachments (which meshes can weight to; to use as new child bones  )
  • Client Side scaling of attachments and default mesh
  • ANIM files are text files

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Kokua Viewer Update

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Maria Korolov has an update on the Kokua Viewer at Hypergrid Business: Kokua viewer to support Imprudence exports. The Kokua/Imprudence developers have been on a bit of a holiday, taking some well deserved time. This January they were planning the development path and asking for user feedback. The general plan is now to stop development of Imprudence and move forward with the Kokua Viewer development.

Kokua/Imprudence Viewers

Important Feature

One of the features of Imprudence is import/export of objects in OpenSim worlds and Second Life. Many build in OpenSim worlds and then move final projects to SL for use or sale. Some also move things from SL to OpenSim. So, the import/export is an important feature for many. Maria spoke with the Kokua developers about the feature.

The news is while the viewer will not initially have the feature it will eventually be added. While there are things with higher priorities to be addressed before import/export the feature is on the to-be-included list.

There seems to be some challenge making the future Kokua import/export compatible with Imprudence’s. The developers plan to make it compatible, if possible. Remember. The viewer and server must cooperate for the feature to work. So, it is not solely a viewer side thing.

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#SecondLife and Anti-Virus

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The Firestorm/Phoenix Wiki has a load of handy information for solving Second Life technical problems. I noticed today that they updated their wiki page on Anti-virus programs.  See: Whitelisting the Viewer in Anti Virus Software.

Image by: SarahCartwright - Flickr

They tell you how to handle; Avast, AVG, Kaspersky, McAFee, Norton, and PC Tools Spyware Doctor.

They don’t say anything about speed gains or risk.

Anti-virus software can place a heavy load on your computer. The result is you lose Frames per Second (FPS). Not all anti-virus programs are the same. PC Magazine did a review of anti-virus programs for 2012: The Best Antivirus for 2012.

PC Magazine doesn’t say anything about performance. Most reviewers seem to consider the only performance criteria to be whether a program can find the virus. While that is important, it seems some anti-virus programmers have taken the approach that all the computer ever needs to do is defend against viruses.

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#SL Firestorm 3.3.0 (24880) Release Review

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I heard there is a new Phoenix Hour out. I suppose someday it will change to a Firestorm Hour. At about the same time the Phoenix Hours restart the next release of Firestorm is released.

This release has a load of features. As best I can tell all the Phoenix features have made it over to Firestorm.  In addition to those features new ones have been added. A good example is the Particle Editor. The code for the Particle Editor was written by Zi Ree. I understand it was written for Firestorm and shared with the community. I first saw the editor in Dolphin Viewer-3 in mid December last year. It has been popping up in other TPV’s ever since.

Particle Editor

Finding the Particle Editor is a bit trick. It is not part of the standard build panel as I expected it would be. After all one is editing a prim’s attributes, so it seems to me that is where it would be. The number of controls in the panel would be difficult to put in a build panel tab.

The Particle Editor

To use the Particle Editor create or edit a prim. Then in the top menu open Build -> Objects -> Edit Particles. Not overly intuitive. It would seem a button in the Build panel to open the editor would be more intuitive. The Features tab seems like an obvious place to put a button.

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