Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
I was asked to help a person get some bare feet working with their Xcite Feet. The person was about 6 months old. First we had to get past lots of confusion. She had ideas about what Xcite was going to do and what bare feet are. The problems I ran into trying to get things sorted out show several reasons people probably give up on Second Life. Whatever that case is, I learned a lot about bare feet, which is what this article is about.
Now there is an idea… Inventory likely becomes a headache for every user of Second Life. I know I have an ongoing battle with inventory. Now the Lab has come up with a new idea. I suppose it is a spinoff from the SLCC announcement of making SL easier to use.
ProductTeam Linden posted an announcement in the Second Life Forum about the new project to test the idea of a simplified inventory. See: Simple Inventory Project Viewer. They want feedback on the new inventory. They ask you to give them information on how you think it will affect new users. I guess we can put on our newbie avayar and see how it goes.
The project has a Project Viewer, JIRA Section SINV, and a Simplified Inventory wiki page.
This is the standard download (28mb) and install. The viewer installs in its own folder, so there should be little conflict. It also uses its own settings file (settings_projectviewer-simpleinventory.xml). It does share the cache. While I am a great fan of separate caches for each viewer, I have been allowing all the viewers from the Lab to share the same cache. I don’t recommend allowing the Lab’s 1.23 to share a cache with the new 3.x.x viewers.
Today a new post appeared on the Imprudence-Kokua Viewer site. It gives us some insight into what is going on with Imprudence & Kokua viewer development. From a users perspective it seems pretty well stalled to me. But, now we know what’s up and that some decision is going to be made. So, is this the end of Imprudence?
For a long time Imprudence was my viewer of choice for use on OSGrid. With the arrival of mesh that changed.
Imprudence was the viewer of choice for builders in OSGrid and Second Life. For many it still is. But, it is getting old and the team is going to have to decide if they can keep supporting it.
This is the newer follow on to Imprudence. It allowed the team to regroup and start from a fresh beginning. It was said this would be a viewer for OpenSim and the Aurora branches of the OpenSim grids.
A new version of the RLViewer was released and announced by Marine Kelly. RLV is for those that enjoy dominance/submission play. So, it or feature sets form its code are popular with numerous role play regions in Second Life.
This is a special viewer and has features and foibles that are atypical to other viewers. The install is unique as is the use of the viewer. Enough so that videos have been made to show people how to install it and use its special features and toys made for it. The basic viewer is as easy to use as Linden Lab’s viewers.
You can read about the new features and fixes in this version in the RLV Blog.
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The download is a bit slow. It is 27mb so it’s not bad, two or three minutes. You can download the viewer from: Restrained Love Viewer Download. Pay attention to which version you download.
It seems someone figured out how to make a special cube that is invisible, even with Transparent Objects enabled.
The wonderful side affect is the cubes break the render pipeline and crash the viewer.
A work around is to turn off shadows.
Tateru Nino has an article about a reject response from Linden Lab in the JIRA STORM-468 comments. Charlar wrote the comment.
Thanks for making this effort. Alignment and snapping are an area where there are useful enhancements to be made.
However, we are not able to accept this contribution as it is.These are the primary issues we found which resulted in that decision:
- The feature should support the same modes as the other manipulation modes.
- It does not work for non-mod permission objects. This functionality should work for all objects that the user can manipulate in-world.
- It only supports World snap mode, not Reference and Local modes, unlike all our other manipulation modes.
It packs and aligns to the face of the object bounding box. If objects are not cubes and do not share the same alignment, or aren’t aligned with the world coordinates (see above), the result of the operation is unexpected. Ideally the operations would use the actual shape of the object for aligning and packing. There are also some coding implementation style issues that would need to be addressed. These can be covered in more depth after the functionality is dealt with. In it’s current form, this is usable for purely prim-based builders under specific circumstances. It’s less useful for building with non-cube prims, mesh, sculpties. It’s minimally useful for building when the structure is not facing a global direction (ex: North, South, East, West). It’s not usable by non-building residents who need to place and organize purchased items.
I found many of the comments to Tateru’s articles interesting examples of transference. I always find it odd that people when told why something is rejected speculate on why it’s being rejected. Whatever…