Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
KirstenLee announced that due to health issues within the RL family, development on the Kirsten Viewer will stop.
You can read the announcement here: Sad Farewell
The end of the Kirsten Viewer is a great disappoint for many of us. The Kirsten Viewer has been the cutting edge viewer. It built on Linden Lab technology. It has better renders and dynamic shadows than the Lab’s viewers. That cutting edge is gone.
The Firestorm/Phoenix Team is releasing a mesh capable viewer. However, the Internet connection to their site is having problems. A main trunk line was cut by some kind of construction. It should be repaired sometime Thursday. So, if you have trouble getting to the site, don’t freak.
Information about the Firestorm Mesh Viewer 3.0.1.22525 is on the blog site, if you can get to it. I find the site a little slow, but working. The download came down without a problem.
Jessica tells us that under normal circumstances they would not be releasing a viewer with this many problems. But, the demand for a mesh version of the viewer is so high, they decided to release it bugs and all. There are some serious bugs. Read the bug list in the wiki. Hot LL JIRA Issues Of The Day. These are serious problems as in Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) serious. So, read the list before you decide to install it.
I don’t write much about the Cool VL (Virtual Life) Viewer a viewer made/maintained by Henri Beauchamp. However, if you are using any viewer for Second Life or OpenSim, you are likely running some of Henri’s code. I won’t try to itemize all of his contributions to the SL and OpenSim communities. I will say his contributions and name shows up in many places. Today I saw that the Cool VL Viewer, formerly Cool SL Viewer, has a new release: 1.0.26.0.16 – 2011-08-27. So, I wanted to take a look at it.
You can learn about the viewer on the viewer’s web site: SLDev.free.fr. You can Download Cool VL Viewer here.
Several people have not been able to upload Mesh in ADITI, the preview grid, but they can in AGNI, the main grid. Most often this is because they have not run through the Intellectual Property thing for ADITI. Yes, you have to do it twice, once for AGNI and once for ADITI. For ADITI visit: https://secondlife.aditi.lindenlab.com/
Also, after viewer and server updates some people are crashing when the attempt to tp to the mesh sandboxes. See: VWR-26698
Also, the 3.0.0 has a video gotcha that causes some people problems. If you are having a problem, visit the Snowstorm Page and get a copy of the latest development viewer. There are some video fixes included that have helped some users.
Many people are having issues with the SL Viewer crashing. Problems started showing up in the 2.8 versions. For many the crash was at viewer launch or just after login. There are various causes depending on the viewer version and the video driver make and version in use. Newer video cards and drivers are more likely to have a problem. So, it is hard to know the cause of anyone person’s problems. However, the Lindens are fixing problems and things are improving.
During the Phoenix Hour, a weekly TV show/Video, Jessica Lyon made several announcements. Here is the summary of the video.
I had some problems finding the video. Try this link. Look for the August 23rd video.
Update: Here is a better link: Phoenix Hour August 23rd