Viewers – Page 173 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Second Life Basic Viewer

2011/05/26 by Nalates Urriah

I suspect most of us ignore the Basic Mode in the SL Viewer. However, the Lab isn’t. They are studying and figuring out how to change the viewer to make entering #SL easier for new users. A recent change…

Voice

The Basic Mode Viewer in its latest incarnation has voice. It is disabled by default. There is a microphone button that is clicked to popup a menu allowing one to enable it and select input and output devices. It replaces the Speak button we have in Advanced mode.

Destinations

The Destinations Guide at the bottom now shows the number of destinations in category. Once a category is selected the number people in a region is displayed.

New Second Life Search Beta

2011/05/25 by Nalates Urriah

Today Linden Lab announced a new search has been rolled out and is in use. This new search has taken longer to arrive because the Lab elected to make a large change rather than a series of smaller changes. A test group has tested this new search and found that it gives better results than the search we are using 75% of the time. Really?

Where is this Search?

Didn’t notice it in your viewer? That is because it is not there. One must get the Search Project Viewer to see it work. Download: Search Project Viewer Oh boy, another install… In Windows it installs the viewer in: C:\Program Files\SecondLifeProjectViewer-Search. This means it should NOT affect your other viewers. This version is: Second Life 2.6.9 (230635) May 23 2011

Revised #SL Mesh Arriving

2011/05/242011/05/24 by Nalates Urriah

The viewer using the new mesh format should be out Thursday of this week. The ADITI grids should have the new server side mesh software installed across most of the mesh regions. Mesh in ADITI will likely vanish as it is returned. New versions of user mesh will have to be uploaded. We’ll see an announcement when the sims and viewer are ready.

Update: See warning below.

New Format

With any luck the new mesh format will be published on the Wiki this week. That means OpenSim coders can start making their changes.

SLV 1.23 Life Expectancy

2011/05/19 by Nalates Urriah

The other day Tateru was blogging about the life expectancy of SLV 1.23 and series 1 viewers. (Reference) She was quoting OZ Linden. Today the minutes for the Open Development User Group posted. Oz Linden is talking about where the Lab is with older viewers and has the quotes. So, how long do the older viewers have?

Old Viewers

‘Old’ is always a subjective or relative term. Apparently some residents are using some really old viewers… you know, the ones that come on the stone disk. I guess the Lab just doesn’t bother to block older third party viewers (TPV).

The problem with older viewers is in the way they talk to the Second Life servers. Over time how the servers talk changes and viewers have to keep up. After all when was the last time you saw a rotary dial phone?

Dolphin Viewer Congratulations

2011/05/18 by Nalates Urriah

Today the Dolphin 1 viewer made it to the top of the Linden Third Party Viewer list.

Third Party Viewer Directory

This list is ordered by crash rate. The viewer at the top of the list has the best (least) crash rate. Dolphin has not been in this list because crash reporting is optional and the Lindens lacked the data to rank it. Some minimum number of reports and logins have to be received to be ranked.

The ranking is:
Dolphin 1
SLV 1.23
Phoenix (probably 1050 – 1102 is too new)
Imprudence
SLV 2.6.3
Singularity
SLV Beta 2.6.8
Firestorm (pre-alpha)
Emergence
Ascent
Kirstens

SL Viewer Progress Week 20

2011/05/17 by Nalates Urriah

Lots of confusion and server problems this last week. New code being merged into the servers caused problems. For viewers the result has been problems and things not working. If you aren’t checking the SL Grid Status, you can’t tell if it is the viewer or the grid. Things are calming down and work is resuming on the viewer.

Region WindLight

More work has been done on getting controls built for setting a region’s Windlight values. The control dialogs are being arranged this week. Once that is done we’ll get a project viewer for testing. Of course, you can only test it if you have a region you manage (estate manager). If you are a region manager and willing to test the feature, get in touch with Oz Linden.

Oz expects the server side code to be on the grid by the time the Project Viewer Rolls out. So, I think we are talking a week or two…