Viewers

General Viewer Information

Revised #SL Mesh Arriving

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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.

#SL Mesh Design Blender 2.57b
#SL Mesh Design Blender 2.57b

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.

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SLV 1.23 Life Expectancy

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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?

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Dolphin Viewer Congratulations

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Dolphin Viewer
Dolphin Viewer

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

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SL Viewer Progress Week 20

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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…

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Phoenix Viewer 1.5.2.1102 Released Review

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The new Phoenix version has Enhanced Avatar Physics. This wasn’t planned. It is a bug fix, as odd as that sounds. The problem is that series 1 viewers started having problems rendering avatars wearing the new SL Viewer’s Physics Layers. So, Phoenix  Viewer users would see avatars wearing the new layer as a Ruth. Oddly the SLV2 people would see Phoenix users Ruthed too.

The details of the problem are in a JIRA report: VWR-25479

While one does need to upgrade their copy of Phoenix to the latest version, one is not required to use Avatar Physics.

I gather that the Phoenix Team had pretty much moved on to Firestorm. But, suddenly the realization the Phoenix viewer was not going to correctly render the avatars of those using the future Firestorm, Kirsten, Singularity, Dolphin, or any other viewer that used Physics Layers. This was worth a fix.

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SL Viewer Development

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I tend to leave previous downloads of the viewers on my computer. If the new install is bad, I can revert back to the previously downloaded version. Every so often I clean out the folder. I thought it would be interesting to see how fast things were happening in viewer development. I put the version build ID, which advances numerically, and download date in a spreadsheet. It may not be significant or particularly accurate, but it is interesting.

SL Viewer Development Rate

The information doesn’t directly say anything about features being added, bug fix rates, or much of anything other than some Linden felt another iteration of the viewer was ready to test.

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