Viewers

General Viewer Information

Second Life: Windlight Tutorial

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Daeberethwen Arbenlow has a 20 minute video (3/27/2016) on controlling your Windlight settings for photography in Second Life. She uses the Firestorm Viewer and the Photo Tools feature it has. Those using the basic Linden viewer can accomplish the same changes to Windlight, just not as easily nor will the video help you learn how to use the Linden viewer, just the Firestorm viewer.

Daeberethwen does a good job of explaining all the settings and what they do. Along with the verbal description is the video example allowing you to see the changes.

Firestorm has the best set of features for photographers and machinigraphers (or is that machinamists?). 

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Second Life: Rendering Speed Up

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Hamlet has a tip he got from Trinity Dejavu over on Reddit. See: Simple Trick to Speed Up Second Life Rendering.

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The ‘trick’ is to turn off avatar rendering when you first arrive in a crowded place. (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-4) One press turns off avatar rendering and a second press will turn it back on. B turning it off your viewer can concentrate on rendering the ‘area’. Later when you render avatars they ‘seem’ to render faster because the viewer just has to render them as all else is already rendered.

This doesn’t make it any faster or actually reduce render time. Actual time to a final render is probably longer. But, psychologically we break the wait time into two parts with each being less than the single pass render but added together… more. Basically it is just easier on our patience.

But, I haven’t put a stop watch on it yet…

Second Life News Week 12

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Servers

Second Life’s main channel got an update to day (3/22). This is the RC package from last week, which is some Script Fixes and Minor internal improvements.

The RC channels are running the same package, no update this week.

"Quiet the mind and the soul will speak.."
“Quiet the mind and the soul will speak..”

Viewers

The main viewer updated last week to version 4.0.2.312269, the Maintenance RC viewer with lots of fixes. 

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Second Life: Firestorm Viewer Week 11

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Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

Firestorm updated sometime after I posted this… 

See: Firestorm Update

I was expecting the Firestorm Viewer to update the 16th. That expectation came from a comment at the Third Party Developers’ meeting. Obviously that hasn’t happened.

I am seeing the wiki updating. Lots of new entries for version 4.7.7-48706. This is typical pre-release updating of the wiki. So, release is eminent. I doubt we will see it today or before Monday. The team doesn’t like to release a new viewer before the weekend. If something unforeseen goes wrong and people have to work on the weekend to fix it, that makes for bad juju.

This version of the Firestorm viewer caught up with the Linden Lab viewer 4.0.1. Of course the day Firestorm releases the Lab released and is now pushing 4.0.2 as their main viewer.

If you are thinking FS is behind again… well sort of, but probably not as much as one might think. Some fixes from the Firestorm team go into the Linden viewer, or at least inspire Linden fixes. Of course those FS Team fixes are already in Firestorm. So, it is hard to say who is a head, on par, behind…

Use the viewers and see which ones work best.