Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
Friday (2/26) saw the Third Party Developers user group meeting. It lasted about 40 minutes. We have some interesting news and even a few specific details. You can watch the video of the meeting here, thanks to Pantera Północy.
There isn’t much change in the Viewer pipeline. Work is proceeding but some of the problems have taken time to resolve. The RC viewers are revealing problems, which is the whole point of having RC versions.
Last week (7) saw an unusual rollout for an update with a security fix in the under lying Linux code.
This week (8) there is no roll to the main channel. There will be a roll to the RC channels with all three getting the same package; RC BlueSteel, LeTigre, and Magnum. There is a Server crash fix and some minor improvements…
So, not much news on the server front.
Maria over at Hypergrid Business has a write up on the latest Alchemy Viewer Beta 4.0.0. See: Alchemy viewer updates browser, chat bar.
The title tells you the big change in this version. Cinder Roxley, Alchemy developer, says they have surpassed the Lab in the implementation of the CEF browsers engine. Cinder is using the latest and greatest, I guess.
Word is this version catches Alchemy up to Linden Viewer 4.0.0.
Download Alchemy Viewer here.
As expected, there are no server updates this week, probably next week. My home region has not been restarted since 2/2/2016, two full weeks. The region seems to be working OK. The server stats shown in the Viewer Statistics Panel all look good.
Not much visibly happening with viewers. But, we may see a viewer promoted this week.
I’ve been using the Linden, Firestorm, and Catznip (R10) viewers recently. I have less problems and better performance with Catznip. That is not a test result. I haven’t done organized testing. But, my subjective experience is Catznip is behaving better right now.
I do see texture thrashing when using Catznip… less of that with Firestorm. It takes some time to get there, generally over an hour for me.
Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.
Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.
You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.
This meeting ran a little over 20 minutes. It was mostly status updates.
RC Second Life HTTP update Viewer version 4.0.2.310660 – This version has the HTTP, Co-routines, and Vivox updates. The HTTP updates were driving up the crash rate so in this version they are disabled.