Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
This time I’ll warn you up front, the title is a deliberately ambiguous headline.
We have lots of interesting Second Life™ promotions stuff going on. Firestorm is asking for people to submit photos: Share your photos this weekend to promote Second Life. The photos will go in the Firestorm Gateway section of Flickr. Canary Beck is moderating the photo pool. It has 4,678 images as I write this.
CAUTION: SPOILER AHEAD!
There was a Third Party Developers’ meeting this past week. Of course Project Bento was a main topic and Vir Linden was there to talk about and respond to comments in the Feedback thread of the forum. So, what did we learn?
The Second Life Valhalla Viewer version 4.0.0.307894 was promoted to default viweer status Thursday 12/17. This viewer has fixes for Bento, which mean little as Bemto animations and avatars are not yet allowed on the main grid. It also changes from Webkit to CEF – Chromium Embedded framework.
Co-Routines or Second Life HTTP Update Viewer version 3.8.7.308134 is merging with the Second Life Vivox Viewer version 3.8.7.307744 and will reappear in RC as a single viewer named… we don’t know.
This release has some fixes and changes. See: Black Dragon Viewer – Update 2.4.4.5 “Going Places”. My take is lots of things added in the last release were broken but fixed in this release.
Avatar Complexity Information is working. Every developer seems to have some problems with this feature. I think the Lab’s problems were the source. But, it seems to be getting cleaned up in general and it sounds like NiranV has it cleaned up in this release.
Second Life 3.8.6-305981 – Main Viewer – Or formerly the Notifications Viewer
My viewer: Second Life 3.8.7 (306758) Oct 27 _ When I mention viewer problems or issues while writing about other topics over the past couple of weeks, this is the viewer I am most likely using.
You may be noticing NVIDIA problems where the viewer has mini freezes, computer freezes, black screens, and video driver resets. As best I can tell, these problems are not solely viewer issues. I have run into the same thing with Word, Chrome, Vivaldi, and other programs. You’ll find a number of threads in other gaming forums discussing problems with NVIDIA crashing and restarting. (Reference)
I’ve been swamped with work this week, which is good. So, I haven’t had time to enjoy Seccond Life™ or keep up on the goings on. Today I’ve taken some time to catch up on the new Firestorm Viewer release 4.7.5. The announcement is here: Firestorm Update 4.7.5-47975.
Inara has her review here: Firestorm 4.7.5: something for everyone.
Last Friday (11/6) was the Third Party Developers’ meeting. We got some news. I’m just getting around to it. I’ve had my head in php parts of a gambling site that didn’t work. My head hurts… sniff… sniff. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m having ice cream for dinner… 🙂
Oz Linden told the group that a new version of the viewer will be coming into the RC group. A maintenance version, which usually means a collection of fixes and often some third party features. He thinks this version may actually pass the other RC version and make it out ahead of them.