This Kokua Viewer update adds version 2.9.15 of RLV and brings Kokua on par with Linden viewer version 3.8.6, which I think means it has the Quick Graphics and Avatar Complexity features, but with out the build number… it may be the Notifications viewer updates. Whichever, The Dev’s need help testing this update.
This is a brief round up of the Third Party Viewers for Second Life that I find interesting. Not in any particular order. The popular feature to be adding is: Restore to Last Position. I explain that in the section on RLV.
RLV 2.9.15 Update
Marine has updated the RLViewer she maintains. She is adding in the feature from Firestorm and Kokua: Restore to Last Position. This is a controversial feature the Lindens have omitted from the Linden made viewer. It apparently generates too many support calls.
What’s that sound? [Good facial expression]The controversy centers around a problem the feature creates. Imagine you have a parcel in, say, Fishergate and it is in the northwest corner of the region. You build and rez stuff into that parcel. You then take them into inventory. You go to a different region, say Furball, and get a parcel in its south central area. When you use Restore to Last Position to rez those items they will poof away. You will most likely find them rezzed at the 0,0,0 point in the region.
This week an Alchemy Viewer 3.8.5 update was released. The developers are busy will real life money making. So, updates are coming slowly. It has been almost 3 months since the last update. This update brings Alchemy to a level with the Linden 3.8.5 version. The current Linden version is 3.8.6.
Alchemy 3.8.5 – Oct 2015
This means Alchemy has the 90+ fixes the Lab added with the promotion of the Maintenance RC Viewer. Plus Alchemy fixes. But, it will still lack the new Notifications Handling released in Linden version 3.8.6.
Yesterday Linden Lab posted in their blog about new improvements coming to Second Life. If you follow my blog, Ciarans’s or Inara’s, you already know most of what they wrote about.
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Project Valhalla is the project viewer where they are changing from Webkit to Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). I’ve been writing about this change since 4/2014 (Reference – speculation). They Lab started talking publicly about the coming viewer change in early 2015.
Rendering Complexity / Quick Graphics – I’ve been writing about doing something like The Avatar Render Complexity feature since late 2014. I filed a feature request in December 2014 (BUG-7928). I doubt mine is the reason we got the feature. I suspect the reason for getting the feature was mostly discussion in Oz Linden’s Monday morning Open Source meeting. Whatever the case, it is close to being added to the main SL viewer.
Notifications – This viewer feature is a change in how we will receive notifications. This feature came on the radar in July 2015.
Mesh Importer – This improvement has been in discussion for a couple of months and made it to the main viewer a couple of months ago.
Inventory Robustness – It is hard to say when work on this change started. The Lab has worked on and been adding inventory improvements for a long time. This particular problem of losing no-copy-items that failed to rez is more recent.
If you follow the Server Deploys notices in the SL Forum, you probably had not have realized this feature rolled out.
HTTP Project – this is actually a much larger project than they convey in their post. It has been on going for a couple of years and appears will be continuing for some time. Parts get added as they are completed.
SecondLife.com – The SL Web Site is changing. They are removing Flash and if any QuickTime was used then likely that too. They are moving up to HTML5. CEF is how HTML5 handling is added to the viewer. These changes sort of go together. Parts of the web site are used by the SL Viewer, i.e., search, profiles, etc.
Since the viewer will real soon now be able to handle HTML5 via CEF it makes since for the web site to abandon Flash.
Not So New
Between Inara, Ciaran, and myself there are a few thousand SL Users that keep up on SL Development news. That is out of several hundred thousand monthly users. The SL Blog doesn’t show how many people have read a post. The forum does. It is rare any post in the forum gets a thousand readers. But, as the blog articles are in the splash screen of the SL Viewer, more people may read the blog.
So, while the news may be old to you, for most SL users their post is news.
RC Second Life Notifications Viewer version 3.8.6.305981 – This is the one with changes in how notices are handled. Earlier I was wondering if the server change running on the RC Channels was related. No hard information, just speculation that there is probably a connection.
