Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
A new version of Kokua Viewer has released: 3.8.2.36975. This is a VMM (Viewer Managed Marketplace) compatible viewer. The release notes are here.
This version is not up to date on RLV.
The Linux version has several caveats.
August 1st Henri updated the Cool Vl Viewer. It now handles:
CoolVLViewer-1.26.14.2 is the current version. It comes in Linux and Windows flavors. Download
Other bit of news from the Third Party Developer’s meeting (7/31):
RSS feed for Grid Status is moving to new platform. The URL will not change just the format is changing from RSS1 to RSS2. But, if you read the status pages, the change is visually significant.
The setup is said to be coming soonish, but seems to be working now. A temp URL will let TPD’s test the feed. See: http://beta.status.secondlifegrid.net which redirects me to https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Status-Grid/bg-p/status-blog.
Oz Linden said little about what is going on with viewers at the July 31 Second Life™ Third Party Developer’s (TPD) meeting. What we do know is:
RC Second Life VMM Viewer version 3.8.2.303891 – A new version came out in week 31. They had little in the way of stats at the time of the meeting. But, so far it was looking good. This will likely be the next viewer promoted, if things continue well… basically baring any catastrophic problems. They seriously want to release it. So much so they did not release a viewer last week when one would normally release. That was done to avoid releasing two versions close together.
Inara made it to last Monday’s open source user group meeting where Oz Linden apparently talked about the Second Life Render Muting feature and where it is in the development pipeline. You may remember that a bug was causing the Jelly Babies to be invisible. That is fixed.
Now the feature is waiting on UI changes. Once those are complete we will get an RC viewer version with the feature. Inara is guessing sometime in week 32, which I think is a good guess. I am looking forward to this feature. I think it will have a significant impact on performance in the long run.
Inara quotes Oz talking about the notices that will appear when our Draw Weight changes and when those around us are not rendering our avatar. We will be able to control how long those messages stay on screen. We already have a Debug Setting to tell the viewer when to render high draw weight avatars as Jelly Babies. Presumably we will have that control out where we can adjust it easily too.
NiranV has made a couple of recent releases of the Black Dragon Viewer, now at version 2.4.4.1. Version 2.4.4 the previous version has a long list of fixes.
The big addition is for Viewer Managed Marketplace (VMM). Or maybe the more important change is fixes to the RLV section of the viewer. Whichever is more important to you, the viewer is better.
VMM is coming to all the viewers. When your favorite viewer gets the feature is not all that important. The only think you cannot do without a VMM compatible viewer is add items to the marketplace. All other tasks can be handled through the marketplace web site.