Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
This week the main channel got an update and roll. This package ran on the RC channels for 2 weeks. There isn’t much to say about it. The changes are to server logging and how member lists for large groups download.
Since there is no new package running in the RC channels, we are unlikely to see the main channel get an update and restart in week 26. Hopefully there will be something new for the RC channels in week 26.
In an odd twist the Lab has made available a legacy Second Life™ viewer for those running obsolete, unsupported operating systems. That means Windows XP and Mac OS 10.7 and earlier. You may know that current releases of the SL Viewer will not install on these older systems.
You can get a copy of this viewer from the Official Alternate Viewers Page. Official name: Second Life Obsolete Platforms Viewer version 3.7.28.300847.
This viewer will NOT update. There will be no updates and while I am not sure about the auto-update feature I suspect it is disabled.
I and other in Second Life™ are waiting for the retail release of the Oculus Rift. Jo Yardley has an article on the Oculus Rift. Seems she is announcing they have an announcement about a coming announcement… See: Oculus announcement about the Rift Headset, it is coming. It is all about this video:
Release of the Rift headset is still planned for first quarter 2016. The video tells us nothing. All we see is the version of the hardware to be released. Jo has lots of information about the Rift in her article.
The Lab and most other viewer authors are building 32-bit programs. We are seeing more people building 64-bit viewers. The Lab has yet to move that direction with their Second Life™ Viewer. The stats coming out of the Lab show that 64-bit versions are way more stable or in plain English; crash less often.
The game PlanetSide 2 is discontinuing support for 32-bit systems. Specifically their new version of the game will only run in a 64-bit operating system. Massively OP mentions it in their article: Planetside 2 Discontinues Support For 32-Bit Client. The game managers realize some people will be locked out of the game. From there stats it is ‘a very few people.’ Management presumably feels keeping up with technology is worth the cost of losing a small number of users.
Last week’s TPV user group had lite attendance. But, the meeting ran just over an hour. We got some new information about Second Life™ and a tiny bit on Project SANSAR (published separately).
You may also have noticed that Inara and I both are breaking the news coming from the TPV Dev’s meeting into multiple articles. That lets me get them out faster. You also don’t have to wade through long articles with parts of less or no interest to you.
Oz Linden was having trouble with the settings in the viewer he was using during the meeting. The Firestorm peeps were putting some good natured trash talk on him about being able to save settings. If you use Firestorm you know it has a save settings function.
Linden Lab is apparently making lots of headway on putting CEF support in the Second Life™ Viewer. They will have a project viewer out ‘real soon’. The Lab will need someone in the Linux community to step up and move that new code into the Linux viewer. If not, the Linden Linux viewer will go way out of date.
I think this will be an awesome change in the viewer. WebKit is used now and it is a bit of an orphan.
This will allow developers to use more HTML5 to develop panels in the viewer. It will also affect many parts of the viewer. There are also possibilities for what can be done server side.