Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
From the Third Party Viewer UG meeting we get a little news. It was another short meeting.
RC Second Life Big Bird Viewer version 3.7.29.301361 – This viewer has fixes for some attachment-related issues. The Lindens are not anticipating any difficulties with this viewer, so this one should be moving to promotion as the default viewer soon.
There are some server side fixes for attachment problems that are in the works.
This viewer was promoted from a Project Viewer to an RC viewer today. This viewer has fixes for some attachment-related issues, particularly when multiple attachments are added or removed at the same time. It also has enhanced logging, so your SecondLife.log file will have some additional lines related to avatar state in general and attachments in particular.
Being promoted from Project to RC means this version is closer to what will eventually be released as the main default viewer. It will also likely be more stable than it was as a Project Viewer. So, if you have been having attachment issues, this is probably the viewer to try to solve your problems.
I downloaded a copy today. Installed it, no problem. I did the remove and then install process, which is annoying. But, enough people have problems when they install over the last install, it is probably a good idea.
It is hard for me to remember when I made my last settings back up. But, the ‘restore’ settings seems to have missed a few settings. I reset those few manually and made a new backup of the settings.
This morning a new RC viewer installed: Second Life 3.7.29-301305, the Layer Limits RC Viewer. The release notes are here.
The primary change in this version is:
The Layer Limits viewer lets you wear up to 60 wearables of any type. We’ve changed the logic for what limits are enforced on clothing worn by avatars: previously, we restricted avatars to 5 items for each type of removable clothing wearable such as shirts, pants, jackets, tattoos and alpha masks. With this viewer, we instead enforce a total limit of 60 wearables of all such types combined. So if you really want to you can wear 60 tattoos as long as you wear none of anything else.
These changes do not apply to body part wearables (skin, shape, hair, eyes), for which the limit is still one of each, and do not affect attachments, for which the limit is still 38 total.
This version installed and started without any glitches. The previous RC version choked as it started installing from a post login notice. This time it notified me at viewer launch before login. I’m not sure that makes a difference, but this install worked better than the last.
This version keeps the one-login-button user interface. I assume the Lindens are continuing to do A-B testing of the login process. I just wonder if they have a log of their test results. Will those working on the viewer 2 or 3 years from now be repeating these tests or have prior test data to review?
I’ve only used the viewer for a little over an hour. About an hour plus in it went Not Responding and hung there. After 3 or 4 minutes it seemed to reset and log me off as if I had lost my Internet connection.
I won’t know if this is a consistent problem until I have more time to use the viewer.
At the Third Party Developers’ meeting Ed Merry man said that the Firestorm Development Team is planning to the next version of Firestorm in 10 days (from Friday’s TPD meeting)… May 3rd.
This release is about 6 months after the last release. The normal release schedule is a new version every 3 months. The way things have worked out, that hasn’t been possible for the Firestorm Team.
In the Third Party Developers’ meeting Oz Linden mentioned that someone spotted a maintenance version viewer without the ability to send snapshots via email from Second Life. This omission of the feature Snapshot-to-Email from this RC version is deliberate. It will eventually be removed from all Linden and Third Party Viewers.
The way the system works, the images are sent TO whoever with the FROM address of the user-sender, at least when the Lab knows the sender’s address. But, the email is being sent from a Second Life server, so they are spoofing the FROM address. This ‘spoofing’ is a common practice of spammers and black-hat crackers. So, the SL servers are getting blocked by numerous ISP’s automated systems as spammers. That is affecting other email services the Lab uses to communicate with users.