Second Life and Virtual Worlds
General Viewer Information
If you use a translator in Second Life, you know recent changes at Google have caused several models of translators to fail. You also know that since 2012 the viewer’s built-in translator cannot be connected to the Bing or Google translation services as originally planned by the Lab. Viewer translation is essentially broken. We have to use an add-on.
Following this blog you’ve seen the recent previous articles. (See: Second Life: Metanomics Translator Failing.)
This Friday (4/10) there was a Third Party Developers’ User Group (TPD UG)meeting. We have some news about Second Life™ from the meeting. The scheduled 60 minute meeting ran a little over 30 minutes.
Brooke Linden opened the meeting as Oz Linden seemed to have poofed. Brooke is telling us that they have started deploying parts of the Viewer Managed Marketplace server side. They hope to have a couple of parts rolled out later in the month. Then they can start what I’ll call an open beta. I take it this means it will be moving from the Preview/Beta Grid to the main grid.
Oz was suffering a bad throat and sounded horrible. So, it is no surprise the meeting was short.
The TPD UG meetings are normally every other Friday. Oz is planning to be taking some Fridays off. So, that regularity is going to be upset. Some meetings will occur very other Friday but some may be three weeks apart rather than two. This will mean, I think, Fridays off in place of a longer vacation period. It’s his choice.
As of Friday Jessica was planning to put a release out to their current preview group. She was writing an invitation to ask more people into the preview group or maybe she meant she is inviting more people to a larger secondary preview group. It sounds like they will stage testing, so multiple groups may help. So, the viewer will soon go out to the first with the current preview group then, if things go well, a week later with the larger group.
You can see the invitation here: WANTED: Brave Early Adopters and Testers… This request makes it clear this will be a second group different than their beta testers.
In general people having a problem logging in or staying logged in have connection problems. But we have a new problem. It seems AISv3 removed the LIMIT on how many items you can have in a folder. Apparently any limit has not been enforced for some time. So, we are starting to see some inventories accumulate enough items to trigger a problem.
As things are now a big flat inventory with thousands of items in a single folder, especially the root folder, is a problem. How fast the computer, network, and region are determines when the problem appears. I don’t know for sure, but logging into an empty region should give one a better chance of getting around the login problem. Hopefully they can stay on long enough to move items into folders.
This week we got some new viewers and updates to existing ones.
SL Main/Default Viewer: 3.7.26.299635 – Appeared: 3/06 – Adds the Avatar Hover Height Slider.
RC Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.27.300636 – Appeared: 4/8 – Long list of fixes – This viewer got an update from its previous 3.7.27.300323. It has performance fixes that make using it very nice to use.
Agent Inventory System version 3 is about new back end programming that improves the inventory system. Listening to Firestorm Team members and other third party developers there have been big problems with the system. It has been enabled on SL servers for some time now. Form where I am I can’t tell if it is problematic code made by the Lab or integration problems because of third party developer code.
Marine explains there were other problems too. So, they have had legitimate reasons for avoiding HTTPInventory.
Either way, the result has been a problem and third party viewers have lagged implementing the update. Now that the Lab is disabling the older UDP protocol for inventory things have to change.