Third Party Viewers Week 44

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?

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. Continue reading

RLV Update Week 40

RLV

Marine Kelly has updated the RLV Viewer which is now version 2.9.14. There are some fixes for RLV bugs. None of it seems earth shattering to me.

See: RLV 2.9.14

Playtime

Playtime

These changes will be making their way into other viewers, but it takes some time.

Updates have been a little slow coming because Marine was working on RLV related products. Check her blog for information on those (use link above).

RLViewer 2.9.12 Released

Marine has a new version of the viewer out. See: RLV 2.9.12.

Snail Racers & Hedgehog Spectators

> Snail Racers & Hedgehog Spectators

One of the interesting changes in this viewer is how you can control shadow render. Seems Marine got a Maitreya body and is wearing it. From what Marine wrote I take that it cut her FPS nearly in half in some scenarios. Looking at the Fast Timers (Ctrl-Shift-9) shadow render was taking more time to figure out how to render the attached mesh items. I wonder how many people check the render cost of that Maitreya body and compared it to other bodies? See: Second Life: Mesh Body Revolution. Continue reading

Second Life: How AISv3 Impacts Some

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.

Danseuse

Danseuse by Charisma Jonesford, on Flickr

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. Continue reading

Second Life: RLV Version 2.9.7 Released

Marine Kelley has posted that a new version of the RLViewer is out.

They still haven't fixed that light?

They still haven’t fixed that light? by Robin (rubberluvv), on Flickr

This version has the new Hover Height adjustment. Right-click your avatar and adjust away. The adjustment is saved as a setting and so, persists across logins.

Marine points out that ONLY viewers with this new feature can see the results of your adjustment. I expect most viewers will have this feature with their next release. Continue reading

Second Life News 2014-47

Group Chat

Simon Linden Tells us:

Yes some of the chat servers have been having troubles in the last few days.   I’ve been looking into that … the code running there isn’t super new, and the outages might be timed with some of those [hardware update] restarts.

In any case, there is an update soon for the chat servers, and already another in the pipeline.

Servers

Photo Shoot w/Mr. S

Photo Shoot w/Mr. S

This week there are no rolls for either the main channel or RC channels. Next week is a no change week. So, I expect no roll outs that week either.

We can expect tweaking to the CDN system. This week whatever they are doing that requires multiple restarts is ongoing.

The main reason for no updates is the hardware updating requiring the restarts scheduled for this week. Estimating time for any individual update or the group is difficult as Simon says, “We also have to actually open up the server box and look inside to see if it needs an update, so it’s random how long each one takes.

This shouldn’t do anything grid-wide, aside from extra region restarts.”  Continue reading

Restrained Love Viewer 2.9

Marine Kelley has announced the release of viewer version 2.9. See: Restrained Love Viewer v2.9. This is the version with additional camera controls.

Marine describes the changes this way: “In essence, the goal is to let a script restrict the camera and the view : how far and how close the camera can go, how clearly and how far the user can see, and whether to let the camera go through walls or not.”