Exporting Second Life

Hamlet has an interesting article up today: New Singularity Viewer Lets SL Creators Convert & Export Their Prim-Based Works to Unity 3D & Other Top Platforms. Hamlet explains why this is such an important aspect of Second Life™. Hamlet links to the article explaining how to do the export from SL to Unity 3D. [youtube … Read more

Second Life News 2013-30 #2

Some of the most interesting news comes from the Third Party Developers meetings. This is not a meeting that is well publicized. I suspect many think that having just the well informed attend is more productive. I tend to agree.

This article is 2,600+ words. It has some work-around methods for some current problems that people are experiencing. It covers some of the most informative news about SL that is available.

TPV Dev Meetin 2013-30
TPV Dev Meetin 2013-30

Server Side Appearance

SSA is going extraordinary well. The stats coming in are as expected, which means the backend is performing as expected. This means the Lab’s estimates for the amount of hardware needed are going to be correct.

View adoption is going pretty well. About 75% of users have adopted an SSA capable viewer. (84% of Firestorm users – see chart) Looking at that the other way, something like a quarter million people login each day with an old viewer. Also, the numbers vary quite a bit from day to day. 

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Viewer Updates 2013-27

We seem to be coming to a crunch point in viewers. The Lab is changing things so quickly third party developers have a challenge keeping up. Henri Beauchamp does well with Cool VL Viewer, which is a viewer based on V3 code with a vintage V1 user interface.

Kitty
Image by Kitty Barnett

Niran seems to have leapfrogged the Niran’s Viewer to having all the latest Linden features by jumping to a recent SL Viewer V3 model. Niran’s Viewer is now Nirans Black Dragon viewer. Niran’s features from previous versions are being added to the new SL V3 Viewer code in Black Dragon. Eventually Niran will have Black Dragon on a feature par with his previous versions.

So, both of those viewers have materials. Firestorm 4.4.1 doesn’t and Tonya Souther of the Firestorm Team explains why, in a blog post: Tracking LL’s big changes, and why the 4.4.2… well now that there is an emergency roll out… 4.4.3 version won’t either. 

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Singularity 1.8.0 w/SSA Released

One of the viewers growing in popularity is the Singularity Viewer. As Phoenix nears the absolute end of its useful life a number of its users are switching to Singularity. Often those with older computers prefer to go with Singularity for faster frame rates. Plus it has the look and feel of the SL Viewer 1.23, the V1 user interface.

Build 4114 is the version with SSA, Server Side Appearance, the avatar baking change planned to fix bake fail. All versions before this one will soon stop working, well stop rendering avatars. They will appear gray. So, this is going to be a required upgrade for all Singularity users. That’s required in the sense of, if you want to see avatar clothes then you have to upgrade. If you don’t care about that, never mind. 

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Viewers Update 2013-10

It has been a while since I took a look at a number of viewers. Rather than post them separately, I’ve lumped them together, except for Nirans. I had not used it for months, so I expected lots of changes.

SL Viewers

The main Linden Viewer is still at version 3.4.5 (270263), pre CHUI (Chat Hub User Interface). I seldom use the Beta Viewer now. It is more of a fall back viewer for when a Development Viewer version has problems. This morning the Beta is at version 3.5.0 (271345). The Development Viewer had been at version 3.5.1 (270826) for about 10 days. Today it updated to 3.5.1 (271386).

I am still fighting with the CHUI update to keep it the size I WANT IT. Other than sizing problems I like the new CHUI. The new build 271386 seems to have some of the sizing problems fixed.

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