Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Linden made series of viewers
No rollouts this week, main or RC channels. Caleb Linden says they will be returning to the regular schedule of rollouts next week. It is vacation time.
I think this is the third week the main channel region I live in has not been restarted.I think the last restart was 8/9. Caleb has posted that if you region is having problems contact support and ask for a restart or file a JIRA describing the problems.
Second Life: Third Party Viewer Meeting (video)
Current RC viewers are all having elevated crash rates. We’ll see new releases of them with various fixes as the Lindens try to get the crash rates down to what we have with the current default viewer, which dropped the crash rate significantly.
So, we very likely won’t see a viewer promoted to main status this coming week 35.
There is a new maintenance viewer coming. It should appear this coming week, but may be not. It could get hung in QA.
Oz Linden is expecting to get the 64-bit version of the viewer out as an RC soon. Oz says it is coming along and they are spending more time on it. There are some ‘corners’ to clean out according to Oz.
This week there are no roll outs to either the main or RC channels. That says there will be none of the normally planned region restarts this week.
The main viewer is version 4.0.7.318301. No change since last week. This seems to be the least crashy of the viewers I’m using.
Is there a roll to the main channel this morning? There was a release candidate running on the RC channels this last week. But, my in-home restart tracker and the Grid Status page do not show a restart on the main channel this morning (7:25 AM SLT/PT).
There is no update in the Second Life Server – Deploys thread.
Grid Status shows a schedules restart for the RC channels tomorrow, Wednesday. But, is this a real event or just an automated post from a standing schedule? No way to tell.
My guess is something didn’t work as expected in the RC package running last week. It will get a revised version tomorrow. And there will be no roll to the main channel.
There is a bug in the new Firestorm 4.7.9 and Second Life 4.0.7. The bug is not much of a problem unless you play in combat games. Whirly Fizzle explains it:
Yep, it’s a bug on Firestorm 4.7.9.
I saw you already found the JIRA issue, but here it is for anyone else having the same problem:http://jira.phoenixviewer.com/browse/FIRE-19640
Workarounds for this one:
If you are wearing an attachment using llTakeControls, take it off. That’s the trigger for the bug.
It may not be viable to remove all attachments using llTakeControls though. This bug is mostly annoying combat people who use mouselook a lot & many weapons use llTakeControls in such a way that they will trigger this bug when they exit mouselook.
Switching to the LL viewer is a no go – although it doesn’t have this specific bug, it has a related bug which breaks being able to shoot pretty much all weapons in mouselook when an attachment is worn using llTakeControls or the weapon itself uses llTakeControls – BUG-11602
Best bet honestly is to roll back to 4.7.7 if this bug is annoying you too much. (Reference)
If you are playing a combat game, add your name and information to the JIRA’s.
The main viewer has updated to version 4.0.7.318301. This was formerly the Maintenance RC Viewer. There are a lot of fixes in this update. Oz Linden points out that work is being done to prevent viewer crashes. This release dropped the crash rate by 4%, which is huge.
One fix in that line is in the image processing. When video memory filled up and there was no way for the viewer to handle the texture… it crashed. Now it will simply skip rendering the texture and color the object gray.