SLV2, 3, 4, 5, 6. & 7 Series

The Linden made series of viewers

Tutorial: Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF)

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Now that we have a Second Life™ viewer with CEF, what can we do with it? For now I am not sure what limitations we will have from the viewer. But, we can look at CEF and see what is possible in general. Here I’ll try to give you the basic information about CEF and links to some tutorials.

Aspen Fell
Aspen Fell

CEF is an open source project built on the  Google Chromium project, which is another open source project to build a better web browser (Chromium) and the project is the parent of the Google Chrome browser. If you research these projects you will see a number of other projects tied together with these.

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Problems with Second Life’s Jelly Babies?

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The RC Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.5.305528 is available here. This viewer has this name because it lets us save our graphics settings. We can have a setting for shopping and another for taking pictures and quickly change between them without opening preferences. Handy.

basement
basement

This viewer also has the new Avatar Render Complexity feature, the one that makes over blinged avatars rez as jelly babies. Now that the viewer is in RC we have a number of users testing the viewer. It is currently my main viewer. I am enjoying it.

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Windlight Magazine for October is Out

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Windlight Magazine October Cover
Windlight Magazine October Cover

I’m not an avid reader of the magazine. In fact this is the first time I’ve even looked at an issue. I see people posting about it in various places. But, I’ve never seen anything that intrigued me to look at it. But, I recently saw some architectural images on Flickr that were amazing. I thought they were Blender renderings. But, as best I can tell they were made in SL and possibly Photoshop’d, but even Blender images get Photoshop’d.

So, when I noticed this issue has a section on Architectural Art in SL and on Huckleberry Hax, a writer. Those two items were enough to get me to click and check it out.

The magazine covers art in Second Life™. It is more about art and where to see it than it is about displaying art in the pages of the magazine.

The images of the architectural art are less than I hoped for. I’ve seen better images in Flickr. However, this is likely just because of the image quality used in the magazine, which may be why it is more about where to find art than trying to show it to you. So, the article points to this work of art in Second Life named: Angel Manor by Kaya Angel.

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SL’s Quick Graphics Viewer Updated

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The Second Life Quick Graphics (QG) Viewer was just promoted to an RC status and updated to version 3.8.5.305528. My install caught it and updated.

The update process for Project Viewers works much better than previously. I haven’t been using project viewers all that much. So, I’m not sure when it changed. But, this project viewer has been updating whenever I log on and an update is available. Nice.

I was just using the previous version of QG to explore Angel Manor. I had found it slow loading textures. It still is. Places I visited earlier today are slow. It is like stuff is not cached. It is the same when I return home after being away for 20 or 30 minutes.

After the initial load in the Manor it was better. But, I still am not impressed with speed. I thought as a Project viewer it probably had more debugging code than the RC’s do. But, the change to RC doesn’t seem to have made much difference.

Notifications Viewer

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Busy Bunnies
Busy Bunnies

The Second Life Notifications Viewer version 3.8.5.305555 is now a release candidate (RC). This is the version that provides a new Notifications floater that separates incoming notifications into Categories. It provides, according to the Lab, a better way to view, interact with, prioritize and manage incoming notices for busy residents.

I haven’t tried this one yet. I am looking forward to it. Now that it is an RC version I may install it. I’ll wait a couple of days to see if it installs itself as I have use RC’s checked.