Second Life Viewers Week 35

From the Third Party Developers’ meeting last Friday we got some news. Not much from the Linden side. I am often wondering if there is really so little for them to talk about in regard to Second Life™ or if the community is wearing them down and they are talking less as a defense. We have been down that road before.

Fantasy uprising
Fantasy uprising

Viewers

RC Second Life Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296 – This view is often left behind. Oz describes it as being ‘preempted’.  They have more important things to do and spend time on those rather than updating this version. I suspect few people are using this version as the Oculus type headsets it is designed for are not yet in retail release. 

Read more

Second Life Project Viewer version 3.8.4.304433

This is a PROJECT viewer, meaning it is more crash and bug prone than the Release Candidate viewers. I crashed and hit 100% disk use with this version of the viewer almost always in the first 15 minutes. But, I wanted to see the new features. So, I keep re-starting it. Sometimes it runs longer than other times. I have yet to pin down what I am doing different between a quick crash and longer run times.

New Complexity Information
New Complexity Information

It is important to note that during this Project Viewer time that you can provide feedback to the Lab and they are much more likely to listen and make changes. After the features are in an RC viewer they are MUCH less likely to make changes. So, if you think you may have a grip or suggestion, get it to the Lindens (JIRA Feature or Bug Report). 

Read more

Second Life™ News Week 31-32

Other bit of news from the Third Party Developer’s meeting (7/31):

RSS Feed for Grid Status

RSS feed for Grid Status is moving to new platform. The URL will not change just the format is changing from RSS1 to RSS2. But, if you read the status pages, the change is visually significant.

untitled
Untitled

The setup is said to be coming soonish, but seems to be working now. A temp URL will let TPD’s test the feed. See: http://beta.status.secondlifegrid.net which redirects me to https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Status-Grid/bg-p/status-blog

Read more

Second Life Viewers Week 31

Oz Linden said little about what is going on with viewers at the July 31 Second Life™ Third Party Developer’s (TPD) meeting. What we do know is:

What You Wanted
What You Wanted

RC’s

RC Second Life VMM Viewer version 3.8.2.303891 – A new version came out in week 31. They had little in the way of stats at the time of the meeting. But, so far it was looking good. This will likely be the next viewer promoted, if things continue well… basically baring any catastrophic problems. They seriously want to release it. So much so they did not release a viewer last week when one would normally release. That was done to avoid releasing two versions close together.

Read more

Jelly Babies – Render Muting

Inara made it to last Monday’s open source user group meeting where Oz Linden apparently talked about the Second Life Render Muting feature and where it is in the development pipeline. You may remember that a bug was causing the Jelly Babies to be invisible. That is fixed.

Surfing at Teahupo'o 1
Surfing at Teahupo’o 1

Now the feature is waiting on UI changes. Once those are complete we will get an RC viewer version with the feature. Inara is guessing sometime in week 32, which I think is a good guess. I am looking forward to this feature. I think it will have a significant impact on performance in the long run.

Inara quotes Oz talking about the notices that will appear when our Draw Weight changes and when those around us are not rendering our avatar. We will be able to control how long those messages stay on screen. We already have a Debug Setting to tell the viewer when to render high draw weight avatars as Jelly Babies. Presumably we will have that control out where we can adjust it easily too.