Every so often I hit a point where my Second Life™ experience sucks from poor viewer performance. When that happens I start changing viewer brands in hope of an improvement. I troubleshoot starting with the easy and work to the hard. But, this time I over looked an obvious problem.
I Still Remember by Thurkearan of Darrath, on Flickr
These days I mostly use the Linden made viewer and it is almost always one of the RC versions. I like being on the cutting edge. Over the years Imprudence, Emerald/Phoenex, Exodus, Kirsten’s, and Niran’s were the viewers to use, at various times, to be on the cutting edge. That has changed.
Simon Linden gave out a note card at Tuesday’s Server-Scripting user group meeting in Second Life™. It gives us the Debug Settings we can change to improve performance at events with lots of avatars.
Work hard in silence, let success make the noise by NOeditiON™, on Flickr
To get to the viewer’s Debug Settings you need to have enabled the Advanced menu. There are a couple of ways to do that. In the SL Viewer open Preferences – top menu: Me->Preferences then select the Advanced tab. Enable Show Advanced Menu. This will reveal ADVANCED in the top menu. Click Advanced->Show Debug Settings.
From the Third Party Viewer UG meeting we get a little news. It was another short meeting.
What The……! – by Simone Landers, on Flickr
Viewers
RC Second Life Big Bird Viewer version 3.7.29.301361 – This viewer has fixes for some attachment-related issues. The Lindens are not anticipating any difficulties with this viewer, so this one should be moving to promotion as the default viewer soon.
There are some server side fixes for attachment problems that are in the works.
This viewer was promoted from a Project Viewer to an RC viewer today. This viewer has fixes for some attachment-related issues, particularly when multiple attachments are added or removed at the same time. It also has enhanced logging, so your SecondLife.log file will have some additional lines related to avatar state in general and attachments in particular.
Illumination by Leonorah Beverly, on Flickr
Being promoted from Project to RC means this version is closer to what will eventually be released as the main default viewer. It will also likely be more stable than it was as a Project Viewer. So, if you have been having attachment issues, this is probably the viewer to try to solve your problems.
This morning a new RC viewer installed: Second Life 3.7.29-301305, the Layer Limits RC Viewer. The release notes are here.
LOTS OF GREAT AND EERIE PHOTO SHOTS AT UNIA by ▓▒░ TORLEY ░▒▓, on Flickr
The primary change in this version is:
The Layer Limits viewer lets you wear up to 60 wearables of any type. We’ve changed the logic for what limits are enforced on clothing worn by avatars: previously, we restricted avatars to 5 items for each type of removable clothing wearable such as shirts, pants, jackets, tattoos and alpha masks. With this viewer, we instead enforce a total limit of 60 wearables of all such types combined. So if you really want to you can wear 60 tattoos as long as you wear none of anything else.
These changes do not apply to body part wearables (skin, shape, hair, eyes), for which the limit is still one of each, and do not affect attachments, for which the limit is still 38 total.
This version installed and started without any glitches. The previous RC version choked as it started installing from a post login notice. This time it notified me at viewer launch before login. I’m not sure that makes a difference, but this install worked better than the last.
This version keeps the one-login-button user interface. I assume the Lindens are continuing to do A-B testing of the login process. I just wonder if they have a log of their test results. Will those working on the viewer 2 or 3 years from now be repeating these tests or have prior test data to review?
I’ve only used the viewer for a little over an hour. About an hour plus in it went Not Responding and hung there. After 3 or 4 minutes it seemed to reset and log me off as if I had lost my Internet connection.
I won’t know if this is a consistent problem until I have more time to use the viewer.
In the Third Party Developers’ meeting Oz Linden mentioned that someone spotted a maintenance version viewer without the ability to send snapshots via email from Second Life. This omission of the feature Snapshot-to-Email from this RC version is deliberate. It will eventually be removed from all Linden and Third Party Viewers.
Blue Note by Marco Pagot, on Flickr
The way the system works, the images are sent TO whoever with the FROM address of the user-sender, at least when the Lab knows the sender’s address. But, the email is being sent from a Second Life server, so they are spoofing the FROM address. This ‘spoofing’ is a common practice of spammers and black-hat crackers. So, the SL servers are getting blocked by numerous ISP’s automated systems as spammers. That is affecting other email services the Lab uses to communicate with users.
