Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Linden made series of viewers
From the Third Party Viewer UG meeting we get a little news. It was another short meeting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The fate of the Second Life Linux version viewer is now up to the Linux community of Second Life. In the Third Party Devlopers’ meeting Oz Linden spoke about the Lab’s Linux support for the near term future. Basically the Lab is going to provide less Linux support.
There are two reasons; one is the Lab’s limited resources and second the new projects they will be starting in the next months or so, which I take to mean late May or early June.
Oz Linden in the Third Party Developers’ meeting mentioned that the Tools Update Viewer made it to main viewer status. That means the Lab is now fully committed to building viewers with VS2013.
Since the Tools viewer got promoted the main viewer is less crashy then previous versions 2% less. That is a significant improvement. While 2% may sound like a small number, it is a significant improvement.