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

The Linden made series of viewers

Second Life News 2015-06

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Servers

There was no Beta Server UG meeting this week. The Lindens were meeting to decide on which projects would be planned for implementation in 2015. With any luck we’ll hear what they decided, at least to some degree.

Slow render Feb 2015
Slow render Feb 2015

I am hoping they decide to work on the viewer’s caching system. I’m tired of coming home to a grey house, something I can do several times per day when I am in Second Life.

I am also hoping they get the Avatar Render Cost feature working. My hope is they will flash a value on screen when you add any new attachment to the avatar. I think it would be great to have that happen when trying on mesh demos. I think it would put pressure on designers to make more render efficient items.

Viewers

The main viewer is now version 3.7.24-297623. (Release Notes) This is the viewer with reduced pipelined texture and mesh fetching timeout. So stalled connections fail quickly, allowing earlier retry. The timeout value changed from 150 seconds to 60 seconds for textures, and from 600 to 240 seconds for meshes. 

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Second Life Bits & News 2015-06

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Second Life Photography

PrimPerfect has an article up on photography. It talks about Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan, and Wildstar Beaumount being interviewed in a ‘first’ show on Second Life Photography. They say a second show will look at post-processing of Second Life images.

The first show was this past Monday at 2 PM in Garden of Dreams at the Designing Worlds studio. Next Monday they will air the second show. You can catch the replay of the shows at the Treet.tv web site, on the SLArtist.com channel, the Aview TV Designing Worlds channel or on the Designing Worlds blog.

AvaStar’s Sparkles

Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix is aware some people are having problems getting Sparkles 50% discount. To help them out she has posted: Troubles getting Sparkles Discount.

Servers

This week the main channel gets an update. It is the Experience Tools permission fix update. Release Notes. 

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Second Life’s Friday TPV Meeting 1/30

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In last Friday’s meeting all the Linden news was covered in 8 minutes. The entire meeting was only 30 minutes. Not much in the way of new information or to talk about. There are even fewer things of interest for general users.

Projects

Brooke Linden spoke about Viewer Managed Marketplace project and their progress. She says they are still incorporating user feedback. A new viewer is coming with the feedback implemented, probably in week 6… or 7. There will probably be another round of user feedback before the project goes to beta. The timing is definitely that beta will only start sometime after the Valentine’s holiday. How much after is undecided and depends on user feedback.

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Second Life Bits 2015-04

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I’m just getting around to looking at last Friday’s (1/16) Third Party Developer’s meeting. See the video here.

Viewers

The viewers in the RC pipeline are; VMM, Maintenance, and Experience Tools.

The Experience Tools Viewer is somewhat held up by backend issues, which are being worked on now. So, there are no changes to this RC Viewer.

Viewer Managed Marketplace – nothing new in this RC Viewer.

Hover RC Viewer – (download) Vir Linden was telling the group 1/16 this new Project Viewer was in QA. Vir was thinking it would be ready in week 4 and the RC test version of the server side did make it to a main grid RC channel in week 4. Due to Wiki changes and fixes the RC downloads page does not yet have this viewer available for download. Inara in her coverage has a link in:  SL project updates 2015 week 4/1: Avatar Hover Height along with examples of the features and instructions for using it.

You must be in a region that supports the feature for it to work. For now that is only Blue Steel regions. If the region does not support the feature the controls will be grayed out.

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Coming Viewer Change

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In regard to viewer updates, currently if a user says they no longer want to run the RC version and disables their ‘willing to  run’ setting, they get downgraded to the current main release, which is always an older version. So, they effectively get downgraded when they were asking not to be upgraded.

Understandably this upsets some people. In the near future this will change and one will remain on the RC version until it is promoted to the new main/default viewer. Then they will update in sync with the main viewer versions.

This might not work out so well. While I have no doubt that the current downgrade surprised some people, it was by design. It allowed one to easily back out of an RC Viewer that did not work well for the user. Now backing out of a poorly working RC Viewer will be a more complex process requiring one to download and install another viewer version. But, that may be less confusing.

We’ll see what people do with the process.