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

The Linden made series of viewers

Second Life Main Viewer Failing

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There are a number of people reporting (11/11/2014) that the update to the now default/main viewer Second Life Viewer 3.7.20 (296071) Oct 29 2014 10:40:27 (Second Life Project Snowstorm) has created problems. The viewer will not run. In most cases it crashes at VFS (Virtual File System) initialization.

Blood Letters - Letter 10 - Not these. The hint says 'canvas'
Blood Letters – Letter 10 – Not these. The hint says ‘canvas’

I am running Second Life 3.7.20 (296355) Nov  3. It does not have the problem. It runs. But, we do not yet know if version 3.7.20 (296071) crashes on all computers or just some. Judging by the size of the response in the forum, a dozen or so, I would say just a few.

It is possible to run other versions of the viewer. The basic trick to being able to install a different version of the viewer is to enable automatic update and  ‘Willing to update to release candidate.’  If not enabled, the viewer will attempt to download and install the main viewer ASAP. The setting is in Preferences->Setup. The setting is also the default setting.

The active thread about this error is: Second_Life_3_7_20_296094_i686_Setup, is anyone else having an issue with this like me? The related JIRA is BUG-7776.

A Clean Install does not fix the problem. Dump version 3.7.20 (296071). Install a different version. You can find the Second Life RC (Release Candidate) Viewers and Project Viewers here. 

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Second Life News 2014-45 #3

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This past Friday was the Third Party Developers’ meeting. This is usually the best source for information about developments in the pipeline at the Lab. This week there is not a lot of news.

Viewers

Benchmark RC Viewer – I been talking about this one. It is the one that ends the use of a GPU table to figure out the default video settings for a new viewer install.

Maintenance RC Viewer – This one is a collection of fixes and feature improvements.

Meauxle Bureaux 2014 - Frost Mole
Meauxle Bureaux 2014 – Frost Mole

AISv3 Fixes aka Attachments RC Viewer – This is a viewer version created to fix problems with AISv3 that were holding up Firestorm Viewer development. The problems were Linden Lab problems and we could see them in the SL Viewers. But, the bugs were a reason the FS Team was not merging the code into their viewer. More on this later. The AIS fixes were moved into this RC Viewer and the code changed to solve issues and make for easier merging into third party viewers.

Oz says this set of code changes are relatively easy to merge and this is the RC Viewer now seen as most likely to promote soon.

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Second Life News 2014-45 #2

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ADITI

There is a bug some encounter when logging into ADITI, the preview grid.

BUG-7707 – “Login at last location” not working for any region on Aditi & other assorted weirdness with teleporting.

Don't Panic 2014 - End of Game
Don’t Panic 2014 – End of Game

For now the Lindens think it has something to do with which inventory server your viewer has connected to. Simon Linden said, “…one of the back-end servers for this grid was having troubles and that’s behind some of the problems like logging into the last location.”

Until the Lindens fix it, there nothing we can do to get ‘last location’ working.

Maestro Linden advised us, “There was also an issue until yesterday [Wed 11/5] where Aditi mainland had “Allow Direct Teleport” disabled.  So you’d end up at a telehub in Ahern when trying to TP to Morris, etc.” He also advised us that the ‘troubled’ server had been fixed. I tried last location in ADITI this morning. It worked correctly. 

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Second Life News 2014-45

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Servers

There is a roll going to the main channel this morning. The Deploy thread in the forum describes it as ‘minor improvements’. Not much to go on.

RC Channels

There is no package ready for the RC Channels. Caleb Linden says there will be no roll of the RC Channels.

Deyanira Yalin - Builder's Brewery Class Instructor
Deyanira Yalin – Builder’s Brewery Class Instructor

Problems

I am seeing more people complaining about texture loading and render stalling and things remaining gray or blurry. It is still a small number of people, which means the Lindens are not going to turn their attention to the problem. They are watching for problems from Pipeline and CDN changes. So, that may reveal the problem.

If you are consistently running into the problem, file a JIRA. To helpful the Lindens needs lots of detail and a way to reproduce the problem. If this is a timing issue, the Lindens may not be able to reproduce it from within the Lab, they are sitting on the servers and miss out on some of the problems we see.

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Second Life News & Bits 2014-44

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Viewer

According to Oz Linden we will see the Benchmark Viewer get promoted to the main default version this week, may be tomorrow, Wednesday. This is the viewer that does away with the GPU Table.

Server Scripting UG 2014-44
Server Scripting UG 2014-44

This viewer is still being tuned to give reliable graphics settings. The one currently in the Alternate viewer page just got some updates. I’m not sure when the ‘just’ is. I suspect last Friday.

On another note about viewers… the Max Bandwidth setting is becoming less important as more of the Second Life™ data moves via pipeline in HTTP. The Max Bandwidth is a setting that controls UDP protocol traffic ONLY. With more and more traffic moving to HTTP the UDP congestion is less and less. See JIRA VWR-29029 for the old problem of setting Max Bandwidth too high. 

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Second Life News 2014-44

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Servers

The Deploys of Week post is up. The big news is CDN.

Oops! Don't Panic 2014
Oops! Don’t Panic 2014

CDN

The Content Delivery Network upgrade will roll to the main channel, the entire grid, this week. That will be happening Tuesday morning.

RC Channels

All three RC channels will get the same maintenance package. The detailed release notes are not out yet. All the Deploys post says is there are ‘some improvements’. We’ll probably see more information coming out tomorrow (Tuesday).

Snack Channel

The Snack channel is a small pre-test RC channel. It is used when the Lindens want to start out with a very small sample for testing. It was used for the initial testing of CDN. It is no longer needed and the regions in the Snack channel will be rolled back into the channels they were previously in and the Snack channel will disappear until it is next needed.

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