Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Linden made series of viewers
I suspect most people know there is a lot of CG in moves these days. This is an interesting video showing some amazing CG work.
Have you heard of #GamerGate? I suppose it has been growing for days. The long and drama filled story can be found here: GamerGate: A Closer Look At The Controversy Sweeping Video Games.
#GamerGate is drama just as we see in Second Life™. Only on a larger scale. It is a story complete with sex, vigilantes, hacking, rage quits, and all the rest.
We have a bit of news from the Third Party Developers Meeting from Friday, 8/29. Chakat Northspring videos the meetings. You can follow him on YouTube and catch those meetings a few hours after they happen.
Viewer news from Oz Linden is pretty thin, his word. I’ve covered most of the viewer news earlier in the week. Oz basically said at this Friday’s Third Party Developers Meeting that projects discussed at the previous meeting are still ongoing and there is no new news on them.
I think this is basically the lull in feature development and bug fixes that comes from the Lindens stopping to work on development tools and upgrade to the new compilers. It is an analogy to car manufactures that stop production of cars to retool for production of the next model year cars.
I have an update of this article: SpaceNavigator, Windows 10, and Second Life (9/2016). The information here has useful content. If you just want to get your SpaceNavigator working, jump to the newer article.
I found a deal on eBay for a SpaceNavigator, I bid and got it. It arrived. Yay! It works with everything BUT Second Life™. What a downer. Then I find out that 3D Connexion no longer supports Second Life. Eek!
But, people are using Spacenavigator (SN) with SL, so what is the deal and how does one get it to work? Torley has videos on how to use it… people are posting about using it in various places…
The SN Help Manual is of no use. It barely covers the basics.
Fortunately there is a page in the wiki that mostly explains how to get it working with SL and the latest SN software (3DxWare64_v10-1-4_r1818). It is not easy and there are gotchas in the wiki page. The page is titled: Flycam. Yeah, I would have thought of that for a title first thing…
As you have probably Google’d for help before getting here you have likely seen posts about how to create a SN profile for Second Life. Those are pre-2013 as best I can tell and the software changed some time in 2013. I can’t find any way to create a profile via the 3DConnexion software v10. But, there are posts in the 3DConnexion site that help. I’ve used those to figure out how to get my SN working the way I want it to.
The main channel got a new update Tuesday. The package has an esoteric JSON fix and a crash fix that we may learn more about tomorrow, Thursday.
A new package rolled to the RC channels today, Wednesday. The package contains bug and crash fixes.
SVC-2262 – Incorrect height value in postcard which sent from above 256m.
BUG-6466 – Numbers expressed in scientific notation and include a plus sign in the exponent are not parsed as json numbers by LSL.
Nothing too exciting. All three RC channels got the same package.
The main channel did not change this week. We will likely see it get an update next week (35).
The three RC channels did get an update. This is a package that has a crash mode fix in it. Maestro thinks he can discuss this fix AFTER it rolls to the main grid.
Next week the RC channels, or some of them, will get a new package that has some visible changes.
SVC-2262 – Incorrect height value in postcard which sent from above 256m. A fix is in the coming package. Maestro describes the bug, “The bug was that the postcard-sending script did a modulo 256 on all three region coordinate components to clamp them. But, while that’s fine for X and Y coordinates, you can be >256m elevation :)”
Not much going on here. The Deploy post arrived on Sunday. No rollout to the main channel this week. The RC Channels will get an update that eliminates a crash condition.
The main viewer is now 3.7.14-292638. This is the Library Refresh Viewer. There is a fix in this version for gray avatars. If you have gray avatars, look in your log file for Transferred a partial file errors. They think they have it fixed, but cannot know as they have not been able to reproduce the problem in the Lab.
You can find the list of updated libraries in the viewer’s release notes.