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

The Linden made series of viewers

Second Life News 2014-15 #3

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Viewers

The current main viewer is version 3.7.5-288464. This is the Google Breakpad RC Viewer promoted to the main release viewer. If you dig around in the log files section you’ll find more ‘marker files’ and more logged information. The Lindens have moved the start of logging, no easy task, further toward the beginning of viewer start  up and the end of shutdown.

Marker files are uniquely named and often have no data inside or very little. The purpose of the files is to basically leave breadcrumb trail for the error reporting process to follow. They are written because if the viewer crashes it often won’t be able to log an error. So, at certain points a ‘marker file’ is written so the next time the crash reporter runs, which is before viewer actually starts, it can check to see what the viewer did in its last run and report when it crashed. The marker file gives some idea of how far the viewer got in its process before crashing.

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Second Life and the Mac WebKit Problem

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Me... a Protester?
Me… a Protester?

 My readers will know Mac users have a problem. There is no near term solution to the problem for several reasons. Even more confusing is there are multiple problems. And today a group approached me hoping to put together a movement to show Linden Lab the extent of the problem and the interest in getting it fixed.

So, I’m scratching my head wondering if the Lab is in a position to fix the problem… and which problem are we talking about? Since I’m not a Mac user, I’m probably not the best one to write this, but no one else seems to be covering it.

I’ve touched on Mac issues in the past; Second Life News 2013-11, Firestorm Viewer News 2014-7, Viewer Release Pipeline Update, and others. The SL Viewer and Third Party Viewers are moving to support Apple’s Cocoa frame work or may be I should say did so move in 2013. But, that has left Apple users on older operating systems behind. SL apparently has problems running in the older Apple OS’s. This has resulted in Apple users staying with older viewer versions.

As we near another release of the Firestorm Viewer those issues are coming to a crisis point for some users. The recent blocking of Firestorm 4.4.0 is bringing home the point of the team only allowing 3 versions to run on the SL grid and blocking older versions. People are getting the idea the team is actually blocking older viewers. 

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Second Life Bugs

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Some are seeing behavior changes in the viewer. It doesn’t seem anyone knows if they were intentional. Whether they are or are not, some people are not happy.

Ardy Lay describes the problem as:

Expectations:

A) Avatar is expected to stop watching mouse pointer after a short period of mouse inactivity.

B) World Map is expected to close-couple pan with mouse movement and stop panning when mouse motion is stopped, regardless of mouse button state after stop.

Results:

A) Avatar is watching mouse pointer long after mouse pointer motion stops.  This defeats a mechanism by which life-like behavior is imparted into avatar motion.

B) World Map exploration is being awkward as the mouse button must be released to stop the map from panning away from the desired view.

These changes start to appear in SL Viewer versions 3.7.3 and 3.7.4. I find them in version 3.7.6.

With the map, I like the change. To see it click on the map part of the World Map and flick the map left or right. Hold the left mouse button down after the drag/flip motion. The map will continue to scroll. How fast you jerk the image does not seem to matter.  The map scrolls at the same speed.

You’ll see some odd behavior when you move quickly. I think our hand bounces a bit at the end and that can confuse the map scroller. Try it. You’ll see.

As to the avatar eyes following the mouse, I have mixed feelings. I gave up trying to control the avatar for pictures with that feature. See Strawberry’s recommendations for pose tools. So, this is not much of an issue for me.

Second Life News 2014-15

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Viewers

The main viewer is  version 3.7.4-288138.

Immersiva Photoshop Night Vision
Immersiva Photoshop Night Vision

This is the version that got the FMODEX fixes that solved a race condition. For the less geeky, a race condition is a common problem in multi-threaded programs. You can think of the threads as separate processes or programs that run at the same time. Once up on a time computers had only one CPU running programs and race conditions were not as common. Now with 2 to 8 cores (CPU’s) built into a single CPU chip the computer can do more than one thing at a time.

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Facebook, Flickr & Twitter from Second Life

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SL Share is the feature name the Lab uses for their sharing feature. You probably remember that Facebook sharing was blocked for a time. Facebook advised the Lab on what had to change for the feature to be unblocked. The Lab made those changes. Now Facebook sharing is back.

While the Lab was making changes they added the ability to share with Flickr and Twitter. Torley Linden made a video tutorial that posted with announcement about the newly enhanced SL Share.

[youtube uVlNa2O9if4]

To use these new features you need to download and install the  Project SL Share2 Viewer version 3.7.5.288424. 

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Second Life News 2014-14

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Servers Main Channel

Today the package from Magnum was rolled to the main channel. This package has a couple of bug fixes.

  • Bug fixes
    • Fixed a rare case in which certain users were unable to log in (BUG-5130)
    • Fix for a case in which multiple scripts in the same prim calling llTakeControls() with heterogeneous ‘accept’ and ‘pass_on’ parameters would not receive acontrol() event correctly in some cases (BUG-5281)
    • Updated LSL syntax file to use a new schema (fixes STORM-2000)
      • This change is for a viewer in testing; see STORM-1831 for more information
  • Fixed a crash mode

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