Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Linden made series of viewers
The news in Second Life™ this week is there is no Second Life news today, at least not much.
There are no roll outs this week, main or RC channels.
I covered the viewers this weekend in: Second Life News 2014-11 #3. Today the main viewer is: Second Life 3.7.3 (287491).
I also see the wiki has updated (Mar 17 2014) for version 3.7.4.288045… this is the Google Breakpad version that has been added to the RC Viewers List, giving us 6 RC Viewers.
Hot Fix Viewer 3.7.4.287875 – Monty Linden is doing most of the work on this one. Fixes include problems with a FMODEX (sound) race condition and other problems. The working fixes in this one are important but are not the problems they hoped to solve.
The main emphasis here is getting the SL Viewer crash rate down. If this version can accomplish that it will move to the top of this for promotion to the main viewer.
Interesting Viewer 3.7.3.287127 – This is the viewer that has better caching and scene loading. This iteration has 12 fixes to previous versions.
Merchant Outbox Viewer 3.7.3.287344 – This has about 8 fixes, one being A Windows 7 crash when exiting the viewer. So, if you have been losing settings made recently, this may be the fix.
Wednesday about 11 AM the Lab made a blog post: Second Life’s Oculus Rift Integration is Ready for Beta Testers. They provide an email address for those that would like to participate in the beta testing. Ciaran Laval posted talking about it. See: Linden Lab Oculus Rift. To be part of the beta team you … Read more
The main grid did get a roll out this morning. The package was previously running on Blue Steel and Le Tigre. It is a maintenance upgrade with bug fixes.
The RC code running on Magnum will now run on all three channels. This is the Sunshine RC with the AISv3 code that improves how inventory works adding reliability and stall prevention. It is considered additional work in the Bake Fail or Server Side Appearance project.
There are a couple of new RC Viewers out now.
Voice Viewer version 3.7.3.287288 – This RC Viewer pulls in Vivox 4.6.x libraries instead of the 4.5 libraries for improved stability and to address reported issues. If you are having voice problems, try this viewer.
Sunshine Viewer version 3.7.3.287158 – This is a promotion of the Project Viewer 3.7.1.286565. The release notes say it had improved stability and retry capabilities for Server Side Avatar baking. It should be able to better detect ‘stuck’ conditions and clear them so the avatar will render.
We don’t often get any insight into what Lindens are thinking about going on’s in the Lab. Today one gave us a glimpse.
I’ll wrap up and say that there’s a lot of good talking [in the Lab] going on about what works in SL, what doesn’t, what we’ve tried before and all that … as you know some changes take a lot of time and work, others can be done quickly. But overall I’m more optimistic than I was 6 months ago, and I like that.
Ciaran has an article up promoting Penny Patton’s ideas about building things to scale in Second Life™. See: Second Life Content Creators Should Pay Attention To Penny Patton.
Ciaran is focusing on a June 2013 article that Penny wrote: Building a Better Second Life. I covered it at the time it was published: Best Building Practices in Second Life.
If you haven’t read any of these articles, please do before you start building your dream home.