SLV2, 3, 4, 5, 6. & 7 Series – Page 79 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Second Life News 2014-5 #2

2014/02/02 by Nalates Urriah

RC Viewers

Interesting Viewer version 3.6.14.285213 – In this version the developers are still hunting for the cause of crashes. The crash rate is still too high, but crash measurement may be erroneously high. Not having clear crash reporting leads back to the Google Breakpad work the Lindens are doing.

Few Third Party Developers have tried merging the Interest List code with their viewers. The Firestorm team is waiting for a more stable release of the code.

Fitted Mesh Viewer version 3.7.0.285669 – Recently this version got a refresh and is likely to get one more next week (6). The fix probably arriving Monday (2/2). A later update will likely only be a merge with whatever viewer is current main version. Then this viewer will likely be in the final RC version before release.

Second Life and WebKit

2014/06/202014/01/23 by Nalates Urriah

Webkit™ is a core Internet Browser, sort of. More precisely it is the render engine for the Safari web browser. Until mid 2013 it was the render engine for Google’s Chrome browser on Mac. The Internet Explorer browser that Microsoft uses is powered y the Trident engine. Firefox uses the Gecko engine. A number of mobile devices use Webkit.

In 2005 it was announced by Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Bertrand Serlet that WebKit would be open source. In 2010 a WebKit 2.0 project was announced.

All this is of interest to us because the Second Life™ viewer uses Webkit to power its internal web browser and Media On A Prim (MOAP). You see it used most by in-world TV’s. I suspect panels like User Profile are also displayed using WebKit.

Second Life Depth of Field

2014/01/23 by Nalates Urriah

Honour has a post up titled: How Deep is Your Field in Second Life? She was having a problem getting the viewer’s Depth of Field (DoF) feature to work. She links to Ricco Saenz’s explanation of how to get it working: How to actually capture depth of field on your SL photos. But, not why it does what is does.

DoF is one thing I have found I cannot control in my RL S4’s camera, or have yet to learn how. It is a reason I still use my Sony digital camera for RL imaging. DoF is something I seldom use in Second Life™ because I prefer the control I have in Photoshop. But, I can imagine that some will find DoF more usable in the viewer than adding it in post production.

Second Life News 2014-4

2014/01/21 by Nalates Urriah

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. day in America. It is a holiday for government and numerous businesses. The Lab considers it a holiday, so the Lab was running on holiday staffing levels. This usually means Tuesday and Wednesday server rolls are skipped or pushed back a day.

This week will be different. Maestro Linden told us last week that a rollout is planned for Tuesday and an RC rollout for Wednesday. We did not have one last week, so may there is a push or they are trying something differently. Whatever, we get rolls Tuesday and Wednesday.

Second Life Interesting Viewer 3.6.14-285213

2014/01/15 by Nalates Urriah

Interesting RC Viewer

This viewer is not yet the main viewer for Second Life™, but it did get an update Tuesday 1/14. This is the Interesting RC Viewer. It is known for faster scene rendering. You can download it here: Second Life RC & Project Viewers. If you are doing photography, this version could save your sanity. Even shopping things are rendering fast. I haven’t got to use it much. But, it seems great, better than previous version.

Remember. To run the RC you need to turn off Automatic Updates or have Automatic Updates and Willing to use RC’s both enabled. The later is preferred.

Second Life Viewer 3.6.13-284995 Released

2014/01/11 by Nalates Urriah

The main Second Life™ Viewer is now release 3.6.13-284995. Release Notes. This the RC Viewer known as the Package Fix RC Viewer. The primary change in the update is described in the Notes as:

The 3.6.12 release [previous release] changed the Windows executable name from ‘SecondLife’ to ‘SecondLifeViewer’, but did not remove any executable using the old name that was in the install folder. This could cause some problems with old shortcuts (not including the default one updated by the install) running the previous version (which might then insist on being upgraded, but the upgrade would not correct the old shortcut).

This (and any subsequent) release removes any executable in that install folder that uses the old name; using those shortcuts will now cause Windows to display an error message that the program is not there, so the user will need to modify or replace them with one that refers to the new name.

The folder and executable name changes meant that some people were experiencing a continual update loop. They would update automatically placing the new version in the new and differently named folder, the viewer would restart and work. The new version was being run. At the next login the viewer would tell them they needed to update, it would update, and run. But, each viewer start would require another update.